Walhalla City

Oconee County, South Carolina

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Walhalla City Hall is located at 206 North Church Street, Walhalla, SC 29691.
Phone: 864‑638‑4343.

Neighborhoods

Walhalla as described in 1941 [1]

Walhalla, seat of Oconee County, was founded in 1850 by General John A. Wagener of the German Colonization Society of Charleston. The community was named by settlers who enthusiastically declared the site as beautiful as the Valhalla, garden of the Norse immortals. The courthouse was transferred from Old Pickens in 1868 when Pickens District was divided into Oconee and Pickens Counties. That same year the Keowee Courier, Walhalla's present weekly newspaper, was moved here from Old Pickens where it had been established in 1849. Popular as a summer resort, the town has two cotton mills employing nearly 500 people.

If, as it is said, the Creek Indians brought with them from Mexico the seed of the tomato, Oconee County is probably the first place in the United States to cultivate the plant. Such Mexican Indian names as Tomatley and Tomatola still exist in this section.

Oconee County has most of South Carolina's section of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Cherokee called them Sahkanaga (the Great Blue Hills of God), which to the prosaic English became Blue Ridge.

  1. Governor Bernet R. Maybank and the Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers Project, South Carolina, A Guide to the Palmetto State, American Guide Series, 1941, Oxford University Press, New York

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