As we're heading towards the end of another spectacular year of the biggest boom Downtown Spartanburg has experienced in anyone's memory, we thought this might be a good moment to get together with two of the most knowledgeable local historians we know, Brad Steineke, Assistant Director of Local History at the Spartanburg County Public Library and Phillip Stone, Archivist at Wofford College, to try to contextualize this current moment in our urban core's history by taking a look at how we got here, starting with the construction of Spartanburg's first county courthouse and running through to our present day. Of course, there's no way we could ever get to all of that in one episode, so on today's podcast, we've got the first episode of our two-part journey, taking a look at downtown from its beginning to the textile boom times of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.