Drive south on Highway 25 past Hodges and you cross two pieces of the same county's memory within about two miles of each other. One is a white clapboard building with a fresh coat of paint and, as of this year, a new gazebo on the lawn. The other is a train depot with no tracks left beside it, the kind of building people slow down for and then keep driving past.
Only one of them opened its doors this year. The other one got a book written about it instead.
That split says something about how a small place decides what to keep alive versus what to simply keep from vanishing. Hodges is doing both at once, and the contrast is sharper in 2026 than it has been in years.
The College That Still Serves Ice Cream Every June
Cokesbury College has been standing since 1854, when the Free Masons built it as a women's college in what was then the planned village of Cokesbury. The building sits on a 65-acre campus that the Cokesbury Historical and Recreational Commission has maintained since taking over the deed in 1971 and completing a restoration in 1974. It is not a museum piece kept behind glass. It is a working event space that hosts weddings, showers, and reunions, and every June it hosts something else entirely: the Cokesbury College Ice Cream Social.
The Social runs as part of the SC Festival of Flowers, the month-long celebration based in Uptown Greenwood that has landed on the Southeast Tourism Society's Top 20 events list for years running. While most of the festival's action stays in Uptown, one Sunday afternoon each June belongs to Hodges. Families tour the historic grounds at 210 College Road from 2 to 5 p.m., free of charge, and eat ice cream on a campus that has hosted everything from a Masonic women's college to, according to local lore, a night's stay by Jefferson Davis on his way south at the close of the Civil War. This year's version of the event added a new gazebo to the grounds, a small but real sign that the Commission keeps investing rather than just preserving.
That is the version of history Hodges maintains on purpose. Somebody mows the lawn, somebody schedules the tour, somebody scoops the ice cream. The building is old, but the upkeep is current.
Two Miles Down the Road, a Depot Without Tracks
Two miles from Cokesbury College sits the second landmark, and it tells the opposite story. The old Southern Railway depot near Hodges once anchored a genuinely busy railroad junction, a stop on one of South Carolina's earliest rail lines. By the time the tracks came out and the freight business dried up, the building sat empty until it found an unlikely second act starting in 1977: Jackson Station Rhythm & Blues Club.
For a little over a decade, Jackson Station was one of the more unlikely music venues in the Upstate. Owner Gerald Jackson turned the old depot into a roadhouse that drew acts including Widespread Panic, the Swimming Pool Qs, Bob Margolin, Tinsley Ellis, and R&B legend Nappy Brown, the kind of lineup nobody expects to find in a town this small. The club's run ended violently on April 7, 1990, when Jackson was attacked by a patron in a dispute over an unpaid tab. The depot sat quiet after that, its windows going dark, its marquee rusting in the weeds.
"This depot marooned in time and place."
That is how one South Carolina writer described passing the building years later, before either of us knew its second act was about to get a lot louder.
In 2017, a Donalds resident named Daniel Prince bought the depot, drawn in by years of hearing stories about the legendary blues club and hoping to eventually restore it. What happens to the physical building next is still an open question. What is not in question is that the story itself just got a serious revival.
Why 2026 Is the Year Jackson Station Came Back
Lander University sociology professor Daniel M. Harrison has published "Live at Jackson Station" through the University of South Carolina Press, built on in-person interviews with former musicians and Greenwood locals who remember the club firsthand. Kirkus Reviews called it a book that fans of the blues and lively music clubs will find fascinating. Novelist George Singleton, blurbing the book, credited it with directing a light on a place that changed people's lives.
The renewed attention is not limited to the book. In June 2026, South Carolina Press Association member papers, including outlets that reached readers as far away as Kingstree and Camden, ran a syndicated first-person piece describing a chance stop at the ruined depot and the digging that followed to uncover its story. South Carolina Public Radio has also carried a feature on the club's history, tracing its arc from Reconstruction-era rail stop to blues bar to abandoned building.
None of that changes the depot itself. It is still privately owned, still standing without its rails. But the story around it is more alive right now than it has been at any point since 1990, and that revival is happening at almost exactly the same moment the Cokesbury College Ice Cream Social added its new gazebo. Hodges did not plan for these two anniversaries to land in the same year. They just did.
Make a Day of Both
If you live in the area and have never made the short drive to either site, this is a reasonable year to do it. The Cokesbury College grounds are open for tours during the Ice Cream Social each June, and the Commission that maintains the property welcomes visitors outside festival season as well, since the campus doubles as a working event venue year-round.
For food after either stop, Hodges keeps it simple and local. Walt's Wurl Famous Hot Dawgs on Highway 178 North has built a loyal following for exactly what the name promises. A few miles the other direction, Somebody's House on Emerson Street serves Southern soul food buffet style, the kind of place where you leave fuller than you planned.
Neither stop requires much of a detour. That is the point. In a town this size, the distance between a building that is thriving and one that is finally getting its due is a two-mile stretch of Highway 25, and both are worth the drive before the leaves turn.
If you are curious about more of what makes this stretch of Greenwood County worth knowing, our Hodges neighborhood guide covers the area in more depth, from local character to what buyers ask about when they are weighing life here against a nearby town.
Hodges keeps showing up in unexpected ways this year, whether that means a new gazebo on a 172-year-old lawn or a university press book pulling a blues club back into the daylight. If a year like this one has you thinking harder about property in Hodges or anywhere else in the Greenwood area, the team at Wilton Bowman would be glad to talk through what you're picturing. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
