Before the Course Tape - The Indigenous World of Newberry

Overview

When you're hanging out at Johnson Family Farm before a Spartan race, or jogging along the warm-up path between the parking lot and the festival area, it's easy to think the land just popped into existence when the tractors mowed the grass and the crew started setting up obstacles. But this spot—Newberry County and the Carolina Piedmont—had its own story long before anyone named it or drew county lines. The ground you're standing on was part of a world that Indigenous peoples knew inside out, not from myths or romantic ideas, but from everyday life: knowing where to walk, plant, find game, watch the rivers rise and fall, and which ridges made for the easiest trek through the hills.

The First People in the Piedmont

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The first folks in this area showed up thousands of years before Europeans even knew the continent was there.

Archaeologists say people have been in the Carolinas for at least 13,000 years, dating back to the Paleoindian period. These early groups weren’t like modern tribes; they were small family bands that knew how to read the land. They followed ridges, avoided wetlands, and traveled along riverbanks because the land sort of made those choices for them. Even way back then, before pottery, farming, or named nations, the Saluda and Broad Rivers quietly guided them through the region.

As the climate warmed up after the last Ice Age and hardwood forests spread across the Southeast, these groups started settling down more. In what would become Newberry County, people began returning to the same hunting grounds and river terraces year after year. By the time the Archaic period rolled around, between about 8000 and 1000 BCE, life had settled into a familiar routine: gathering nuts in late fall, fishing at certain shoals, and hunting along the same ridgelines that modern dirt roads sometimes follow without even realizing it.

Villages Along the Rivers

Over the years, the rhythm of life just kept getting richer. During the Woodland period, people started making pottery, gardening, and setting up more permanent villages. By around 1000 CE, corn farming began spreading into the Piedmont area, and folks living along the Saluda, Broad, and Enoree rivers started including maize in their seasonal routines. Villages got bigger as families worked small fields in the fertile lowlands, picking spots with good soil that wouldn’t leave crops vulnerable to the worst river floods. The land here has its own way of being generous: creekside terraces with moist, easy-to-work soil; upland ridges that make for dry travel paths; and forests full of deer, turkey, black bear, nuts, and berries.

The Peoples of the Region

By the time we get to the centuries right before Europeans showed up, the Carolina Piedmont was a mix of connected communities. The tribal names we know today—Catawba, Cherokee, Saluda, Congaree, Wateree, Cheraw, Waxhaw, Eno, Santee, Pee Dee—were part of a regional patchwork rather than a map with fixed boundaries. In the Newberry area, names that pop up later in history—Saluda, Congaree, and Wateree—were probably linked to river-centered communities whose territories overlapped and shifted because of hunting, marriage ties, and seasonal needs. Up north, the Catawba-speaking world was a loose but important network of Siouan-speaking groups. Out west, Cherokee hunters sometimes ventured into the upper Piedmont. Down southeast, the Santee, Pee Dee, and Congaree folks had villages near the open wetlands of the Coastal Plain. And in between, there were smaller, quieter communities that don't often appear in documents but left their mark in the ground.

How Life Worked Here

No one saw the land as something you just owned and held onto. Sure, villages might stick around for generations, but hunting areas shifted with where the animals went, and families often moved with the seasons based on what crops were growing, what game was around, and what social events were happening. A village by the Saluda River didn’t need strict borders because everyone just got how the land worked. People farmed the terraces in the summer, hunted the uplands in winter, gathered nuts and berries as the seasons changed, and hit the trails to visit family, host ceremonies, or trade goods.

Trade was super interesting in pre-contact Carolina, especially in a place like Newberry, which sits between the mountains and the coast. Rivers were the natural highways. The Saluda flows down from the upper Piedmont toward what we now call Columbia, and along its banks, Indigenous folks paddled canoes, carried goods, and visited neighboring communities. The Broad River, marking Newberry’s eastern edge, was another major route, connecting the area to larger networks toward the foothills and deeper into the Southeast. These rivers weren’t borders—they were highways.

When the geology changed, so did travel. Further southeast, you hit the Fall Line, where the hard Piedmont rock turns into softer Coastal Plain sediment. Canoes could easily travel above or below this line, but not across the rocky drops and shoals that mark the transition. For Indigenous groups, this meant certain river stretches became natural gathering spots. Traders from upstream would meet those from downstream, swapping stone tools from the Piedmont for shells, clay, and coastal goods from the lower regions. This exchange didn’t need a marketplace like we think of today. It just followed the land’s natural layout.

Upland ridges played a similar role. For thousands of years, people walked along these elevated land spines because the ground was drier, the vegetation was lighter, and the views were clearer. Many of today’s backroads in the Piedmont—especially the ones that seem oddly straight despite the rolling terrain—trace these ancient paths. Some of the ridgelines near Johnson Family Farm were part of these old travel routes, connecting the Enoree area to the Saluda River corridor.

Long-distance trade routes tied the whole Southeast together. From the Newberry area, goods could make their way to the Appalachian mountains—where copper and mica came from—or head down toward the Georgia chiefdoms at Etowah. They could travel west through the Tennessee River Valley or southeast toward the Santee and Pee Dee rivers. They might eventually reach Moundville in Alabama or even Cahokia near modern-day St. Louis, the largest Indigenous city north of Mexico. This wasn’t just one big highway. It was a network of paths, rivers, and exchanges that passed from community to community, sometimes over hundreds of miles.

Daily life in the Newberry area was a mix of local certainty and wide-reaching connections. In the morning, villagers might wake up to the sound of animals stirring near the riverbanks or the crackle of a fire warming a pole-and-wattle house. The smells of maize cakes or stewing squash would fill the air as people got their tools ready for hunting or working the fields. Kids played near the water, where stone fish traps shaped like low walls sat just beneath the current. Hunters prepped for the day by checking bowstrings and examining tracks in the mud, reading the signs of deer or turkey movement as casually as we check the weather forecast.

Agriculture was steady but not overwhelming. Fields weren’t huge expanses but carefully tended patches where corn, beans, and squash grew together in harmony. Families planted sunflowers and other native crops around the edges. They relied a lot on the forest cycle—nuts, fruits, and animals—just as much as on cultivated plants. Controlled burns helped keep the understory open, encouraged grazing animals, and reduced pests. F

The Trade Routes Through Newberry

Each season had its own vibe. In the fall, when hickory and oak trees were loaded with nuts, folks would gather and prep them to get through the winter. Winter was all about long hunts in the uplands, where deer were easier to track. Spring was the time for new plants and taking care of the fields, while summer was for fixing up houses, visiting friends, or joining in on rituals that celebrated the year's changes. These cycles weren't set in stone; they adjusted based on the weather, resources, and local happenings.

The political scene in pre-contact Carolina was pretty intricate but not too crazy. The big Mississippian chiefdoms like Etowah, Moundville, and Cofitachequi were part of the Southeastern world, but Newberry was outside their main areas. This place seemed to have smaller, more flexible communities that were connected to the rivers and uplands without being controlled by one big chiefdom. The people we later know as the Saluda, Congaree, and Wateree lived here, interacting with their Catawba-speaking neighbors to the north and the Santee and Pee Dee to the southeast. They were into diplomacy, intermarriage, and trade but didn't form a big empire or political structure.

A Landscape of Movement

The way the land is formed really influenced how things developed politically. In the Piedmont, you don't get the big, centralized farms like you do in the rich soil of major river valleys. Instead, the area is better for medium-sized fields, spread-out communities, and easy movement. While rivers allowed for travel, they weren't great for huge floodplain farming. The ridges were good for getting around but didn't lead to the dense cities like those in the Mississippi heartland. So, Indigenous societies here didn't build the massive mound centers you see in other places. Their real strength was in being adaptable and staying connected, not in building big structures.

When Europeans showed up in the 1500s and 1600s, they weren't stepping into untouched land. They were entering a place that Indigenous peoples had been shaping for thousands of years—burning, tending, farming, navigating, and understanding it as part of their survival and daily life. The land we see now—open fields, wooded ridges, riverbanks—is like a layered story. Underneath today's farms and forests is a landscape shaped long ago by Indigenous knowledge, choices, and movement.

The Land Remembers

When we ran Spartan race in Newberry , some part of the race almost certainly crossed paths that Indigenous people used long before anyone called this place South Carolina. Maybe you crossed a ridge that families once used during seasonal moves, or ran along a slope overlooking the Saluda that once held a village garden. Perhaps the course dipped near a shoal where fish were trapped in stone weirs, or climbed a hill that once marked the division between two hunting territories. You might not recognize these traces now, but the land remembers them in its structure, in the feel of its slopes and bends, in the way water shapes the valleys.

This is the world before white settlement—not idealized, not tragic, just real. A place where people lived by paying attention to the land and understanding how to move across it. A place where the rivers served as guides, the ridges as roads, and the seasons as teachers. A place layered with generations of human experience long before a race course wound its way across Johnson Family Farm.

References

Anderson, D. G. (1994). The Savannah River chiefdoms: Political change in the late prehistoric Southeast. University of Alabama Press.

Beck, R., & Moore, D. (2002). Catawba Valley Mississippian: Ceramics, chronology, and cultural change. University of Alabama Press.

Hudson, C. (1976). The Southeastern Indians. University of Tennessee Press.

King, A. (2003). Etowah: The political history of a chiefdom capital. University of Alabama Press.

Moore, D. G. (2002). Catawba Valley Mississippian: Ceramics, chronology, and cultural change. University of Alabama Press.

Sassaman, K. E. (2010). The eastern Archaic, historicized. AltaMira Press.

South Carolina Department of Archives and History. (2020). Native peoples and the South Carolina Piedmont. Columbia, SC.

South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. (2019). Archaeology of the South Carolina uplands. Columbia, SC.

Swanton, J. (1946). The Indians of the Southeastern United States. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 137. Smithsonian Institution.

Ward, H. T., & Davis, R. P. (1999). Time before history: The archaeology of North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press.