A` LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU
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| The former Cates Store in Glenn Springs is becoming one with the forest |
A common refrain heard from those who find progress a mixed
blessing is the rate at which quiet old communities are subsumed by the ugly
trappings of modern enterprise, disappearing under strip malls and cheaply
built subdivisions. In the American
south, however, I marvel at how often the reverse is true. South Carolina in particular abounds in towns
that were once crowded and bustling with commerce, but today are largely
deserted, their once-proud buildings crumbling into the kudzu.
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| Closed mill |
I set out to
explore some of these towns with my husband as co-pilot when a writing project
spurred me to research South Carolina history in the mid-nineteenth century
more systematically than I have done so far.
I’ve been returning to some well-thumbed plantation diaries, slave
narratives and collections of Civil War soldiers’ letters that already had a
place in my library, as well as new volumes that have come my way like The
Hammonds of Redcliffe and Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War. I found the latter volume at the tiny library
in Traveler’s Joy* and soon became immersed in this collection of letters
written by members of the Anderson, Brockman and Moore families in 1853-1865,
when numerous sons and fathers from the Spartanburg-Reidville area left home to
join the Third, Fifth, Thirteenth (the Brockman Guards) and the Eighteenth
SC Infantry Regiments.
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| Reidville Academy Faculty House, SC, built in 1858 |
Wanting to
see the area so vividly depicted in their letters, I headed for Spartanburg and
that portion of the county south and west that is fed by the Tyger and Enoree
Rivers, a region whose place names echo the prominent family names of these
correspondents and their neighbors: Moore, Duncan, Woodruff, Fincher, Switzer
and more. It amazed me to realize how
quickly one can be driving through farmland and dense woods after leaving the
noisy thoroughfares of exurbia; less than fifteen minutes after pulling off
Interstate 85 my husband and I were parking under the willow oaks at the
Reidville Academy Faculty house.
Coincidentally, the night before I read the letter written in May 1858
by the prosperous planter David Anderson to his son John Crawford Anderson,
away at a boarding school in Columbia (The Arsenal), telling him how “…we have
finished the brickwork of the professors house.
The workmen have covered it and will have it ready for plastering in a
few weeks” (Craig 3). This building is
one of two structures remaining from the original school established by
Reverend Reid for the purpose of providing a good Presbyterian education for
the children of local gentry, the other one being the Female Academy’s
dormitory, which, on the day we visited it, housed an antiques business in the
process of closing down.
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| Farmland |
The Reidville
Academy Faculty House is described on the town’s website as being home to the
Reidville Historical Society, but no organization seemed to be operating out of
the striking old building when we stopped there. The windows were shuttered and wasps were
building nests below the eaves. In fact,
the town is so sleepy and undeveloped that it takes no great stretch of
imagination to see it as it must have looked over 150 years ago, before many of
the town’s young men and several of the school’s instructors joined local
brigades and marched off to war.
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| Dr. Leonard's Store in Reidville, built in 1905 |
A
significant number failed to return from northern battlefields, including the
most loquacious correspondent in Tom Moore Craig’s book, Andrew Charles
Moore. Andrew and his younger brother
Thomas were the sons of Andrew Barry Moore, the doctor whose family established
Walnut Grove Plantation in Roebuck (Becca) early in the nineteenth century, an historic farm which I have visited several times. After the doctor’s first wife died childless,
he married a local woman 34 years his junior and she bore four children,
including the boys. Many of the letters
in the collection are between these young men and their mother, Nancy Moore
Evins (Dr. Moore died when Andrew and Thomas were still young), bearing
evidence of the close relationship they enjoyed with her and of the universal
nature of a young man’s experience being away at college. The requests for money are ceaseless, with Thomas,
studying at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina,
Columbia) complaining about his roommates: “I have been bored nearly to death
by some Charleston fellers above me. I
am going to take another room…” and pleading with her to send him shirts and
two feather pillows to replace the cotton ones he’s been issued because “I had
as leave lay my head on a log.” Thomas John’s revelation about higher education
will sound familiar to anyone who teaches college freshmen, when he writes to
his mother in January 1859: “I was under the impression before I left home that
anyone could get through College without much study, but since then I have
found out better.”
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| Black-eyed Susans |
Meanwhile Andrew, studying law at the
University of Virginia, scolds his mother for indulging his younger brother
Thomas’ “extravagance,” and struggles to break the sensitive news to his mother
that he has got engaged to his second cousin, Mary Foster -- “I ought to have
told you long ago” (Craig 19).
Thomas
survived the Civil War, spending the last two months of it in the federal officer’s
prison on Johnson’s Island, Ohio. He
returned to his family’s estate of Fredonia but it was empty save for the
cotton bales filling the rooms on the ground floor, stored there by Moore’s prudent
overseer, Mr. Hill, against the day when the blockade would be lifted and Moore
could make a new start with the proceeds.
His mother and stepfather had died by then, as had his older brother Andrew,
who was struck in the right temple by a minie-ball at the Second Battle of
Manassas on August 29, 1862. Thomas
reported this in a letter to their sister, Margaret, who had traveled north to
Virginia on the train accompanied by her slave cook, Louisa, intending to find
her brothers and her husband, Sam Means.
She missed them all through an infuriating scenario of bad timing and
misinformation, including, at one point, being told by a soldier that her husband
had been wounded when he was actually unharmed.
Thomas wrote to Margaret that he went looking for Andrew (‘Bud’) on the
battlefield after someone else in the Eighteenth Regiment reported seeing
him fall; when Thomas found his brother’s body he wrapped him in two blankets
and buried him in the grave he dug with his own hands. Before doing so he cut a lock of his
brother’s hair to give to Andrew’s young wife, who had written to her husband only
three days before he was cut down charging a Union battery (Craig 107).
On this
beautiful early summer day in Reidville the wheat was standing high in the
fields surrounding town, and on the hillsides a teenage boy on a tractor was
cutting hay. On Main Street it was as
quiet as 1860. My husband and I walked
from the Professors’ House to Dr. Frank Leonard’s store on College Street to
have coffee and share a piece of homemade cake.
The store sits directly across from the elementary school, which
occupies the site where the original Female Academy stood. The academy survived a brush with Union
troops camping nearby at the end of the war who were bent on burning it, as the
story goes, but could not withstand the wrecker’s ball when it was finally torn
down in 1948.
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| Souvenir of Reidville: set of antique compote dishes bought for a few dollars at the former Reidville Female Academy dormitory |
It is much
the same story in Glenn Springs, which we viewed on another day, taking Highway
150 south from Tomahawk County* across the Pacolet River. This road is virtually a
see-what-happened-when-the-textile-mills-closed-down tour, taking motorists on
a winding trail through the three depressed towns of Pacolet Mills, Central
Pacolet and Pacolet, where a sturdy but rundown early 20th century
mill house can be purchased for very little money but where jobs are a lot
harder to come by than houses.
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| Bridge over the Pacolet River, approaching Pacolet Mills |
Glenn Springs, which is not far from
Reidville and is mentioned once or twice in the letters in Craig’s book, has a
different story to tell. The mineral
springs in this area attracted entrepreneurs as early as 1825, when developer
John B. Glenn opened an inn beside the springs and advertised it as a healthful
summer retreat. By 1838 a much larger
hotel and spa were attracting summer visitors by stagecoach from throughout
South Carolina, and the town expanded to accommodate permanent residents who
seemed to have led highly social lives.
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| House in Glenn Springs |
This resort peaked around the 1890s, by which time Glenn Springs mineral
water was being shipped as far away as the U.S. Capitol, where it was served in
the Senate cloakroom.
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| Glenn Springs Post Office |
By World War I,
however, the town was losing its popularity, and by the time the hotel burned
down in 1941, the development of roads and highways that bypassed what remained
of the village had already sounded its death knell. What structures remain habitable in Glenn
Springs are impressive by way of the faded grandeur they exhibit, but more
striking are the ruins being swallowed up by vines and groves, like dinosaur
bones sinking into the tar pits.
We passed through Cross Anchor, another town whose heyday dates from a previous
century (in this case, the late eighteenth, when Methodists settled here)
but which is now merely a crossroads, where we viewed a man at one corner
selling watermelons from his truck and on the opposite corner an old brick
store and a Masons’ Lodge collapsing into the brush. At last we crossed the Enoree
River into Laurens County and finally arrived at our furthest western destination
that day, the county seat of Laurens.
Laurens has certainly seen better days but it is still hanging on, with
many of its stately homes looking as stately as ever and the courthouse square
showing more encouraging signs of life than I remember when I last visited the
town fourteen years ago. At that time
the Klan Museum and Redneck Shop was still housed in the old Echo movie theater
on the square, the sight of which gave displaced Yankees the heebie-jeebies so
bad they hightailed it out of town as fast as their rented cars could take
them. Since then the shop, its owners,
and the stranger-than-fiction story that embroiled them and the town made it
into the New York Times. (“Uneasy
Neighbors in a Southern Gothic Tale,” January 12, 2012 -- see the link below).
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| Cross Anchor, SC -- what's left of it |
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| Laurens Courthouse and monument to Confederate dead |
My husband and I poked our heads into a
little artist’s co-op on the square, a good sign for Laurens’ potential as a
tourist destination, and I asked one of the friendly women minding the store
what was up with the Klan Museum. She
explained that everyone in town was hugely relieved when the shop’s proprietor
finally announced that after years of wrangling over the establishment’s
ownership in court and running it at a deficit he was closing the place. The editor of Laurens’ newspaper was so
pleased by this turn of events that he ran a celebratory front page story
announcing that fact.
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| Laurens front porch |
This so enraged
the Klan-loving business owner that he announced he had changed his mind and
was keeping the shop open. He only managed
to prolong the closing, however, not maintain the business, but that contrariness
speaks volumes about the character of a certain kind of native-born South
Carolinian who starts a civil war out of spite, or tries his best to blacken
the reputation of a town trying to haul itself into the twenty-first century. Fire-eaters, indeed.
Any day-trip
through the eastern portions of South Carolina’s upstate country is ended
fittingly with a visit to historic Morgan Square in Spartanburg, called “the
village” in antebellum times. The
streets radiating out from the statue of General Daniel Morgan, a Revolutionary
War hero, have become livelier in recent years (a reassuring bucking of the
trend) with the addition of the Chapman Cultural Center, numerous restaurants,
and Hub City Bookshop, an excellent independent bookstore and small press that
has acquired a kind of literary landmark status since it opened in 1995.
We
discovered Hub City to be a good way to decompress gradually, after spending long
hours submerged in the land that time forgot.
With apologies to Proust, the past is a highly absorbing place to visit
(and remember), but I’m glad I don’t have to live there.
###
WORK CITED
Craig, Tom Moore, ed. Upcountry
South Carolina Goes to War; Letters of the Anderson, Brockman, and Moore
Families, 1853-1865. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press,
2009. Print.
LINKS & INFORMATION:
The New York Times, “Uneasy
Neighbors in a Southern Gothic Tale,” January 12, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/us/in-laurens-sc-the-redneck-shop-and-its-neighbor.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&emc=eta1
The Hub City Bookshop, 186 W. Main Street, Spartanburg, SC
29306
864-577-9349, www.hubcity.org/bookshop
History of Reidville, South Carolina: http://www.townofreidvillesc.org/2.html
.JPG) |
| Laurens house |
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