Gray Court, developers celebrate Foxbank subdivision with ribbon cutting

Foxbank residential developers, the Laurens County Chamber of Commerce and the Town of Gray Court hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday to officially welcome Foxbank subdivision to the town.

When completed, Foxbank is expected to include around 250 single-family homes priced from “the upper $200s to $370,000s” by developers DRB Homes and Veranda Homes near Gray Court-Owings School on Highway 14.

For Gray Court, that could be a population game changer. The new subdivision, which has been annexed completely into the town limits, should boost the town’s population by around 500 voting-age adults and possibly as many children.

That amount of growth is substantial for a town with around 800 residents, according to an online estimate and around 770 residents reported in the 2020 census.

Chelsea Cathcart, a Laurens County native and vice-president of sales and marketing for DRB Homes, said the she wanted “to be able to tell my grandchildren that we had an impact here.”

Foxbank is one of several developments in the Gray Court area that have been completed or are planned, but those are outside the town limits. The subdivision could change everything from voting patterns to the business landscape as Gray Court attempts to revitalize its downtown and grow as the corridor into Laurens County from the north directly off of I-385.

“Laurens County wants smart growth. You don’t want cancerous growth,” Cathcart said. “But growth is important because if you’re not growing, you’re dying, so it’s important to do it well, and we think we are here. We want to do it right and leave an impact that we’re proud of for years to come.”

One key component for the Gray Court to attract development the size of Foxbank is the availability of infrastructure.

In the case of sewer, Laurens County Water and Sewer Commission Executive Director Jeff Field said the arrival of key industry in the town along the Highway 14 corridor paved the way for residential development.

“These projects take a long time,” Field said, recalling Foxbank’s inception around 10 years ago. “But infrastructure takes a long time to plan when there’s nothing there. In this case, there was infrastructure in the general vicinity associated with the industrial development, and they had the ability to expand and grow off of those sewer lines. . . . For industry sometimes you have to oversize everything, and in this particular case, doing that allowed all of these other developments. I think sometimes it looks like it happened over night, but it doesn’t quite work that way.”

The LCWSC and town leaders are looking at potential ways to bring sewer or at least a community septic system to the downtown business district as residential growth influences business growth.

Town Administrator Columbus Stephens said Foxbank presents both opportunities and challenges for the town, but town leaders are ready to accept both. He also said he hopes the increased population business investment to the town, which currently has no grocery store and no bank.

“It will be a good economic initiative for the Town of Gray Court as well as Laurens County,” Stephens said. “Gray Court is geographically situated south of Greenville and north of Laurens, thereby serving a ‘pathway to the gateway’ to opportunities for Laurens County’s growth.

He continued:

“The potentially large population increase will impose challenges that will require additional services such as police protection, EMS and fire services. . . . It has been proven time after time that working together works. . . . Gray Court will be able to convert the challenges into opportunities by tapping into and taking advantage of all available resources. We are striving to improve while being on the move.”