Charles Hood, Local Author

Join us for a special local author visit — a unique opportunity to connect with the person behind the pages.

During this visit, Charles will discuss the inspiration behind his new book and share his writing process.

Books will be available for purchase (cash only). All proceeds from book sales go to Charles's late son's guitar scholarship at Young Appalachian Musicians.

Book Summary:

Pickens County has never lacked for stories—only for someone to gather them before they slipped away. A sheriff's badge in a desk drawer, a rail bed turned bike trail, a cotton mill whistle nobody's heard in decades, a recipe card in a grandmother's hand. Pickens Portraits: Volume Two rescues another armful of them from the edge of forgetting.

Like its predecessor, this is not a textbook. It's a collection of stories—vivid, deeply researched, and written for anyone who believes that local history deserves the same narrative craft as any bestseller.

Inside, you'll discover:

C. David Stone, South Carolina's marathon sheriff, who wore the badge for 44 years—and once recognized a fugitive he hadn't seen in more than two decades from across a nursing-home lobby
The Doodle: the Pickens Railroad that ran for over a century, from 1898 to 2013, and the beloved rail-trail it became
Ben Robertson Jr., the Clemson-born journalist whose Red Hills and Cotton gave the Upcountry its truest voice—and whose life ended in a wartime plane crash at its height
The Pickens Centennial of 1968, with its Brothers of the Brush, its Centennial Belles, and a whole town playing dress-up with its own past
Mill Hill: life inside the Pickens Cotton Mill village, where the whistle set the rhythm of every day
Rocky Bottom, the mountain community tucked high in the county's northern reaches
A walking tour among the stones of Pickens' cemeteries, and the remarkable lives resting beneath them
Pickens County's experience of World War II, told through the men who left and the town that waited
A history of the historians—the keepers and tellers who preserved this county's memory before us
And a century of recipes, the dishes that fed Pickens through boom, bust, and everything between

Drawn from archival scrapbooks, original documents, family interviews, and sources that have never appeared in print, this book is local history with the texture and momentum of narrative nonfiction. Whether your people have been in Pickens County for seven generations or you just moved to the Upstate last year, these stories belong to you.

This event will take place in the meeting room.