GREENVILLE — As skateboarders flip and fly across the concrete at Poe Mill skatepark, a yellow construction truck vrooms behind them on flattened dirt.

It’s an eerie glimpse into the future.

Those construction trucks are building the early stages of a 482-unit apartment complex. At some point, they will come rumbling for the skaters, destroying the 21-year-old, do-it-yourself skatepark born on the ashes of a burned-down textile mill with makeshift ramps tatted in graffiti, created and maintained by the community.

That reality brought photographer Zach Suggs to Poe Mill.

Suggs wasn’t initially a skateboarder, but he fell in love with what was left of the 125-year-old mill after a devastating fire. Among the towering twin smokestacks, he fell in love with the impossible tricks, young people, old people, families and the community it gave him during a time when he felt alone.

“The skatepark became definitely like a sanctuary,” he said.

After Poe Mill was sold in 2021, the 35-year-old spent over three years taking pictures of the skatepark and portraits of the skaters.

Now through May 25, those images are being displayed at Woodbine Studio & Gallery in an exhibit called “Poe Mill: A Skateboarding Retrospective.”

Matthew Craven co-owns a private skateboarding gym, Companion Skatepark, and sees the preservation effort as vital.

“We need to preserve the images and the feel of what it is like to be at Poe Mill once it’s gone,” Craven said.

After a multi-year delay, the shrubs have been removed around the skatepark, parts of the dirt have been leveled and construction area signs are visible, though nothing has been built yet. It’s unclear when Contour Companies will finish the mixed-use project and shut down the skatepark, which it has said will happen.

The developer didn’t respond to the Post and Courier’s multiple requests for comment for this story.

The birth of a DIY skatepark

A century before the skatepark, there was a textile mill.

Founded in the 1890s, the 75-acre Poe Mill anchored the neighborhood for decades, surrounded by a church, school, cow pasture, baseball field and a swimming pool. At its peak, it employed 800 workers and operated over 70,000 spindles.

It closed in 1977, falling into disrepair like the other mills that orbited downtown Greenville from the west side for decades. It sat vacant for the next 25 years. Windows were broken and weeds grew.

Then in the early 2000s, two fires burned the site to the ground, leaving behind nothing but brick rubble and two smokestacks rising high.

In its wake, skaters made the brick rubble their home. They cleared a path and built a wooden box, cinder blocks, a big green wooden ramp and, little by little, the debris was pushed to the side and a skatepark came to life.

It evolved into the city’s only free full-fledged skatepark — even as the government put up a fence to keep people out.

They slathered those slabs with orange and green graffiti, tagging them with phrases that no one but the people there understood. When the ramps broke, they pieced them back together. When the park was quiet, they turned up the music. When trash piled up, they hosted a clean-up. It was a far cry from the buttoned-up, glossy, picturesque city rising just a mile away downtown.

“That’s part of the appeal is building it and skating and it being rough around the edges and not perfect,” Suggs said. “You learn to skate there, you can learn anywhere.”

Poe Mill is where Ben Swehla learned at 13 years old. He didn’t have much money, so he went to Poe Mill. He and his friends would squeeze into cars, drive to the park and spend hours there until the sun went down. It was where they hung out, even on their birthday.

“We had to find a way to make a spot for us for feeling included, for feeling welcome, for that sense of community that skaters always strive for,” Swehla said. “(Skating) is not something you feel welcome doing if you don’t have a community with you. It’s frowned upon by society.”

Craven, the Companion skate gym owner, called DIY parks “100 percent necessary” to the “art and culture” of the skateboarding community.

At other skateparks, he said, “you’re not going to be able to spray paint. You’re not going to be able to have a DJ out in the parking lot practicing spinning. You’re not going have somebody selling t-shirts that they just pressed and they’re trying to get their brand coming off. That’s the kind of stuff you see at a DIY spot. It’s a community center more than a skatepark.”

The Greenville County Redevelopment Authority bought the land and spent $800,000 in federal funds to clean up the hazardous waste left behind.

In 2010, the redevelopment authority started working with Clemson University architecture students on design plans. A 40,000-square-foot sanctioned wheel park was floated, but it never materialized.

In 2021, GCRA sold the 11-acre site to Contour Companies for $1 million. The Michigan-based developer planned to create “The Village At Poe Mill,” a 482-unit apartment complex with shopping, restaurants and a connection to the Swamp Rabbit trail, spurring gentrification concerns.

It also signaled the end of the skatepark.

Finding Poe Mill

Over the course of two years, Suggs drove out West multiple times, helping friends move to new places.

He also hoped to find a new home for himself, far from Greenville.

The Gastonia native and Clemson graduate had lived in Greenville for a decade. Entering his 30s, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he should move somewhere else, somewhere outside of the Southeast. In Greenville, he felt directionless. Surviving, not thriving. Depressed.

“It really felt like I was not in control of everything, but I was just getting dragged along this path,” he said.

When Suggs returned home in 2018 after moving his last friend, something changed. He realized that he couldn’t keep dreaming of new places. He needed to settle down.

So he started a photography project.

He had become a photographer after tearing his ACL mountain bike-riding as an undergraduate at Clemson. While injured, he picked up a camera, started shooting and never stopped. He taught himself the craft, secured photography jobs and produced a self-reflective exhibit called “A Well-Worn Path” in January 2020 about his cross-country road trips.

When he decided to stay in Greenville, he chose a project about the Swamp Rabbit Trail.

Then it was announced Poe Mill would close, where he had visited with friends occasionally over the years.

He abandoned the Swamp Rabbit Trail subject matter and turned to Poe Mill. He spent over three years learning how to skate, scouring old Greenville News articles and photographing skaters.

It evolved into the current exhibit at Woodbine Studio & Gallery — a fully immersive time-capsule of Poe Mill.

Life-sized portraits of skateboarders like Tre, Elizabeth and Charity hang on the wall, portrayed as saints, Suggs said, in the style of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra.

A chronological account of Poe Mill in newspaper articles and pictures leads visitors through its history. Old TVs show grainy images of skaters flying up and down Poe Mill. Sounds of rolling skateboards and kids talking play on speakers in the background. There’s also art from other artists, tributes to skaters who passed away and a poem by an 11 year old.

“I see it as my duty to present these folks not as outsiders or misfits,” Suggs wrote in an artist statement, “but as a tight-knit community of friends, and skateboarding not as a fringe sport but an incredible venue for artistic expression and self-reflection.”

But Suggs doesn’t only want to honor the past. He hopes to advocate for a future public skatepark.

In 2023, Greenville revealed plans for a new public skatepark near the downtown airport, though it’s still in the early stages.

Suggs has started a nonprofit, Greenville Skatepark Foundation, to serve as a bridge between government agencies and the skating community.

Suggs doesn’t know what’s next for his photography. He hasn’t had time to think. He’s spent three years dedicating his life to Poe Mill. When asked if the effort has tired him of the skatepark, he shakes his head instantly.

“No,” he said. “Not at all.”