GREENVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Darke county, Ohio, U.S.A., on Greenville Creek, 36 m. N.W. of Dayton. Pop. (1900) 5501; (1910) 6237. It is served by the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis and the Cincinnati Northern railways, and by interurban electric railways. It is situated about 1050 ft. above sea-level and is the trade centre of a large and fertile agricultural district, producing cereals and tobacco. It manufactures lumber, foundry products, canned goods and creamery products and has grain elevators and tobacco warehouses. In the city is a Carnegie library, and 3 m. distant there is a county Children’s Home and Infirmary. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Greenville occupies the site of an Indian village and of Fort Greenville (built by General Anthony Wayne in 1793 and burned in 1796). Here, on the 3rd of August 1795, General Wayne, the year after his victory over the Indians at Fallen Timbers, concluded with them the treaty of Greenville, the Indians agreeing to a cessation of hostilities and ceding to the United States a considerable portion of Ohio and a number of small tracts in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan (including the sites of Sandusky, Toledo, Defiance, Fort Wayne, Detroit, Mackinac, Peoria and Chicago), and the United States agreeing to pay to the Indians $20,000 worth of goods immediately and an annuity of goods, valued at $9500, for ever. The tribes concerned were the Wyandots, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the Ottawas, the Chippewas, the Pottawatomies, the Miamis, the Weeas, the Kickapoos, the Piankashas, the Kaskaskias and the Eel-river tribe. Tecumseh lived at Greenville from 1805 to 1809, and a second Indian treaty was negotiated there in July 1814 by General W. H. Harrison and Lewis Cass, by which the Wyandots, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the (Ohio) Senecas and the Miamis agreed to aid the United States in the war with Great Britain. The first permanent white settlement of Greenville was established in 1808 and the town was laid out in the same year. It was made the county-seat of the newly erected county in 1809, was incorporated as a town in 1838 and chartered as a city in 1887.
GREENVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Greenville county, South Carolina, U.S.A., on the Reedy river, about 140 m. N.W. of Columbia, in the N.W. part of the state. Pop. (1890) 8607; (1900) 11,860, of whom 5414 were negroes; (1910, census) 15,741. It is served by the Southern, the Greenville & Knoxville and the Charleston & Western Carolina railways. It lies 976 ft. above sea-level, near the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, its climate and scenery attracting summer visitors. It is in an extensive cotton-growing and cotton-manufacturing district. Greenville’s chief interest is in cotton, but it has various other manufactures, including carriages, wagons, iron and fertilizers. The total value of the factory products of the city in 1905 was $1,676,774, an increase of 73.5% since 1900. The city is the seat of Furman University, Chicora College for girls (1893; Presbyterian), and Greenville Female College (1854; Baptist), which in 1907–1908 had 379 students, and which, besides the usual departments, has a conservatory of music, a school of art, a school of expression and physical culture and a kindergarten normal training school. Furman University (Baptist; opened in 1852) grew out of the “Furman Academy and Theological Institution,” opened at Edgefield, S.C., in 1827, and named in honour of Richard Furman (1755–1825), a well-known Baptist clergyman of South Carolina, whose son, James C. Furman (1809–1891), was long president of the University. In 1907–1908 the university had a faculty of 15 and 250 students, of whom 101 were in the Furman Fitting School. Greenville was laid out in 1797, was originally known as Pleasantburg and was first chartered as a city in 1868.
GREENVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Hunt county, Texas, U.S.A., near the headwaters of the Sabine river, 48 m. N.E. of Dallas. Pop. (1900) 6860, of whom 114 were foreign-born and 1751 were negroes; (1910) 8850. It is served by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, the St Louis South-Western and the Texas Midland railways. It is an important cotton market, has gins and compresses, a large cotton seed oil refinery, and other manufactories, and is a trade centre for a rich agricultural district. The city owns and operates its electric-lighting plant. It is the seat of Burleson College (Baptist), founded in 1893, and 1 m. from the city limits, in the village of Peniel (pop. 1908, about 500), a community of “Holiness” people, are the Texas Holiness University (1898), a Holiness orphan asylum and a Holiness press. Greenville was settled in 1844, and was chartered as a city in 1875. In 1907 the Texas legislature granted to the city a new charter establishing a commission government similar to that of Galveston.
GREENWICH, a township of Fairfield county, Connecticut, U.S.A., on Long Island Sound, in the extreme S.W. part of the state, about 28 m. N.E. of New York City. It contains a borough of the same name and the villages of Cos Cob, Riverside and Sound Beach, all served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railway; the township has steamboat and electric railway connexions with New York City. Pop. of the township (1900) 12,172, of whom 3271 were foreign-born; (1910) 16,463; of the borough (1910) 3886. Greenwich is a summer resort, principally for New Yorkers. Among the residents have been Edwin Thomas Booth, John Henry Twachtman, the landscape painter, and Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847–1907), founder of the American Sugar Company. There are several fine churches in the township; of one in Sound Beach the Rev. William H. H. Murray (1840–1904), called “Adirondack Murray,” from his Camp Life in the Adirondack Mountains (1868), was once pastor. In the borough are a public library, Greenwich Academy (1827; co-educational), the Brunswick School for boys (1901), with which Betts Academy of Stamford was united in 1908, and a hospital. The principal manufactures are belting, woollens, tinners’ hardware, iron and gasolene motors. Oysters are shipped from Greenwich. The first settlers came from the New Haven Colony in 1640; but the Dutch, on account of the exploration of Long Island Sound by Adrian Blok in 1614, laid claim to Greenwich, and as New Haven did nothing to assist the settlers, they consented to union with New Netherland in 1642. Greenwich then became a Dutch manor. By a treaty of 1650, which fixed the boundary between New Netherland and the New Haven Colony, the Dutch relinquished their claim to Greenwich, but the inhabitants of the town refused to submit to the New Haven Colony until October 1656. Six years later Greenwich was one of the first towns of the New Haven Colony to submit to Connecticut. The township suffered severely during the War of Independence on account of the frequent quartering of American troops within its borders, the depredations of bands of lawless men after the occupation of New York by the British in 1778 and its invasion by the British in 1779 (February 25) and 1781 (December 5). There was also a strong loyalist sentiment. On the old post-road in Greenwich is the inn, built about 1729, at which Israel Putnam was surprised in February 1779 by a force under General Tryon; according to tradition he escaped by riding down a flight of steep stone steps. The inn was purchased in 1901 by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who restored it and made it a Putnam Memorial. The township government of Greenwich was instituted in the colonial period. The borough of Greenwich was incorporated in 1858.
See D. M. Mead, History of the Town of Greenwich (New York, 1857).
GREENWICH, a south-eastern metropolitan borough of London, England, bounded N. by the river Thames, E. by Woolwich, S. by Lewisham and W. by Deptford. Pop. (1901) 95,770. Area, 3851.7 acres. It has a river-frontage of 412 m., the Thames making two deep bends, enclosing the Isle of Dogs on the north and a similar peninsula on the Greenwich side. Greenwich is connected with Poplar on the north shore by the Greenwich tunnel (1902), for foot-passengers, to the Isle of Dogs (Cubitt Town), and by the Blackwall Tunnel (1897) for street traffic, crossing to a point between the East and West India Docks (see Poplar). The main thoroughfares from W. to E. are Woolwich and Shooter’s Hill Roads, the second representing the old high road through Kent, the Roman Watling Street. Greenwich is first noticed in the reign of Ethelred, when it was a station of the Danish fleet (1011–1014).
