Notes From The Road
June 7, 2013
Getting My Kicks On Highway 76
By Tom Poland
June 7, 2013
And the taillights dissolve, in the coming of night …
Sensing too well when the journey is done. There is no turning back…
Big Log—Robert Plant
In Memoriam
To Those Souls Lost Along Highway 76
In a way, the journey was done for many fine two-lane highways June 29, 1956. The end of the glory days actually began for some fine two-lane highways in the summer of 1919. That’s when 81 vehicles set out from Washington, D.C., for San Francisco. Averaging six miles per hour, the convoy took 62 days to cover 3,251 miles.
Along partly for a lark and partly to learn was a young lieutenant colonel. Later, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower saw troops sprinting along Germany’s autobahns. In his memoir, At Ease, he wrote, Germany made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land. He saw troop-laden freeways defending the country in the event of a foreign invasion.
When President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway June 29, 1956, South Carolina’s destiny included broader ribbons. Five interstates and 757 freeway miles later, an asphalt grid zips travelers across the state in hours. They see little other than interchanges, concrete, and medians, but don’t despair. South Carolina’s true face is still out there. It hides along forgotten backroads. Among those routes rolls U.S. 76. Cosigning with 176, 378, and I-26, and other roads, 76 runs across the Palmetto State entire.
And it runs through my mind, this asphalt river lost in time. For three Sundays, I journeyed east to west past remnants of an old South Carolina, past a shiny new South Carolina, my escort none other than the goddess, Change. Its reassurance shields my faithful companion, I saw the remains of the past and the promise of tomorrow abiding side by side.
Journaling a road: it’s eclectic at best. Perceptions flicker by as fast the road’s center stripes. It begins simply. Highway 76 eases unceremoniously into South Carolina from Tar Heel land. No state sign welcomes me, just a sign heralding my arrival in Spring Branch. Crossing the Little Pee Dee, I’m in vintage country: a tire swings from a tree near the Spring Branch Country Store. And then Nichols, all 1.4 square miles arrives.
Echoes of the Old South reverberate here. The reverberations ring through the burnt-out hallways of charred homes. Crumbling mansions remind me that once upon a time glory lived here. I attribute this change to I-95 and tobacco’s demise.
Photo at right: Highway 76 eases out of Tarheel Land
From a weathered mansion’s column, a framed deer head stares at 76 passersby. Man’s oldest calling: hunting thrives here. And fighting too. Marion honors Francis Marion, Revolutionary War hero, and just beyond Marion flows the Great Pee Dee, the river that missed renown in Stephen Foster’s Old Folks at Home. Spying the Suwannee River on a map, Foster preferred Swanee’s lyrical fit.
A gunboat sleeps way down beneath the Pee Dee. The Confederate Mars Bluff Naval Shipyard built the C.S.S. Pee Dee upriver from the 76 bridge. Because Sherman was coming, Confederates scuttled the Pee Dee March 15, 1865.
Fields and forests fly by until I arrive in Florence where the Drive In Restaurant claims to have the Pee Dee’s greatest fried chicken. That would please those Chic-Fil-A bovines who take matters into their own hooves and their famous cousin who lived here. In 1925 Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover visited Fred Young’s dairy farm whose Jersey, Sensation’s Mikado’s Millie, set a world-champion butter-fat record.
In Timmonsville, Cale Yarborough says it all. Outside Mayesville, veins of tar run like rivers through 76, now a gravel road of the old days. From here came Mary McLeod-Bethune, civil rights leader and founder of Bethune-Cookman College.
Sumter’s regal O’Donnell House commands the eye. Built circa 1840 in the Italianate style, Frank Pierce Milburn remodeled it in 1905 in the Neo-Classical style. Once a funeral home, now a social venue, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.
Water features embellish Sumter where its Opera House, built mid-1890s, houses City Hall offices. Stately and evocative of Europe, I wouldn’t trade this classic opera house for 100 multiplex cinemas.
Photo at right: Sumter Opera House
Highway 76’s military character strengthens west of Sumter. Jets from Shaw Air Force Base’s 20th Fighter Wing scream over Manchester Forest. Across the Wateree River, jets streak over Highway 76 from McEntire Air Base, once known as Congaree Army Airfield.
Close by stands the last old-growth bottomland forest, Congaree Swamp National Park. World-record trees take their place here among redwoods and sequoias as arboreal legends. Alas, past car dealerships and fast food restaurants and into Columbia where 76 joins I-126 near Elmwood Cemetery. Here on a bluff, the Broad River purling below, sleep Confederate soldiers.
Approaching Riverbanks Zoo, fall line rapids churn, plummet, stair step, froth, and run white. On zoo grounds lie ruins: a covered bridge and one of the South’s oldest cotton mills, which Sherman burned. Confederates torched the bridge, a futile attempt to keep Sherman out of Columbia.
I-26 soon steals Highway 76’s identity, but thankfully, 76 divorces it near a gleaming Toyota dealership. Now 76 strings beautiful beads together—small towns. It curves into Ballentine, named for E. A. Ballentine who ran a general store here. Built in 1929, it’s Ballentine’s last original building. Political candidates once waxed eloquent here as wise, old men played checkers by the wood stove.
Angie Rhame opened High Noon here Valentine’s Day 2007. In walked an elderly woman. This does my heart good. I was so afraid they’d tear this place down. I have so many memories here.
A train rumbles by each day at high noon, (thus the name). In the old days as the train rolled through an attendant snagged a mail bag from a hook and hurled a sack of incoming mail to the ground.
Carlos Gibbons operated Farm House Antiques here from 1995 until 2006. You may have heard of his daughter, Leeza.
Photo at right: Abandoned Farmhouse in Newberry County
Through White Rock where two horses stand nose to nose, still as stones, and always have. Then through Chapin, a stone’s throw from Beaufort Street and its eclectic shops, among them a gallery and NASCAR collectibles shop.
Just inside Newberry County, a thicket veils a vanquished farm. This abandoned farm—a poignant reminder of lives moved on—recalls a time when small farms sustained this country. Sadly, we continue to lose our connection with the land.
Just beyond Prosperity’s old train depot sits the town square. There, Diane Folden runs Diane’s Steak House in a 1935 granite block building. A Swede laid the granite blocks quarried in Winnsboro for $3.25. C. Boyd Bedenbaugh operated Bedenbaugh Mules and Horses here. Saturdays, farmers came to buy horses and mules. To gauge animal’s temperament, farmers walked them around the public square before buying them.
Photo at right: Old Depot in Prosperity
From the ’40s until the mid-’80s, the building housed South Carolina’s oldest, continuously run seed cleaning business. Mrs. Jenny Bedenbaugh said they separated chaff from soybeans, wheat, and oats here. Dining here takes place in a seedy place.
Imposing timbers inside the restaurant once separated stables. Many customers compliment me on the restaurant’s rustic look, said Diane. I’ve had a successful time doing Shag night for the past two and a half years. We never have a dull moment here, she adds. I’ll add that though it’s a steak house, Sunday’s fried chicken is fabulous.
Down the road a piece, an old ’50’s gas station, now a dusty antiques shop, speaks volumes about I-26’s arrival. Toward Clinton, orange tiger paws adorn a shed’s roof near a Christmas tree farm in 76’s ongoing crazy quilt culture.
In Joanna the Blalock mausoleum dominates the Veterans’ Memorial. Joanna, once known as Goldsville, feels deserted. Beyond its outskirts, kudzu mobs deep woods. This topiary artist gone mad drowns local forests, and somewhere beyond its green masses, I know, farmers struggled to contain red gashes in the earth.
Through Laurens and on to Hickory Tavern. Land rises into green swells as I journey past the silver shoals of the Reedy River and on through Princeton, past aluminum frying pans hanging over some small-but-precious plant.
U.S. 178 cosigns with 76 from Honea Path to Anderson: the Electric City, where the world’s first electric cotton gin operated. On November 14, 1931, Amelia Earhart flew in here. Pondering her fates, I shoot beneath I-85 to La France past Pendleton’s outskirts where Samuel Augustus Maverick was born. Sam moved on to become an ornery Texas rancher, a maverick who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Thus, did maverick enrich our language.
Here in Foothills Country, I roll down 76 even as the land climbs. To my left sits the entrance to the Botanical Gardens of South Carolina and its 295 acres of gardens and bogs. U.S. 76 crosses Lake Hartwell and the Seneca River, where its inundated riverbed joins the Tugaloo to create the mighty Savannah, that great river of sovereign delineation.
Seneca, established 1873, shipped cotton over its rails. Then the mills came. Seneca, today, possesses a homogenized look here and there. Dollar stores, drug stores, and Mexican restaurants. On to Westminster just outside the dark green slopes of Sumter National Forest. All that greenery makes a doublewide trailer’s bright purple roof appear radioactive. The theme of old and new commingled continues … a classic barn near Westminster faces a mobile home across Highway 76.
The Chauga River passes beneath me, a mini Chattooga. Outside local trout fisherman, few know of the Chauga Narrows, a class VI rapid. There’s where the true Earth exists. The Earth too wild to tame.
A Wild West appears in Longcreek, or is it Long Creek? Maps show it as one and two words and its split personality appears on local business establishments. Here in faux frontier land, the countryside is so different than Nichols where I began this passage through time, culture, and geography. Where thick green crops rose from Coastal Plain sand, here apple orchards behold the Blue Ridge escarpment, born of a massive tectonic collision 200 million years ago. One silvery orchard, dead and dry nonetheless stands, its crisp apples no more.
Woodall Shoals, the Chattooga
The land steepens, plunges, then turns and falls away like a roller coaster’s speed run through banked turns. To my left I see the Chattooga Whitewater Outfitters, a business that owes its existence, in part, to Deliverance and the land of nine-fingered people. As if by magic, the Two Redneck Chicks Café appears with twin Confederate flags fluttering, but, no, I’m not in coon-on-a-log, corn-liquor country. That was fiction. And then straight ahead looms the river of legend, the Chattooga, wild, unforgiving, and running beneath the bridge separating Georgia and South Carolina.
I park and get out. The air here is different; the water here is different; this river surely is different. I walk onto the bridge and plant my left foot in my native land, Georgia, my right foot in South Carolina. Looking upriver, I see two rocks asunder, that imaginary line between them. To my right I look back at Highway 76 and see it climb and disappear into South Carolina from whence I’ve come … I’ve covered every mile, every inch of it. I look back at the Chattooga.
Darkness falls. The journey is done. Across the bridge, across the Chattooga in Georgia, the taillights of westbound cars dissolve in the coming of night. It’s time to retrace my journey, but I change my mind. There is no turning back. Besides, you can’t step into the same river twice. Red-eyed and fevered with the hum of the miles , I rest for a while before crossing into Georgia and finding my way back.
All photos by Tom Poland. This piece first ran in Sandlapper in 2010.
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.
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