Fun at the Old T.P. Wood Store, 1992
What both local and national governments had failed to offer in the way of profitable alterna- tives to distilling, NGHS compensated for, at least for future generations of the communities in northern Greenville once known for boot- legging. Te school offered the opportunity for their children to rise above their situation as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” through education, as West had hoped.
Most NGHS students did, in fact, finish high school and then go on to attend college. And many became teachers themselves in Green- ville County. By the time North Greenville began raising funds for its first dormitory in 1902, in fact, around 22 percent of the whole student population helped teach in the summer schools. Remember: these were students who just years before had little to no formal educa- tion!
“We largely supply the public schools of our half of the county with teachers; having had twenty-five in our school this year,” noted an early catalog, adding: “In college or in business, our students succeed.”
Te student body had grown to 200 by 1903, and so the school soon set out to add a new two-story main building. Te last class to meet in the original schoolhouse earned the nick-
name “Te Class of Distinction” because all five of the graduates in this class went on to graduate from college, too.
All five of them also spent several years in the field of teaching after their time at North Greenville.
Giving Back
NGHS graduates became teachers, pastors, and other respected professionals, living their lives out in service to the community, the state, and beyond. Some of the high school’s earliest stu- dents even returned to North Greenville later in life, of course finding it much different than when they’d left.
One example is Dr. E. Buford Crain, a 1908 graduate of the high school. After Buford’s subsequent graduation from Furman University and Te Southern Baptist Teological Semi- nary, respectively, he became a pastor in Green- ville, SC, and served for more than 12 years on the NGHS Board of Trustees. Eventually, he even returned to Tigerville proper, where he pastored the school’s neighboring Tigerville Baptist Church — founded by NGHS family — until his retirement.
Of the change he’d witnessed in the nearby community since his youth — when neighbors had stills and pistols as surely as they had eggs and potatoes — Buford said, “In overcoming the power of darkness, North Greenville has done more good than all the revenue officers and sheriffs combined for a hundred years.”
And his brother, Dr. J. Dean Crain — a gradu- ate who served as principal from 1910 to 1912, just before NGHS changed to an academy — predicted, “I can but feel that the school is just entering upon its career of usefulness, and that ere long what is known far and wide as the Dark Corner of South Carolina shall become famous for the light shed by the lives of its people.”
Dean went on to become an evangelist, educa- tor, and pastor.
Who could have imagined that, over the next century or so, North Greenville would grow by leaps and bounds, impact thousands of students, and then send them out to shine the light of Christ — in Greenville, South Caroli- na, and every corner of the world?
View the sources for this story and learn more about NGU’s history at
ngu.edu/125.
NGU.EDU | 31
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