Welcome to The Pickens County Chronicle, a newspaper that is a mixture of local news, local history, local tourism, and local recreation here in our home of Pickens County, South Carolina. At The Pickens County Chronicle‘s beginning, Sassafras Mountain, which is the highest point in Pickens County and in the state of South Carolina, was chosen for this newspaper’s logo.
The Pickens County Chronicle is owned by Karen Brewer, a journalist who has reported on her native Pickens County since 1999 – as the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel from July 14, 1999 to May 13, 2004 and as a newspaper and magazine Publisher and Editor in Pickens County since the spring of 2004. She publishes four publications in Pickens County and also owns a professional on-location photography business, Picture Perfect Photography. She has written thousands of news and feature stories, has interviewed hundreds of local citizens, and has taken thousands of photographs at numerous events throughout Pickens County.
She is a graduate of Clemson University, having earned a Master of Arts degree in English (American and British Literature) following a Bachelor of Arts degree, with a major in English (American and British Literature) and a minor in Journalism, and courses in American history, world history, astronomy, calculus, philosophy, psychology, political science, Constitutional law, and three foreign languages, in addition to literature, poetry, short story writing, playwriting, film, and journalism.
For three years while an undergraduate student at Clemson, from age 18 to age 21, she was employed by Clemson University News Services and University Relations (Media Relations) in the Trustee House on campus, adjacent to Fort Hill, the home of John C. Calhoun. She wrote Clemson University news releases sent to the news media, and she wrote articles published in the university’s Clemson World magazine and other university publications, and she wrote the script for a television spot, about Clemson University’s history, for a project in which Clemson University collaborated with the local NBC affiliate WYFF Channel 4, where the spot aired.
Also while pursuing her undergraduate degree at Clemson, she was a staff writer for Clemson University’s weekly student newspaper, The Tiger, and she wrote about Clemson University for the Clemson newspaper, The Clemson Messenger, and she and fellow journalism students created and wrote articles for a recurring publication, distributed free in the community, for Helping Hands of Clemson, after Jean Tulli (who founded Helping Hands as an emergency shelter and foster home for abused and neglected children) spoke about Helping Hands to their journalism class.
From July 14, 1999 through May 13, 2004, she served all of the communities of Pickens County as the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel (a weekly newspaper founded in the county seat in 1871), working 60 to 80 hours each week (days and nights, including weekends), writing hundreds of news and feature stories each year as well as a first-person column, “Reflections”, for each issue. In addition to editorial duties, her responsibilities also included covering many beats, including education (attending and reporting on all Pickens County School Board meetings, held the fourth Monday night of each month, and events at the elementary, middle, and high schools as well as events at Clemson University and Southern Wesleyan University and news about Tri-County Technical College), government (attending and reporting on all Pickens County Council meetings, including regular meetings held the first and third Monday nights of each month and additional called meetings, and Liberty, Central, or Easley City Council meetings, held the second Monday night of each month, some Clemson City Council meetings, all Pickens County Water Authority meetings, all Pickens County Public Service Commission meetings, and Pickens County Planning Commission meetings, as well as interviews with, and individual stories on, all candidates for all political races, countywide and in all municipalities, and candidates on the state and national levels), law enforcement (the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office and police departments throughout the county), court (trials at the Pickens County Courthouse), breaking news, local veterans events (including attending and reporting on all events of the American Legion Pickens Post 11), events at churches, stories on many non-profit organizations in Pickens County, attending and reporting on festivals in the county (including the Pickens Azalea Festival, the Six Mile Issaqueena Festival, held at Six Mile Elementary School before being moved to Main Street, the Pumpkintown Pumpkin Festival, held at the former Oolenoy schoolhouse), Christmas parades in Pickens County, and many other events throughout the county. She also interviewed and wrote in-depth feature stories about local citizens, wrote about local history, and wrote about local places of interest, including Collins Ole Towne in Central, the Central History Museum, McKinney Chapel in Sunset, Hagood Mill in Pickens, the Pickens County Museum in Pickens, the Hagood-Mauldin House in Pickens, and Freedom’s Hill Church, relocated to the campus of Southern Wesleyan University. In addition, the Associated Press (AP) asked her to report on political elections for the AP. The South Carolina Press Association presented her statewide Press Association awards for writing and photography (news reporting and feature writing). Local organizations including the American Legion Pickens Post 11 and Prevent Child Abuse Pickens County (The Parenting Place) gave her plaques of appreciation for attending and reporting on their events, and students wrote letters thanking her for coming to their schools and reporting on their news.
Local historians with The Central Heritage Society, including Anne Sheriff, Beverly Cureton, and Roy and Pat Collins, in collaboration with Sandlapper: The Magazine of South Carolina, asked her to write several articles, published in several issues of Sandlapper in 2004 and 2005, about the Central area, including articles about the history of Central, about the Central History Museum, about the Central Community Center (an historic former schoolhouse for black children), about Collins Ole Towne (a recreated 1930’s era village in Central), about Heirlooms and Comforts (the state’s oldest quilt shop), and about Freedom’s Hill Church (an abolitionist church and the oldest Wesleyan meeting house in the South, relocated to the campus of Southern Wesleyan University in Central).
In the spring of 2004, she launched a local newspaper in Pickens County (with the first issue printed in June, 2004), and thousands of copies of each issue were printed by Hiott Printing in Pickens and distributed around Pickens County and other parts of the upstate. After a few years in print, it evolved into a weekly online-only publication for several years (with the advantages of having no space limitation for in-depth articles or photographs of local events), and the articles, with more than 8,000 photographs, reached readers locally as well as in every state and in 173 countries. (Most of the articles were from her interviews with local as well as nationally known preachers, singers, missionaries, sports figures, and many others who shared about their lives and their faith, and, through the years, the publication included coverage of many events in Pickens County.) A few years ago, the publication, now a magazine, returned to print (with in-depth articles and color photos), and pdf versions of the printed magazine issues are also available online. (Coverage of local events will be published in The Pickens County Chronicle.)
Born in Easley, she is a lifelong Pickens County citizen who is descended from Pickens County’s earliest settlers, her sixth great grandparents Cornelius Keith Sr. and Juda Thompson Keith, and their son, Cornelius Keith Jr. According to historic accounts documented in the National Register of Historic Places and in History of Pumpkintown-Oolenoy (a book written by Bert Hendricks Reece) and by the historical marker erected by the Daughters of the American Colonists, the Cornelius Keith family, in 1743, settled the Oolenoy area that is now Pickens County but was then home to the native Cherokee. According to historic accounts, Cornelius Keith and his wife and baby son traveled by covered wagon, following Indian trails, and, when having reached the area now known as Oolenoy, he traded one of his ponies for land from Chief Woolenoy. The Keiths’ son would later become a patriot of the American Revolutionary War, one of her many ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War.
Most of her family is from her mother’s and her maternal grandfather’s hometown of Pickens, yet her ancestors and family members have lived throughout all parts of Pickens County. Her maternal grandmother (although descended from the Keiths who settled in Oolenoy) was born in Jocassee Valley and was raised in Jocassee Valley and Salem in Oconee County, and her grandmother’s parents owned almost 500 acres in Jocassee Valley, nearly all of which is now buried beneath the waters of Lake Jocassee. She has fond memories of time spent with her maternal grandparents not only at their home in the city of Pickens but also at their lake cabin, built after Lake Jocassee was made.
She began reading at the age of three, and her love for writing began at an early age, first with writing poetry, short stories, and plays in childhood (and continuing through adulthood). She was a staff writer for four years for her high school newspaper (and her love for journalism continued in college, as a staff writer for her college newspaper). She has written novellas, including two she developed from her scripts which placed as finalists in nationwide screenwriting competitions. Her personal library, of more than 1,000 books, includes American and British literature and poetry, biographies and autobiographies, and history. She has visited numerous writers’ homes/museums across the United States and in England.
Her interest in history and in travel led her to visit numerous historic sites across the United States (from the Colonial and Revolutionary War eras through the present), as well as historic sites in other countries.
She also has a love for nature and nature photography, having visited numerous beaches (on the East Coast, West Coast, and Gulf Coast, as well as the Caribbean and England), and having hiked in deserts, and in mountains, and to many waterfalls. Her love for nature and nature photography led her to launch an outdoors magazine — with the first article from an interview with her friend Debbie Fletcher aboard a pontoon while divers visited Debbie’s family’s beloved Attakulla Lodge buried in the waters of Lake Jocassee.
Her interests through the years have also included horseback riding, genealogy research, and historical research.
She has always had an interest in sports, having played on her high school softball team and high school volleyball team (voted co-captain and MVP) and having played racquetball for fun while in college at Clemson, at Fike Recreation Center. (Childhood sports included basketball, soccer, softball, skateboarding, roller skating, and go-karting at a neighborhood former baseball field in Easley which at that time was only a dirt field but later became a restored baseball field again.) Through the years, she has been a fan of baseball, football, NASCAR, Motocross. golf, karate (and enjoyed attending karate tournaments in Memphis), and the Olympics (and enjoyed touring the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs). She has enjoyed, through the years, watching several younger relatives (elementary, middle, and high school age) in their athletic endeavors, including soccer, football, baseball, softball, volleyball, basketball, track, wrestling, and rodeo.
She is a fan of classic cars, classic music, classic films, and classic television (including westerns, and she has enjoyed visiting many sites from the historic Old West as well as locations where classic westerns were filmed — and being on set as a favorite western television series was filmed in the 1990’s in California).
Having varied interests is beneficial in the journalism profession, which requires reporting on many different topics. And she has enjoyed reporting on all of the communities of our county, for we are all connected and are, in essence, one community here in our home of Pickens County.