Community Heroes: Sans Souci couple champions rebirth of Verner Springs Park

It’s just a small piece of land tucked into the southwest corner of the neighborhood, but thanks to the efforts of a Sans Souci couple -- and the many friends and neighbors they’ve helped organize -- Verner Springs Park is coming back to life.

The park is just one effort of the Sans Souci Neighborhood Alliance, which works to connect neighbors and advocate for improvements to infrastructure, roads and parks.

The couple is Tee and Hannah Thompson. Tee is the president of the group. Hannah serves on its parks committee. Even before they moved to the neighborhood in 2016, they were drawn to its sense of community engagement, they say.

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“We’ve been involved since we started thinking about buying a house here,” Tee Thompson says. “We went to one of the neighborhood meetings and it seemed like a really connected community and that was one of the things that drew us to this neighborhood.”

The couple moved in, dug in, rolled up their sleeves and got to work, becoming leaders and fierce advocates for Sans Souci and its residents.

Sans Souci couple selected as Greenville News Community Heroes

For their dedication to making Sans Souci a nicer, more welcoming place to live, Hannah and Tee Thompson have been selected as Greenville News Community Heroes.

The Community Hero program, sponsored by the Greenville Federal Credit Union, recognizes generous and selfless work by those among us who make our community a better place.

Know a Community Hero? Click here to make a nomination

The vision for the park, off Old Bleachery Road near Cedar Lane Road, is for it to become a safe, welcoming gathering spot for all members of the diverse community, a place for fellowship and connection among neighbors, and a safe playground and green space for the children and families who live in the neighborhood.

The revitalization includes new playground equipment, provided as part of a Leadership Greenville project, and hundreds of hours of volunteer work, pulling stumps, clearing overgrown bushes and generally cleaning up the landscape.

In the next few months, there will be new fences and benches, riparian buffers along the stream that runs across the property, landscaping and a mural that illustrates the spirit and pride of the neighborhood.

Sans Souci neighborhood alliance advocates for needed improvements

Sans Souci translates to “carefree, or without worries,” but keeping a neighborhood vital and connected requires lots of care and participation.

The neighborhood alliance, founded about 15 years ago, gives structure to what neighbors have been doing informally since families started moving into the area about 100 years ago – building community, being neighborly and advocating for needed improvements.

About 8,000 people live in Sans Souci, a few miles northwest of downtown Greenville, roughly bounded by Poinsett Highway, the Swamp Rabbit Trail, Blue Ridge Drive and the area just past it. Most are living on moderate incomes. About half are Black or Hispanic.

Greenville County master plan for Sans Souci

And while the park is currently the most visible project, it is far from the only thing the alliance is working on, Tee Thompson says. Road diets for Perry Road and Old Buncombe Road, aimed at calming traffic and improving safety are big priorities, as is a revitalized commercial district along Old Buncombe.

All are included in a Greenville County master plan for Sans Souci, developed with the SSNA in 2018.

The $1 million Perry Road project is awaiting SCDOT’s green light for repaving, curb and sidewalk work. Old Buncombe is in the planning and advocacy stage, Tee says.

The Thompsons are parents of a four-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl who will be a first grader at Cherrydale Elementary. The school is located on Perry Road, and a major benefit of the traffic-calming project will be improved safety for kids and parents who want to walk to school.

Other neighborhood priorities are efforts to keep housing affordable, allowing lower-income residents to stay and young families to move in; and trying to make sure that the massive development planned for the former Union Bleachery Site at Blue Ridge Drive and Old Buncombe doesn’t overwhelm the neighborhood.

'Make sure that Sans Souci still has its grassroots, scrappy feel'

“I want to make sure that Sans Souci still has its grassroots, scrappy feel to it,” Hannah Thompson says.

For the remainder of the summer and fall, though, the park will be the center of attention.

It is named for lawyer and judge David Pettigrew Verner, who built an estate on the property in the latter part of the 1800s. The springs on the property provided a water source for the Verner Springs bottling company, which produced soft drinks, including Coca-Cola, until World War II.

There are accounts of elaborate landscaping and fishponds on the property, even a menagerie of other small animals. The gardens were available for visitors and parties, but once the bottling company closed and its building burned in the early 1960s, the property languished as a swampy corner of a huge tract owned by Cone Mills.

In the 1990s, Habitat for Humanity acquired about 15 acres of the property – and built a village of more than 50 homes across several streets. The park lies in a flood plain and could not be used for home sites, but a 1995 Leadership Greenville class partnered with Habitat to take on the park as a project, cleaning it up and installing some swings and benches.

The three decades since had taken its toll. Hannah says the family would ride their bikes by the overgrown property on Old Bleachery Road and imagine “What if?”

When she moved to Greenville after college in Pennsylvania, Hannah worked for non-profit organizations where she did a lot of grant writing. It’s a skill that came in handy.

The neighborhood alliance applied for several grants to fund improvements at the park.

Leadership Greenville selected park as one of its projects

One application was turned down, but the most recent class of Leadership Greenville selected the park as one of its projects – providing funding for a new play structure and a commitment to helping with the labor of clearing brush and cleaning up the park.

Hannah says that the park project also got some county discretionary funding arranged by recently elected Greenville County Council member Benton Blount, whose District 19 includes Sans Souci. “He’s been very receptive and supportive of everything that’s going on,” she says.

The park is just a couple hundred yards from the Swamp Rabbit Trail, across Old Bleachery Road. Creating direct access to the trail is a goal down the road.

Primarily, both Tee and Hannah say that getting the park refurbished demonstrates that change and improvement is within reach, visible progress after the pandemic, which put the brakes on many projects.

“It shows that we can get stuff done,” Tee says. “We had a lot of momentum going into 2020 and then when COVID happened, everything just stopped for over a year. It was hard because we had a lot of these big projects that we were working on.”

Progress has resumed and there is plenty of enthusiasm.

“I think the thing that makes Sans Souci unique is that there are so many people who want to get involved and make the neighborhood a better place,” Hannah says. “When someone wants something done, it’s ‘OK, let’s do it!’ and they make it happen. It’s so contagious and I’ve never lived anywhere like it.”

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Community Heroes: Sans Souci couple champions rebirth of park