Chapters
For more than a century, Greenville residents have walked, played, gathered, and found quiet along the Reedy River in and around Cleveland Park. The park did not begin on one tidy date. Its history includes an early Cleveland-family gift recorded in 1908 and 1909, a major planning and construction push in the mid-1920s, public works in the 1930s, changing recreation, and continued stewardship.
This is also a history of neighboring communities. Nicholtown grew from landownership and community formation after emancipation. Cleveland Forest emerged later beside the park under subdivision rules that included an explicitly racial occupancy restriction. Public recreation in Greenville was segregated, and in 1961 Black young people challenged exclusion at Cleveland Park's municipal skating rink. Telling these histories together helps us understand the park as a shared landscape shaped by unequal experiences and by people who worked to change them.
Before the park
Long before Cleveland Park took its modern form, the Reedy River corridor was part of a changing landscape of farms, estates, roads, streams, and communities. The 2017 City historic-resources survey describes the larger area through records of landholding, post-Civil War property division, neighborhood development, and public planning.1
More than one beginning
The City survey traces one beginning to a Cleveland-family parcel. It states that title was deeded to Greenville in 1909, following the wishes of W. C. Cleveland, and cites May 1908 newspaper accounts describing the gift and plans for the Civic League to add plantings and benches.2
A second beginning came through the larger park project of the 1920s. In 1925, Park and Tree Commission chairman J. A. McPherson described a sweeping boulevard, connecting roads, and planting program influenced by the earlier Kelsey and Guild beautification plan. A published park proposal showed trees and shrubs, circulation, ball and football fields, tennis courts, and a proposed zoological garden, with an anticipated opening in early 1926.2
These records explain why different accounts use different dates and acreage figures. The honest story is not a single birthday: an earlier public parcel was followed by a much larger designed park effort.
The 1925 plan
A landscape built for public life
Major work continued in the 1930s. The City survey attributes improvements to the Civilian Conservation Corps and records a Girl Scout meeting place, a nine-hole golf course, and the rehabilitation of a former rock quarry by the Greenville Garden Club under landscape architect and city park director Carter Newman Jr.2
The Rock Quarry Garden became one of the park's most distinctive spaces. Its stone, water, paths, and plantings show how civic groups transformed an industrial landscape into a public garden.
One park, different experiences
Nicholtown
The City survey describes Nicholtown as a community formed around 1880 after emancipation, when parcels from the former Stokes Plantation and Green estate were purchased following the Civil War. It identifies A. L. Cobb as an early African American property holder and records settlement by families of mixed racial heritage in the 1870s. By 1937, the city directory described Nicholtown as an African American residential section.3
The neighborhood was not distant from the park story. The 1923 Hillside Terrace plat laid out forty-two lots beside Cleveland Park, linking the development histories of the park and nearby communities.4
Cleveland Forest
The park's surrounding residential landscape changed again in the twentieth century. A May 1940 plat mapped 204 lots in Cleveland Forest. The City survey records building and land-use restrictions and quotes an occupancy restriction barring people of African or Asiatic descent, except domestic servants living with an owner or tenant.5
That restriction belongs to the documented Cleveland Forest records; it should not be generalized to every nearby property or to present-day residents. It is nevertheless essential evidence of how race and property shaped access to housing beside a public landscape.
The skating rink challenge
In Walker v. Shaw, the federal court recorded that Black young people sought admission to the city-operated skating rink in Cleveland Park on February 18, 1961, were refused, and were arrested after they did not leave. The court found that the rink had been operated for white residents. It also stated that the evidence in that case did not establish denial of other park facilities.6
The distinction matters. The rink is documented. Broader claims about every Cleveland Park facility require separate evidence.
Zoo, recreation, and changing use
The 1925 proposal anticipated a zoological garden; the City survey records that the Greenville Zoo opened in the 1960s. Over time, the park also held courts, fields, trails, playgrounds, picnic shelters, memorials, and other facilities. The City continues to describe Cleveland Park as its largest park.27
A cultural landscape worth caring for
Cleveland Park is more than a collection of amenities. Its roads, river edges, mature trees, recreation spaces, garden, zoo, neighboring streets, and community memories form a cultural landscape. Some layers are celebrated. Others require careful research, permission, and listening.
History is not a verdict on today's neighbors. It is context for the choices we make now. Friends of Cleveland Park can help preserve the landscape, document overlooked stories, invite community knowledge, and widen participation in the park's next century.