Down A Graveled Road, Part I
June 28, 2013
By Tom Poland
June 28, 2013
Hotels, History, & Huguenots
Late May, a beautiful day. A blue-sky, cotton-ball cloud kind of day. Photographer Robert Clark and I are deep in the woods of western South Carolina photographing historic sites for a book. Beyond McCormick we round a curve and the sky turns a menacing yellow. The smell of burning woods fills the car and Robert spots a cloud much different from the rest.
There’s the fire, he said, pointing slightly northeast.
A yellow plume of concentrated wood smoke ascended. It occurred to me that photography under these conditions wouldn’t be possible. Just the opposite. Robert said the smoke would render the sunset spectacular, rife with color. Fire … we’d encounter it again before the day was done.
Highway 378 is a highway of change. Used to be pastoral. Not so much anymore. Clear cuts and old stores torched by arsonists are just a few of the eyesores. Metal buildings and mobile homes conspire with piles of junk to ruin things.
In McCormick we checked in with the Chamber of Commerce. We needed a way to get into the old Dorn Grist Mill. Anne Barron, director, and Dot Bandy greeted us and soon Dot led Robert and me through the mill. Right off we walked past a 1914 boiler built by the Lombard Iron Works of Augusta. That modern boiler powered this 1898 attrition mill where grinding plates revolved in opposite directions at 2,200 rpm. When this mill was up and running the din must have been unbelievable. All is quiet. The hand of time stills the great gears, wheels, and cogs. Ann Barron said the mill still works. Just needs someone to run it.
Multi-hued beams, chutes, and railings gleamed blond, red, and tan, and the thick brick walls supporting all things wooden kept the heat out. Much cooler than I expected. Beautiful too is the Silver Creek Flour Packer that funneled flour into bags thereby earning its name. Manufactured by the S. Howes Company Eureka Works it came from Silver Creek, New York. Silver Creek Flour Packer indeed.
What impressed me most was the building itself. It has a medieval look. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places it’s praised as an outstanding example of rural industrial architecture. Out front stands a low squatty brick monument with a plaque.
THIS TABLET IS ERECTED IN GRATEFUL
APPRECIATION OF THE MUNIFICENCE OF
MRS. NETTIE F. MCCORMICK,
WHO DONATED THE SITE OF THIS BUILDING.
Munificence. A word you don’t come across often. Patrician.
That afternoon we drove up Highway 28 to Abbeville. We had a 2 o’clock appointment to tour the Burt-Stark home. Ruth Bacon met us at the front steps and we walked into history. You don’t have to go to Gettysburg to see serious Civil War history. It’s close by. Abbeville is often referred to as the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy with good reason. Abbeville’s Burt-Stark Mansion, known also as the Armistead Burt House, is where the Confederate Council of War cabinet members last met.
The birth took place at Secession Hill when local citizens gathered November 22, 1860, to adopt the Ordinance of Secession. A few hundred yards and four and a half years later the Burt-Stark Mansion is where the will to fight left the Confederacy’s leaders.
Historian Fred Lewis gives an account of this key moment at the Burt-Stark Mansion. As the Civil War approached its end, President Davis left Richmond, Virginia on April 2, 1865 heading southwest. He reached Chester where he was invited to Burt’s home for a time of rest. He arrived in Abbeville May 2 accompanied by 900 to 2000 Confederates. He arrived at the old home around 10:00 in the morning. After ‘supper’ that evening he met with Secretary of War John C. Breckenridge, military advisor Braxton Bragg, and five field commanders in the men’s parlor. His attempt to obtain support for another effort against the Union failed. Convinced not to pursue a guerilla war against the Union, Davis says, ‘Then all is lost.’
A shaken Davis had to be helped upstairs where he rested in a four-poster bed.
Making our way toward Mount Carmel we found Highway 823 a backroad if ever there’s one. On this lonesome road we were looking for the Calhoun Mill and we found it not far from a rusting steel bridge over Little River. Think of a scene from Fried Green Tomatoes. Just off a side road at the end of the bridge we parked and trudged through a thick field of vetch saturated in lavender blooms. At the far edge of the vetch stood the mill, luminous with low-angled sunlight. Backtracking we drove across the bridge and found the dam where the mill got its power. Some locals were having a good time. They eyed us with suspicion but a friendly young woman—I write poems—led us to the riverside. A Chattooga-like setting met us. As we photographed Little River and the old mill dam a man trudged by with two good-sized channel cats. Fried fish tonight!
Back in Mount Carmel, a ghost town, we spotted a picturesque church, picturesque but abandoned. With a simple architecture and elegant lines crisscrossed by vines the Old Mount Carmel Presbyterian Church sits there, its paint peeling away. Across the street sits an old home ceded to tangled greenery, old landscaping turned feral. Easy to conjure up the ghosts of that home drifting through broken windows at dusk, settling light as feathers on the old worn, forlorn steps.
Too many nice homes have surrendered to shrubs and vines. Oh and like bookends another abandoned church stands at the opposite end of Mount Carmel, the Mount Carmel Associate Reform Presbyterian Church. The Savannah River Railroad helped Mount Carmel to prosper in the 1880s but something went wrong. What happened? Well a series of events.
In the summer of 1896 fire destroyed part of the town. During a burglary a kerosene lamp fell over and four homes and twelve businesses turned to ash. Several businesses were rebuilt, brick this time, and the brick came from D.B. Cade’s brickyard. So the town carried on … for a while.
How does change choke the life out of a town? Like this. The arrival of the automobile lessened the railroad’s value and folks began to move in quest of jobs. In 1921 the boll weevil infestation devastated Mount Carmel’s cotton-producing areas. The Great Depression delivered the knockout punch.
With the sun dropping fast and my gas gauge hovering right at E, I drove us out of there. Outside Calhoun Falls we gassed up and made our way home across Lake Russell into Elbert County and down Highway 79 past my mother’s childhood home into Lincolnton, Georgia.
§
THURSDAY, EARLY MORNING. FOG DRIFTS THROUGH THE PECAN ORCHARD across Georgia Highway 47. Dew-bejeweled spider webs throw up silver tents in green pastures.
We drove back into McCormick where Janice Grizzard, director of the McCormick Arts Council at the Keturah, gave us a tour of Hotel Keturah. This circa 1910 building is also on the National Register of Historic Places. In front of the hotel, Janice pointed out six stones sunk into a sloping shoulder of grass just off the rail tracks. Black gentlemen in tuxedoes escorted train passengers to Hotel Keturah down those rocks. What a polished time. Keturah by the way is the name of the wife of W.J. Conner. And who might he be? Well he’s the man who built not one but two hotels on this site and named both in his wife’s honor. (The first Hotel Keturah, 1900, burned in 1909.) Janice told us how to find Badwell Cemetery and we struck out again on this whirlwind exploration of a historic land.
Hitting 378 again we turned off onto Huguenot Parkway. We stayed on it all the way through Savannah Lakes. A lake community favored by northern transplants, and soon we spotted a road to the right, Badwell Cemetery. We drove this sandy lane and turning left and driving some more we hit a turnaround where the gleaming white spire of a monument broke through the greenery. We parked near a beech tree where souls have carved sentiment and messages into its aged bark. Looked a bit like hieroglyphics.
We found the cemetery down slope near water. Legend says a troll guards Badwell Cemetery. We saw no evidence of a troll—an odd haint—but a courageous terrapin met us near the entrance. I nudged the fellow with my foot but he remained unperturbed. The entire time we were there he never left. Surely he wasn’t a shape-shifting troll?
A rock wall, partially caved in, protects the cemetery. Well it tried to. Thieves made off with the Grim Reaper sculpture that adorned the wall’s iron door. Thank goodness it was recovered and now sits in the South Carolina State Museum. Damn a thief! What a photograph that would have made!
I’ll never forget this graveyard but not because notable French Huguenots such as the Reverend Gene Louis Gibert and members of the Petigru and Alston families lie here. No, credit for this bittersweet memory goes to the inscriptions on a four-sided white marble marker.
Sacred to the memory of Martha Petigru, Only daughter and last
remaining child of Thomas and Mary Lynn Petigru, Aged 2
years, 1 month, and 16 Days.
Her sun went down
While it was yet day.
Born Septr. 16th 1830
Died Novr. 2nd 1855
Her sun went down while it was yet day, Jeremiah 15:9.
With a ringing mandolin and Copperhead Road playing in my head, we set out looking for a memorial to the site of a Huguenot place of worship. On we drove down graveled roads far from the city. And then we turned onto a dirt road with a strip of grass in the center. Deeper into pines and then we saw it, a Maltese cross that marks the New Bordeaux Huguenot place of worship.
New Bordeaux, 1764, was the last of seven French Huguenot colonies founded in South Carolina. The French settlers brought the European model of agriculture here. Fruit trees, olive gardens, and vineyards sprang up. The village prospered in the 1760s and early 1770s, but the Revolutionary War ruined things and New Bordeaux faded into oblivion.
Looking around I saw nothing but pine trees, no river, just the lake. Clark Hill Lake, mind you. Not Thurmond. Growing up I slipped over to Bordeaux. It had a country store that would sell beer to underage Georgia boys and the owner’s daughter was a looker. Not a trace of the store remains either. I heard it burned long ago. And she? Who knows. Marble monuments and rock walls though … they endure.
Next Week: Part II, Shoals, Smoke, & Spirits
Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]
Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.
Sign up here to receive MidlandsLife weekly email magazine.
