Lonely Lone Star
August 21, 2025
By Tom Poland
I’ve long felt that two South Carolina community names ascend to prettiest—Silverstreet and Lone Star. Those names, evocative and wistful, charm the ear. One conjures up biblical streets of gold; the other brings to mind the Alamo, Davy Crockett, and that independent state, Texas.
At long last I saw Lone Star. It’s a spot in the road that awakens feelings and memories. The bottle caps pressed into earth in front of an old store’s vanished gas pump? That I had seen at my Granddad Walker’s country store in Georgia. Best I figure it was an effort to create a hard surface. Coca Cola asphalt. A faded sign spoke of a gas station. Couldn’t make out the Brothers name.
You can barely read the old sign.
Then I saw a brick building whose purpose evaded me. Too big to be a bank, it looked like a store with living quarters above. Its sturdy red bricks were weathering time’s passage quite well. (When planet Earth dies, among civilization’s wreckage will be bricks. You can break a brick but you can’t kill it.) A man walking by said it had been a courthouse. The thwack of a gavel sounded.
Then I saw the old depot and train tracks. What happened here? Well, the Atlantic Coast Line folded in as part of another line. As I looked over the forlorn buildings, it occurred to me, surely there had to be more to this place once upon a time as fables begin?
Of course, there was.
John Cely wrote about Lone Star. “The new town was at first called Auburn but later changed to Lone Star after a local store of the same name.”
That store’s name, Auburn. Well there’s Auburn, Georgia, and Auburn, Alabama. And there’s Auburn, Texas––is that the deal?
Relocated away from the tracks, the depot makes its last stand.
Lone Star. Its desolate look and vanished purple-yellow-silver locomotives and their clackety-clack wheels and lonesome whistle made me wonder some more. “This place could be the setting for a movie.”
Well, it was. In 1991 scenes were shot at Mr. O.K. Zeagler’s store and nearby places for Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, a movie about a daredevil woman who rides horses off high dives.
Cely wrote, too, “Part of Lone Star upped and moved south a few years ago when entrepreneur Pat Williams decided to renovate and move some old country stores from around the community. He used these heirloom buildings for the best possible reason—to serve BBQ.”
Those old buildings went up in 1893, the year Lone Star came to be. And then those buildings upped and burned, but they took on new life for a while and modern folk got to see Zeagler’s Store and its Coca Cola mural. It brought to mind Cold War Nikita throwing back an old “dope,” that cocaine-tainted drink of yore. My other granddad called a Coke a dope. “Boy, we ort to go down to de sto and git us a dope and goobers.”
Across the tracks, that genteelism for folks down on their luck, sat a less ancient store. Nonetheless time put it out of its misery. The pay phone and TV dish antenna told me so.
I conjured up better times. Joshua pumps Texaco gas into his shiny Ford pickup. He turns and shades his eyes as the whistle of an approaching locomotive sounds. “Well, looka here.”
The engine’s thrumming drifts over the Coca Cola caps and gas pump into the courthouse. The clackety-clack-clack of steel wheels over creosoted ties slows as patient bales of cotton, gleam in the sun. The train grinds to a halt. A bell clangs. Silence for a moment. From afar I hear piano notes. Life is good, but life will change.
Lone Star, stranded by progress. Yet another place that didn’t anticipate how changing farming methods and transportation would render it lonely. Lonely, yes, but forgotten? Not by me.
Photos 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]
