The Pickens County Chronicle‘s Publisher & Editor, Karen Brewer, has worked as a trusted journalist in her native Pickens County full time, more than 60 hours per week, since 1999, having written thousands of news and feature stories and having taken thousands of photographs, documenting numerous events — from July 14, 1999 to May 13, 2004 as Editor, writer, and photographer for The Pickens Sentinel newspaper and since the spring of 2004 as a newspaper and magazine Publisher, Editor, writer, and photographer, in print and online. While a full-time undergraduate student at Clemson University, she worked part time for three years as a writer for Clemson University News Services and University Relations/Clemson University Media Relations (including writing Clemson University news releases sent to the news media and writing for Clemson World magazine), and she also was a staff writer for The Tiger (Clemson University’s student newspaper), and she also wrote for The Clemson Messenger (Clemson’s community newspaper). She also has reported on political elections for The Associated Press (AP), has written articles about Pickens County history and tourism for Sandlapper: The Magazine of South Carolina, and has won statewide awards for writing and photography (news reporting and feature writing) from the South Carolina Press Association, beginning in 1999. She owns and publishes The Pickens County Chronicle newspaper and three magazines and is the owner of Picture-Perfect Photography, Tiger Web Design, and Tiger Media.

After graduating from high school with high honors, she entered Clemson University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in English (American and British literature) and minoring in writing/journalism, and earned a Master of Arts degree in English (American and British literature). While her graduate degree consisted of studying all English courses in American and British literature, and writing a film screenplay for her creative master’s thesis, and taking a master’s oral exam covering 150 works in American and British literature, her undergraduate liberal arts degree included studying courses in western civilization, history of England to 1603, history of the Roman world, England’s cultural history, solar system astronomy, stellar astronomy, finite probability, mathematical analysis, multivariable calculus, logic/philosophy, psychology, American politics, American Constitutional law, and three foreign languages, in addition to English courses in American literature, Shakespeare, Medieval period literature, British Romantic period literature, structure of poetry, fiction writing, structure of drama, playwrighting, film, feature writing, vocabulary building, American humor, and journalism.

For three years while a full-time undergraduate student, from ages 18 to 21, she worked part time weekdays as a student writer for Clemson University’s News Services and University Relations (Clemson University Media Relations) in the Trustee House on campus (adjacent to Fort Hill, former home to the John C. Calhoun and Thomas Green Clemson families), where she wrote Clemson University news releases sent to the news media, wrote for the university’s Clemson World magazine, wrote for the university’s newsletters for faculty and staff, and wrote the script for a Clemson University television spot (which aired on WYFF Channel 4) about Clemson University’s history, specifically about the Clemson Aero Club’s ‘Little 372’ airplane built in the 1920’s and on display in the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. 

Also while an undergraduate student at Clemson, she was a staff writer for the Clemson University student newspaper, The Tiger (following four years as a staff writer for her high school student newspaper), and she and other journalism students wrote about Clemson University for a special edition of The Clemson Messenger newspaper. She and a few fellow Clemson journalism students also created, and wrote stories for, a recurring printed newsletter for Helping Hands of Clemson (which was founded as an emergency shelter/foster home for abused children), and copies of each issue were distributed free around the community, as a way to assist that organization in its mission of helping children. (The newsletter continued to be published by later journalism students.)

She began her full-time journalism career on July 14, 1999, when she was hired as the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel, a newspaper founded in the county seat in 1871 and in 1999 owned by Publisher Jerry Alexander and managed by General Manager Don Hunt. In addition to editorial duties, she wrote hundreds of news stories and feature stories each year while she was the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel. She reported on government (all meetings of Pickens County Council, meetings of several City Councils, including Liberty, Easley, Central, and Clemson, all meetings of the Pickens County Water Authority, all meetings of the Pickens County Public Service Commission, and meetings of the Pickens County Planning Commission, as well as interviewing and writing about the candidates for political races on the city, county, state, and national levels). She reported on education (all meetings of the Pickens County School Board and many events to which she was invited at the elementary, middle, and high schools and local universities). She reported on law enforcement (the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office and police departments throughout the county). She covered trials at the Pickens County Courthouse. She wrote about local museums (including the Pickens County Museum and the Central History Museum) and other local historic places (including the Hagood Mill, the Hagood-Mauldin House, McKinney Chapel, and Freedom’s Hill Church), and she wrote historical feature stories. She covered all of the festivals (including the Pickens Azalea Festival, the Pumpkintown Pumpkin Festival, and the Six Mile Issaqueena Festival), Christmas parades throughout Pickens County, and the other events around the county throughout each year. She reported on veterans, including all of the events of the Pickens American Legion Post 11, who invited her to their events, including Memorial Day, Veterans Day, 9-11 anniversaries, and at other times. She wrote about many non-profit organizations and churches throughout Pickens County. She wrote about local places of interest, including Collins Ole Towne. She wrote sports feature stories and human interest stories about local citizens, and she wrote the Editor’s column, titled “Reflections”, in each issue of The Pickens Sentinel. She especially enjoyed covering stories focused on youth and on senior citizens. She was presented plaques of appreciation from Prevent Child Abuse Pickens County/The Parenting Place and the American Legion Post 11 of Pickens and received many letters of appreciation from organizations, students, and other individuals, which were encouraging during all of those 60- to 80-hour workweeks.

She was presented awards from the South Carolina Press Association, beginning with the 1999 contest with first place in the state in the sports feature category for her story “Say It’s So, Joe”, about Pickens County-born ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson and efforts to have him reinstated into Major League Baseball and inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

While she was the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel, she was asked by the Associated Press (AP) to report on political elections.

She was asked by local historians from the Central Heritage Society (Anne Sheriff, Beverly Cureton, and Roy and Pat Collins) and wrote several articles and took photos, published in 2004 and 2005 in several issues of Sandlapper: The Magazine of South Carolina, including about the history of the town of Central, about the Central History Museum, about the Central Community Center (historic former schoolhouse for black children), about Collins Ole Towne (a recreated 1930’s-era village), about Freedom’s Hill Church (an abolitionist church and oldest Wesleyan meeting house in the South, relocated to the campus of Southern Wesleyan University in Central), and about Heirlooms and Comforts (the state’s oldest quilt shop, located in Central).

In the spring of 2004, she launched a Christian newspaper in Pickens County and chose Hiott Printing Company in Pickens as the printer, as the Hiott family had been longtime owners and operators of The Pickens Sentinel and then continued printing The Sentinel until Jerry Alexander sold the newspaper effective January 1, 2002. As owner/Publisher and Editor of the new newspaper, she reported on events in Pickens County and also conducted one-on-one, in-depth interviews with local citizens as well as nationally known individuals, in Christian ministry as well as in other fields, sharing about their lives and about their Christian faith. Thousands of copies of each issue were distributed around Pickens County and the Upstate. That printed publication developed into a magazine, in print and online, where she wrote hundreds of stories and published more than 8,000 photographs. She was asked by the South Carolina Baptist Convention to serve on the SCBC’s seven-member 2007 Resolutions Committee with six Baptist Pastors.

She has a love for nature and nature photography, having visited numerous beaches (on the East, West, and Gulf Coasts, as well as in the Caribbean and England) and having hiked in deserts, in mountains, and to many waterfalls, and her love for the outdoors led her to launch an outdoors magazine.

She is a fan of classic cars, classic music, classic films, and classic television (including westerns, and she has enjoyed visiting locations where westerns were filmed, as well as many historic sites from the Old West). Her music collection includes nearly 500 albums of different genres on cd’s, cassettes, and records, and her entertainment collection includes hundreds of classic films and classic television shows. Her love for classic entertainment led her to create a magazine devoted to entertainment from the past, with her interviews with actors and coverage of events.

In addition to publishing The Pickens County Chronicle newspaper and three magazines, she is the owner of Picture–Perfect Photography, Tiger Web Design, and Tiger Media.  She has written three novellas and has begun a fourth and has written short stories, poetry, scripts, and plays. 

Born in Easley, she is a lifelong Pickens County citizen who is descended from Pickens County’s earliest settlers, the Cornelius Keith family, who, in 1743, settled in what is called the Oolenoy area of Pickens County, named for Cherokee Chief Woolenoy. Her love for history has led her to visit numerous historic sites across the United States as well as historic sites in other countries, yet she loves to research and share the history of her own native Pickens County. She has family ties to every part of Pickens County and is particularly fond of Easley (her childhood hometown), Clemson (where she earned her degrees and began her journalism career while a student), and Pickens (her mother’s and maternal grandparents’ hometown, and where much of her family has lived, and also where she started her full-time journalism career as the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel).

She also has family ties to Oconee County, the original home of her maternal grandmother (who was born in Jocassee Valley and was raised in Jocassee Valley and Salem with eight siblings) and where her grandmother’s parents and grandparents owned nearly 500 acres in Jocassee Valley (nearly all of which is now covered by the waters of Lake Jocassee), and where her grandmother’s father owned the only store in Jocassee Valley, frequented by locals and campers from the Camp Jocassee for Girls, who enjoyed Coca Cola, ice cream, and other snacks. Karen did not know her great grandfather, but she has fond memories of time spent with her maternal grandparents not only at their new home they built in Pickens but also at their lakehouse they called the cabin, which they built on Fisher Knob, overlooking Lake Jocassee after the lake was made. She also has fond memories of visiting often with her maternal great grandmother at her home in Salem through the years. Karen’s great, great grandmother (her maternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother), a native of Transylvania County before moving to Jocassee Valley with her husband and family and whose maiden name was Fisher, was a great granddaughter of Revolutionary War patriot James Washington Fisher, Sr., a native of Maryland who was given a land grant and settled in western North Carolina after the Revolutionary War, and a granddaughter of James Washington Fisher, Jr., about whom author and historian William Gilmore Simms wrote.) Additional family ties to Oconee County include Karen’s ancestor Henry Lusk (who served under Andrew Pickens in the Revolutionary War). Henry and his brother, Nathan Lusk, were among the founding members with General Andrew Pickens of Bethel Presbyterian Church in present-day Oconee County. Karen still has family members living in Oconee County. 

She began reading at the age of three and began writing poetry, short stories, and plays in early elementary school. While growing up, she was a voracious reader who utilized school libraries and public libraries, loved ordering books from a book club through her elementary school, and loved studying 19th Century and early 20th Century American literature in middle school and high school. As a teenaged college student (when not in class or working at the Trustee House), she loved reading the books in Clemson University’s Cooper Library and also began collecting books for her own personal library, which now totals more than 1,000 volumes, mainly American and British literature, poetry, local and U.S. and world history, biographies and autobiographies, books on travel, and some books on sports. She has visited the historic homes of many writers, including Robert Frost (New Hampshire), Mark Twain (Connecticut and Missouri), Jack London (California), John Steinbeck (California), Carl Sandburg (North Carolina and Illinois), Thomas Wolfe (North Carolina), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Massachusetts), Henry David Thoreau (Massachusetts), Louisa May Alcott (Massachusetts), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Massachusetts), Emily Dickinson (Massachusetts), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Connecticut), Margaret Mitchell (Georgia), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Florida), Joel Chandler Harris (Georgia), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Massachusetts), Edgar Allan Poe (Pennsylvania), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa), Earl Hamner (Virginia), and Charles Dickens (London, England). 

She has a love for genealogy research. Her maternal grandmother, who researched family genealogy extensively (through primary sources in libraries), passed the interest of genealogy down to several family members. Through her maternal grandmother, Karen is descended from Oolenoy settler Cornelius Keith and Revolutionary War patriots Jeffrey Beck, William Burgess (who became a Minister and is buried in Alabama), James Washington Fisher, Sr., Abraham Hester, Cornelius Keith, Jr., Henry Lusk (who served under Andrew Pickens), and James Lusk (who served under Andrew Pickens). Through her maternal grandfather, she is descended from Revolutionary War patriots James Caldwell, Jesse Calvert, Obed Calvert, Adam Elrod, and James Lanford, in addition to Pocahontas and her son, Thomas Rolfe, as well as George Calvert/Lord Baltimore (who had the vision of founding the colony of Maryland) and his son Leonard Calvert (who led the expedition of the ships Ark and Dove, bringing colonists in 1634, and became the first Colonial Governor of Maryland). Her lineage also goes back to the kings and queens of England and other countries.

Her maternal grandmother also researched local history and served on the committee, with Anne Sheriff and several others, for the book Pickens County Heritage, published in 1995. Prior to that, her grandmother and a friend of hers researched and wrote the history of their church, Mountain Grove Baptist Church in Pickens, for their book Twin Springs and a Grove of Trees, published in 1990, and for which they were honored by the South Carolina Baptist Convention.

Karen has always loved sports and played on her high school softball team and volleyball team (voted MVP) and played racquetball while a student at Clemson. As a child, she enjoyed playing baseball and basketball and soccer, as well as skateboarding, roller skating, and also motorbiking and go-karting at a former baseball field (in her neighborhood in Easley), which at that time was only a dirt field but later was restored to a baseball field, which it is today. Through the years, she has been a fan of baseball, football, golf (and enjoyed touring the Pebble Beach golf course in Pebble Beach, California), karate (and enjoyed attending karate tournaments in Memphis, Tennessee), NASCAR (and enjoyed touring the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida), and Motocross. She has always loved watching the summer and winter Olympics (and enjoyed touring the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado). Through the years, she has enjoyed watching younger relatives in their athletic endeavors, including baseball, softball, volleyball, football, soccer, basketball, track, wrestling, rodeo, and cheerleading competition.

Additional interests through the years have included playing piano (beginning at age seven) and horseback riding.

She can be reached at Karen@ThePickensCountyChronicle.com.

Her most recent Reflections newspaper columns can be read by clicking here.