Highway 13, Cemetery Road

By Tom Poland

 

Pot holes pockmarked the old road. She promised a bumpy ride, but rivulets of tar stitched her together, and that was good enough for me. I could take better roads but didn’t. Better roads most often are boring roads. Highway 13 wormed her way into my heart, my true GPS, my gut feeling that says something special waits down the road. And it did.

Just like that I lost myself on South Carolina County Road S-25-13, Highway 13, my road to nowhere or so I thought. I soon learned it led to eternity. Along its route I passed at least four family cemeteries. Dempsey was one. Zahler Cemetery another. The other two escape me. I’ll go back and visit all.

Of the Dempsey Cemetery, I found this description from a beautiful soul: “There is a landing where the river runs through at the bottom of the hill. This is the coldest, dark water in all of Hampton Co. People fish, swim, and in the older days we held baptisms here. It is a peaceful and serene spot. The cemetery is a beautiful well-kept cemetery to be out in the woods, with a beautiful cedar tree inside the fence with Spanish moss. I know the tree has to be over 200 yrs. old.” —How lovely, Yvonne Carrol Deloach, thank you.

My road to eternity has a name, Salkehatchie. Now and then I saw “Old Salkehatchie Road.” Old is right. In Miley, South Carolina, a place connected me to my father and his long-ago days as a pulpwooder. Now I hear tell of aristocrats described as bluebloods. The only thing blue about me are my eyes. Resin runs in my blood. In the 1960s my father owned a saw shop. I worked in that shop as a boy and the fragrance of conifers—pines and cedars—mingled with raw gas created an aromatic blend I summon whenever I want. I didn’t have to summon it in Miley. Saw chips dapple my memories and this old lumber mill both gladdened and saddened me. Glad to see it. Sad that it sat there forlorn and abandoned. Still, at this railroad crossing, the old mill had company, a quaint Post Office that could easily be in Mayberry. She even leaned a bit like Otis.

The heart of the community, I daresay the heartpine of the hamlet, had to be Lightsey Brothers, owners of the old mill. They operated it from 1910 to 1957. They even provided money—an aluminum token worth 5 cents in merchandise from the Lightsey Brothers Lumber Company Store.

I read this from a memory of Miley. “At one time, 320 men worked at the mill, and 500 people lived in the small town with a general store. Also there was meat market in Miley.” Like I said, the heart-pine of the hamlet. She’s a ghost town now and I saw ghosts aplenty. In astonishing defiance of gravity Carrabba-like full-grown trees grew  on the roof of the warehouse where they stored lumber. Looking for traces of their ancestors I romanticize. “Cut us, if you dare,” they say.

To me, the old lumber mill is a cemetery but with something you don’t see any longer: an old steam engine. It brings to mind an abbreviated version of the Best Friend of Charleston. I found a 1956 photo of the steam engine, all oiled up and black and ready to work.

And who were the Lightsey brothers? Edward Oswald Lightsey and his brother, William Norris Lightsey. Both boarded that last train to the lumber mill in the sky. RIP.

My love for the past grew thanks to Miley and that old lumber mill. I drove on and on, not seeing even one dollar store, and then my back-road reverie ended. At Cowpen Branch Road Highway 13 vanished. Just like that.

 

Photo by Tom Poland.

Georgia native Tom Poland writes a weekly column about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture and speaks frequently to groups in the South. Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon Tom, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, stating, “His work is exceptional to the state.” Poland’s work appears in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers throughout the South.

Visit Tom’s website at www.tompoland.net

Email him at [email protected]