A look back into Hartwell's history as reported by The Hartwell Sun.
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The front page of the Aug. 15, 1990 edition featured a photo and story about a warehouse fire on N. Forest Avenue in Hartwell.
Aug. 15, 1990 — Low water pressure hampered firefighters’ ability to control a warehouse fire on North Forest Avenue.
The old Savannah Valley Egg Company plant, used as a warehouse to store egg cartons and egg handling equipment, caught fire around 10:30 p.m.. Firefighters arrived and found flames shooting through the roof.
When firefighters realized they couldn’t control the fire due to a lack of water pressure, they focused their efforts on protecting the surrounding areas, including a home just a few feet away from the burning building. The home was not damaged — even the shrubs weren’t torched, The Sun reported.
The fire took two hours to contain and smoldered into the next day as fire crews monitored the remains in case of a re-ignition.
At the time, City Fire Marshall Terry Vickery said his investigation led him to believe the cause of the blaze was electrical.
Aug. 12, 1971 — Law enforcement disbanded an 11,000-gallon “moonshine” distillery located in a chicken house on a farm in the Hickory Crossing community.
Agents with the Federal Treasury Department assisted state and local law enforcement with the bust that one agent called “the largest still we’ve discovered in a long time.”
The still reportedly contained 2,160 mash vats and cookers capable of producing 350 gallons of liquor per day, The Sun reported.
Authorities confiscated 676 gallons of liquor, bottled in clear plastic milk jugs; 2,800 pounds of sugar which would produce about one gallon of liquor per pound; a 1964 Ford pick-up truck; a 1970 Chevrolet sedan and a farm tractor.
Aug. 14, 1925 — A road coming through Hartwell and into South Carolina was designated as a U.S. Highway.
Following a decision by a joint board on interstate highways in Washington, D.C., more than 50,000 miles of roads throughout the U.S. were to be designated as “United States Highways” with uniform road markers.
One road selected in Georgia, now known as U.S. Highway 29, stretched from Atlanta into South Carolina via Hartwell. The north-south highway now spans 1,036 miles from Pensacola, Fla., to the suburbs of Baltimore, Md., and still passes through Hartwell.
The emblem selected as the marker for the federal highways was the U.S. shield with the road numbers.
No new road construction was involved in the change, other than plans already made under the federally funded program.