Cherry's Crossing

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Cherry's Crossing is the name for the spot about two miles south of Clemson's campus where Cherry Road crosses the current Norfolk Southern rail line just east of Lake Hartwell. Dating to 1860 when the Blue Ridge Railroad built its line from Anderson through the Pendleton District to West Union, South Carolina, the rail stop was the closest railroad connection to Fort Hill until another rail line was laid through Calhoun in 1873. However, there was never a station at Cherry's Crossing, only a small shelter. Freight deliveries were made in Pendleton. Sports teams rode out of Cherry's Crossing to matches in the western state. After coal unloading for the Clemson Physical Plant was discontinued at the Southern Railway spur at the Clemson depot in the early 1970s (which required the coal trucks to transit through Clemson), a new coal dock was erected at Cherry's Crossing.

Clemson College was reported to be considering building an electric railway from Calhoun, the location of the Southern Railway depot, through Clemson to Cherry Station on the Blue Ridge Railroad in a June 1909 newsbrief appearing in the Electric Railway Journal. Walter Merritt Riggs wrote a rebuttal for the next issue which declared that the trustees had considered the idea, but had agreed that it was not practical. Considering the size of the town involved (Cherry Station, at best, had four nearby families), the line would have seen reasonable use only when the college semesters began and ended. (Source: Palmetto Traction - Electric Railways of South Carolina by Thomas Fetters, 1978, Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, no ISBN. - Fetters is Class of 1961, with a BS in Chemical Engineering.)

This is the Clemson Wiki project's 1,290th article.