To the editor:

I’m not sure what year it was, sometime before the big announcement of “the Tryon Equestrian,” my wife and I started talking about the idea of finding a home in walking distance of downtown Landrum.

There was hardly any land for sale and most of the homes were built in the early 1900s — some beautiful homes but in need of renovation.

Landrum has a thriving old downtown. Most times when we went out we would go to Landrum to wine and dine. We thought it would be great to live in a walkable community.

I think the best way to describe Landrum is Mayberry with wine. It has a small town feel where everyone knows everyone and it is open minded enough to enjoy a glass of wine on an outside patio as you enjoy your visit to town.

As we started looking, we found a couple of abandoned proprieties, and that’s when we found out about Spartanburg County tax auctions. We bought a house at the tax auction and later bought a vacant lot next to it. This gave us close to an acre with an easy walk to town.

As the venture started we found out that the taxes were a bit high, so I talked with the city of Landrum and Spartanburg County and explained if they would drop the price of the taxes for a few years we would do our part and clean that corner of the world up, and they did indeed.

We decided we would tear down the house ourselves and salvage as much of the old lumber as we could. I’m a truck driver and my wife is a bank teller, so this wasn’t something we had ever done before. We found a few people who were willing to help in exchange for the lumber. It took us all summer but we took the house apart board by board. It was a rewarding experience, but I can’t say we would ever do it again.

There were times when it all became so overwhelming we were ready to sell and stay in our home from now on. It’s sometimes hard to see your dreams through; it can be much easier just to walk away.

We had planned on waiting till our retirement to build a home, but my wife was transferred to Landrum on her job, so we sold our home and started construction.

Our hope is that Landrum will continue to grow and become a great place to spend our retirement. We hope others will follow our lead and invest in Landrum in one way or another. 

When you talk about Landrum to anyone in Spartanburg or Greenville County the response is always the same: “I just love Landrum.” With the Tryon Equestrian just 12 miles away, there is, and will continue to be, people from all over the world visiting our small town. I hope they love it as much as we do.

We hope to be in our new home by Christmas. We will keep you posted on our “Life in Landrum.”

~ Joey Johnson, Inman, S.C.