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Walhalla's Description

Walhalla is a city in Oconee County, South Carolina, United States. It is located 16 miles from Clemson University, which is located in Clemson, South Carolina. The population was 3,801 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Oconee CountyGR6. The current mayor of Walhalla is Lamar Bailes. Walhalla is known as “The Garden of the Gods” and the “Gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
Walhalla was the terminus for the Blue Ridge Railway system that planned a route to Chattanooga, Tennessee before the American Civil War. Some folks seem to think it was suppose to run through Knoxville, Tennessee but this is incorrect according to documents in the South Carolina Archives and railroad historians and much out of the way from the true intended route. Had the Knoxville(which was at that time a tiny backwater at that time compared to Chattanooga) route been chosen; it would have been easier and shorter to have taken the road from Greenville to Spartanburg and up to Asheville thence to Knoxville which the Southern railroad certainly did after 1870. The big problem in constructing any roads beyond the Piedmont before 1870 was that the Blue Ridge Escarpment made it very difficult to build roads of any kind over the Escarpment Walls. Another misconception was that the road was completely built by free white men. It was not; slaves both black and white (the so- called “poor white trash”), some of whom were indentured servants, were used to build the road until slavery was outlawed and continued to be used until the North over came the South in the American Civil War. Construction faltered with the Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel above Walhalla unfinished. The rail line to Walhalla was cut back by the Norfolk Southern to nearby West Union in the late 1990s. The railroad, however, is the mainline between Charlotte and Atlanta.