Editor’s note: This is part of a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
The Poinsett Hotel opened on June 22, 1925, replacing the Mansion House, which had welcomed travelers at Main and Court Streets for a century. Twelve stories, 210 rooms, a private bath in every room. William Lee Stoddart of New York designed it, J. E. Sirrine and Company engineered it, and Hunkin-Conkey built it at a cost of about $1.5 million.
Greenville had been working toward it for a decade. In 1915 the city brought the Southern Textile Exposition here from Atlanta. The first exposition drew 169 exhibitors and more than 40,000 visitors. Textile Hall, completed in 1917, provided the textile industry with a permanent place to gather. The city could now bring buyers and mill executives to town, but had nowhere to put them.
The Poinsett Hotel provided what was missing. John T. Woodside and William Goldsmith organized the Greenville Community Hotel Corporation, and local investors subscribed $650,000. Most would never need a room. They were building a city prepared to receive business, financing a private hotel almost as a public bridge.
The wager nearly failed. The Poinsett lost $30,000 in its first year and earned no profit in five years. By 1930 it was in default on three mortgages with $150 in the bank. Mason Alexander saved it by attending to what guests actually wanted: clean rooms, good food, employees who remembered their names. In 1946, the Southern Hotel Journal named the Poinsett Hotel as the best medium-sized hotel in the country.
It became the address where Greenville met the outside world. Amelia Earhart stayed there, and John Barrymore, and later Robert Kennedy. Greenville was by then calling itself the Textile Capital of the World, and the claim carried weight, because the city had spent 30 years building the mills, halls and hotel rooms in which the textile business could be conducted.
The claim had a line drawn through it. The Poinsett Hotel served white Greenville. Black travelers relied on private homes, boarding houses, and Black-owned businesses. White mill workers made the cloth but rarely entered the rooms where the industry celebrated itself, and Black workers were largely denied those jobs. The city sold its prosperity without showing whose labor produced it.
Celebrating its 101st year, the Poinsett Hotel still stands at Main and Court Streets, and Greenville is still in the business of being seen. The question is no longer whether Greenville knows how to sell itself. It is whether the Greenville being sold is one all its people can enter.
Next: Greenville’s municipal airport made aviation a civic strategy, linking the city to national routes while promoting modernity, investment, competition and future growth.
Russell Stall is a Greenville native, former at-large Greenville City Council member, and certified city planner. He serves as executive director of the Greenville County Historical Society. For more information, visit greenvillehistory.org.
