Letters: Simpsonville is no small town

Thanks for printing the article about the Simpsonville ice cream shop ( “Ice cream shop brings new life to small SC town,” Thursday). It makes me want to go there and have some ice cream.

I was surprised to see your headline writer characterize the city as a small town. The population is 21,000, and that doesn’t include people who live in unincorporated areas near the city. (South Carolina has a lot of urbanized unincorporated areas.)

Simpsonville has a 5A high school that is growing so much that a new high school is being built in Fountain Inn to relieve the overcrowding. It also has one of the four regional locations of the Greenville Health System, and one of the four regional campuses of Greenville Tech.

Many people don’t know that Greenville County’s population is 475,000, making it the largest in the state, by far. Downtown Simpsonville probably doesn’t look a whole lot different than it did when my parents taught there in the early ’50s, but I definitely think it is large enough to be called a city, not a small town.