Hub City Historian

2011-05-10T20:36:00.000-04:00

Colonial Blend

I had a great conversation with my friend, Denise Frazier last night about distinct ethnic-cultural groups and their blending and shifting over time.

Denise is from Houston, but has personal and family ties to Louisiana and especially New Orleans, where we both went to school. Denise went to grad school for cultural studies, and I studied anthropology in undergrad, so we have a common interest in culture and heritage and we can both talk about the culture of the Mississippi Delta.

Culturally, the Delta is very different from this part of the South, and I think that many folks assume that the South is a bit more uniform than it actually is. Down there, they have an entirely different background and it really comes out in the present culture and identity of the whole area. For one thing, English-speaking people had very little to do with that area for the first hundred or so years of its existence as a thriving colony. And it wasn't just the French that had a stake in things, the Spanish were also an enormous influence. Throw on top of that a rich and powerful West African blend, various Native American groups, and sub-groups among the European colonists, and what you have is a very fertile medley of culture.

Mix that up for 300 years and you end up with a diverse blend with shades of many, many distinct groups. And as a result, the Delta has a distinct identity. It's a unique sub-set of Southern culture.

I love that culture, and I valued my time there greatly. But what I really want to take out of it is a better understanding of the dynamics in my part of the South: the Piedmont.

New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana use that culture to promote the area and to draw people in. Once people understand something about those cultural dynamics, they better appreciate the area and its quirks. So what are those things that make the Piedmont (and Spartanburg in particular) unique among places in the South?

Well for one thing, this area has been firmly controlled by English-speakers since the beginning of colonization. It's true that Spanish explorers roamed through here, but they never got around to planting crops and building houses. But despite that English-speaking uniformity, there were some distinct subsets. It's well known that the Scots-Irish form the backbone of the population here. These are mostly Lowland Scots who left Scotland for a brief stay in Ireland before being ferried over the Atlantic to settle in the hills between the wealthier English on the coast and the potentially dangerous Indians in the mountains. They got cheap land out of it, of course, but essentially they were the pawns of the English, who wanted a buffer. They had served the same function in Ireland, where they buffered the English from the Irish.

I could go on about the current political implications of local Scots-Irish descendants serving the interests of the wealthy without taking part in that wealth, but I'll leave that to another time, perhaps.

There are also a healthy number of true English folks here too. They got interested in the available land at the same time that the Scots-Irish were first settling this area in the 1750s and 1760s. But unlike the Lowcountry English, they were mostly family farmers without huge slave workforces.

Slave populations in the Piedmont were never as large as they were even in the Midlands, which is one reason that West African culture did not remain a strong influence in the Piedmont. Also, because the hills made transportation from the coast difficult, those with West African heritage here were more likely to be a generation or two removed from Africa. Essentially, the fresh supply of African-born slaves less often made it up this far. That meant that West African cultural traits had been diluted by time spent in America away from fellow tribesmen. That's not to say those traits had disappeared completely. Take a look at the WPA Slave Narratives recorded here in the 1930s to see some of the fascinating details of local slave culture.

There are other groups here too, of course. There are Lowcountry descendants of French Huguenots who came to teach at Wofford College, a scattering of Swiss-German settlers, folks with Cherokee blood who came down from the mountains to work in the textile mills, not to mention growing communities of Hmong and Hispanic immigrants.

So what does all that mean for local culture? I'm not even close to answering that question. Denise and I got our feet wet by trying to identify some local idioms that might be distinctive, but we could only think of a few. Have you heard any phrases or expressions that seem unique to Spartanburg or the Piedmont?

2011-03-10T10:01:00.005-05:00

A friend and I were chatting the other day about the popularity of time travel as a storytelling device and I thought I'd take this chance to flesh out some of my thoughts about the influence of one particular time travel story. There were only a handful of movies I watched in heavy rotation as a child, and without a doubt the one most often in our VCR from about 1990 on was Back to the Future.

I'm lucky to have a family with an interest in history and to live in a place with a deep historical record, but without the influence of Back to the Future, I'm certain that my interest in family and local history would have never developed as it has. That film had so many themes with far-reaching consequences for my interests, that I feel a list would be a better organizational method.

1. Local/Everyday History: One of the biggest ways Back to the Future differs from other time travel stories is that it doesn't involve any "major" historical event. As a kid, I was fascinated by the kind of everyday history depicted in this movie. Hill Valley is a fictional small town and the only noteworthy historical event depicted is the destruction of the town's clock tower. Finding depictions of the assassination of Lincoln or World War II are a dime a dozen, but it's rarer that you get to see an era encapsulated through a depiction of the everyday. This is also the reason I love another piece of popular historical fiction: Mad Men.

This kind of everyday history is at the intersection of history and nostalgia, which I see as a major access point for truly understanding history. Once you gain an appreciation for "what it was like," you can begin seeing history from a street-level perspective, one that values local history as much as the big national-level history. That's a theme I stress every time I speak to teachers and students: Local history is important because it has a personal and visible impact on the landscape most familiar to people. It can be a means for understanding national history, but it can also be a means to understand our own social and physical landscape, which is what we encounter on a daily basis. You might not ever see the Emancipation Proclamation, but this afternoon I could show you a slave cabin, or where a race riot nearly broke out in downtown Spartanburg in 1917; or I could explain why the south side of town has so much open space. These are big stories that resonate nationally, yet occurred in our midst.

An understanding of the everyday in different periods of history also makes possible a semi-imaginary world constructed from assembled facts, a world I operate in fairly regularly. On a tour, a person might ask me about Magnolia Street in the 1920s, so I assemble my memory of photographs and historical data and I create an imaginary street-view of buildings and people and events, and I interpret that vision to the person who's asking me. In those moments I like to imagine that I'm equal parts shaman and historian. Guided by my memory of historical facts, I imagine some shade of me is transmitting glimpses from a bygone era and that I'm sketching them out for my listeners. It's a fun exercise, and I think it makes for a more interesting experience of reality.

2. Theories of time: By the time I was a teenager, I'd caught on to the fact that there are a few different theories about time and causality. In the Back to the Future universe, it is possible to alter the past, which of course affects the future (or the present, depending on your perspective). This is the major plot element, in fact. Marty accidentally prevents his parents from meeting, so he has to spend the rest of the movie playing matchmaker in order to save his life and the entire course of events as he has known them. If a time traveling DeLorean really existed, a lot of deep philosophical questions might immediately be answered. One could imagine that due to his very existence, Marty might have been denied somehow the ability to disrupt the future. Or, as the movie shows it, he could end up being a relic of a reality that ceases to exist. A less interesting story might have shown Marty immediately disappearing the instant he prevented his parents from meeting. Free will, fate, causality... all of this could be sorted out in far greater clarity if time travel were invented. Of course I have no idea how this would work, and neither does anyone else. But this movie got me thinking about this stuff earlier than I would have otherwise. Thanks, BTF for opening up my mind a little bit more!

3. Psychology: It's only a tiny scene in this movie, but it left a memorable impact on me nonetheless. Early on in the movie, a reference is made to a wayward uncle who they call "Jailbird Joey." He's always in and out of prison and seems to be a source of frustration for the family. When Marty travels back in time, he meets this uncle as a toddler in his playpen and quips, "Better get used to these bars, kid!" He's then told that Joey cries whenever he's taken out, so the family leave him in there constantly. Wow! It's dangerous to treat this as a true case story, but the psychological implications are pretty intense. There are other psychological developments that occur as part of the plot, including Marty's recognition of his character flaws, especially as they compare with those of his father. Anyway, I felt that there were some interesting psychological issues addressed through what is otherwise a sci-fi/comedy.

2011-01-03T21:51:00.002-05:00

History vs. Heritage, Pt. I

The Age of Enlightenment gave birth to the modern concept of Reason. And ever since, various human endeavors have been adjusted to conform to its exacting razor. Because of its unique way of trimming off irrelevancies and leading thinkers to productive ends, Reason is a sublime power of the human mind, and has transformed the world over.

Science, as a product of the study of nature through the lens of reason, is the best known result of this new Weltanshauung. What came before, alchemy for instance, was fundamentally hindered by the lack of a deductive method. Aided by reason, human understanding of chemistry alone has given us huge reaches of power that were entirely unavailable to our predecessors before the Enlightenment. It's really been quite remarkable. The imagination balks at how much power has been gained by our understanding (incomplete though it may be) of the mechanics of the Universe. Look at how much we now control! Understatement of the millennium: It's overwhelming.

One of the constant narratives of my childhood was Star Trek. Its gung-ho outlook on mankind's expanding horizon of control defined my early views about human progress. In the Star Trek universe, human technological control always barely exceeds the unexpected problems that result, so the net gain is always good. But over the years, I've grown to become wary of that perspective. I've gradually become squeamish about the controls of the planet being seized by squabbling, selfish apes. And what can I blame more than reason? To be completely fair, it's not that reason is flawed, but rather that there are supplemental ways of seeing the world that can prove more useful at times.

So my beef with reason only supplements the inherent problems that exist between reason and history. A reasoned approach to history equates stories with theories. But whereas a scientist can posit a theory and devise tests (or find additional examples) to bolster or refute that theory, historians cannot, because history is not a testable truth. Nonetheless, the practice is to read through the evidence, filter and rank the sources, comprehend the biases, and construct the most likely story to explain the evidence. Just like forensic investigators, but with far less evidence.

I don't much care for this approach. It can be useful, for sure, but it entirely misses the magnitude and usefulness of history. In my view, that approach is best used only as a tool to aid historians in their greater mission: to distill heritage. Heritage is about more than the recorded facts of the past, it's about sacred torches, passions, pride, regrets, groundedness. It's the stuff of myth.

"Myth" is a dirty word now, used to describe stories that are, at best, simply false, or at worst, dangerously misguided. But there's a sense in which myths can be useful and held proactively as a guide. I view myths as not true or false, but as ideology in narrative form. They are Rorschachian mirrors that can explain as much about the external world as they do about the internal culture. They're not exclusive of reason, they just illuminate areas where reason alone is inadequate. They can also be helpful in making sense of the past and charting forward into the future.

Myth and heritage are the heart of my interest in the past, as they are probably for most historians. But there are problems with using myth to interpret the past, the most glaring of which is the massive hangup people have with bias. The traditional approach in science, history, or any other academic field has been to attempt to ignore or cover up bias so that the evidence "can speak for itself." Of course there are also political reasons to disguise bias. Admitting bias can undermine academic authority and make results suspect. But it all seems like a lie to me. We're all either biased or apathetic and I want my heritage distilled by people with a passion. Besides, these days with Faux News and other overtly biased information sources, I think people expect that information reaches them with a bias already engineered in. I hope so, at least.

It's also fascinating to me that certain biases have "won out" so that they're now orthodox. Believing in racial equality and the evil of slavery are no longer biases, as they once were, they are now firm "truths," disputed by only a tiny radical fringe. Interpreting history to read in any way other than affirming these beliefs is fiercely heretical. I hold those beliefs personally, but I would be wrong to call them anything but a bias. So when I interpret history to conform to this bias, I'm dealing with myth... not in the sense that it is "false," but in the sense that it is an ideology.

Next time, I'll work up to applying these thoughts to that powder keg of Southern heritage: the Civil War.

2010-12-07T20:36:00.001-05:00

Like many children of the 1980s, I had a bright red, plastic View-Master among my toy arsenal. For those who don't remember, the View-Master was a popular children's toy that allowed three-dimensional color images to be viewed by inserting paper disks embedded with color film.

Mine had a dozen or so discs, each containing seven 3D images. I don't really remember many of the scenes, but I suspect some were either heirlooms from my parents or picked up at yard sales during my childhood. I definitely remember a Sesame Street series of my era and I dimly remember the older ones having puppet vignettes and tourist attractions from out West.

I've had reason to think back on my old View-Master lately because of a quest I've been undertaking at work involving an earlier form of three-dimensional imagery. View-Masters had a much older predecessor called a stereoscope. Rather than using discs with transparent color film, stereoscopes used bulky paper cards that contained a single three-dimensional image. The cards show two nearly identical photographs, each taken at the same time from a different angle, matching how your eyes assemble a 3D image from two planes of vision. The stereoscope works by using two lenses that juxtapose the two images on top of each other. Here is a stereoscope:

Long before I began working for the museum or the library, a friend who understood how much I like quirky old stuff gave me a stereoscope and a few cards as a birthday present. Just as my 19th century forebearers had done, I have enjoyed passing it around to guests who ask about it. There's something magical about it. Not only are you looking at a 3D image, you're looking at a 3D image from over 100 years ago. My favorite is probably a night-time view from a roller coaster at Coney Island. There are thousands of antiquated light bulbs illuminating hundreds of smiling visitors, suspended in time in a place that is long gone.

Recently, though, my stereoscope has gained renewed relevance. A month or two ago, a library patron brought in a collection of stereoscopic cards he had collected that included several scenes made in Spartanburg. Since historic Spartanburg photography is my thing, I set about looking into just how many Spartanburg stereoscopic cards were made.

It turns out that there were lots of people making them. It wasn't something that anyone with a camera could do, but it seems that several local photographers dabbled it in. What's even more exciting is that one series (labelled "Southern Scenery: Spartanburg, S. C. and Vicinity") by Asheville photographer W. T. Robertson includes some of the oldest outdoor photographs made in Spartanburg. My professional Holy Grail is to uncover a photograph of Morgan Square that predates the iconic 1884 photograph of "Sales Day" (that isn't really sales day). That photograph was made by S. C. Mouzon, who had been working in Spartanburg as a portrait photographer since the Civil War.

Although I haven't found a Morgan Square image among Robertson's photos, several other views around town are shown, and they all date from around 1872. So far, I've found First Baptist Church, Church of the Advent, First Presbyterian, Wofford College's "Old Main," Wofford College faculty members, and the short-lived Carolina Orphan Home, which was on the former campus of the Spartanburg Female College. Conveniently for me, these images are each marked with a number from Robertson's Southern Scenery series. The numerical gaps tell me that there are at least two other Spartanburg images from the series I haven't yet found. I suspect they would include the only other church in town at the time, Central Methodist, and possibly the other college, St. John's College. Whether there are more, I can't say, but I'm looking very hard! Let me know if you come across any, even the ones I've listed!

Robertson's series may have been the oldest, but it was far from the only one. Someone was able to snap an 1876 image of the First Presbyterian parsonage and Gaffney's June Carr took a few photos nearby in the 1910s. The largest (and most professionally produced) series seems to have been made by Thomas R. Shuford of Gastonia, NC. He came into Spartanburg County in the days following the devastating Pacolet River flood of 1903 and took some 50 photographs of the wreckage and clean-up effort. The record they provide is quite remarkable.

The final series I've seen was made by an unknown photographer in the summer of 1910 during the South Carolina Confederate Reunion, which was held in Spartanburg. That event included the dedication of the Confederate monument then on South Church Street, but now in Duncan Park. I've only seen a handful of these stereoviews, and unfortunately none were labeled, so figuring out whether an isolated image goes with this series would take some research finesse.

I hope to have some of these images publicly available soon at the library. If you're interested in seeing them, come by and have a look! Here's one from the 1910 Confederate reunion, during a parade through Morgan Square:

2010-11-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

The Face of Segregation

Most people need a connection to the past in order to appreciate the story it has to tell. Often my role when speaking to the public is to foster that connection in people. One of my great professional joys is to watch a person's reaction to a photo or artifact transform as that connection is formed.

Among photos, which are often my focus at work, the ones that capture my attention the most are usually images of familiar places. My own connection to an old photo often comes from knowing the place where a photo was made, even if the image I see differs vastly from the place as it exists now, or as I personally remember it. That's the connection for me: a shared place, usually anyway.

Something different happened recently when I was processing some photos donated by School District Seven. Most of the photos came with clear identifications because many of them had been published in a 1982 history of the district. Others had penciled notes, or were clearly identifiable. Only a few required some historical sleuthing, and one became all the more poignant as I tried harder and harder to uncover the circumstances of the photo.

The fact that Spartanburg was so late to fully desegregate its schools, which happened finally in the fall of 1970, should not go unnoticed. And despite the dubiously intended "separate but equal" ruling, on the administrative level, African-American teachers, students, schools, and materials were always secondary to their white counterparts. That disparity was highlighted in this 1964 photo of a retiring black schoolteacher receiving a certificate of recognition for her years of service from superintendent J. G. McCracken. Study her expression for a minute.

Mrs. Larcie Smith Browning with Dr. J. G. McCracken, May 28, 1964

She seems emotionally overwhelmed. Mixed up in her expression are uncomfortable humility, intense gratitude, and the restraint of someone who knows to stay in the place society has left for her. If her stifled tears and nervous smile weren't emotionally powerful enough, there's the white dress, white gloves, and white powder she has used to dress up for one of the biggest occassions of her adult life.

Growing up at the turn of the century, she would have come of age in one of the worst periods for African-Americans in South Carolina. The generation in power at that time went to great efforts to prevent the chaotic social upheaval that had marred their own youths during Reconstruction by constraining African-American progress. New voting rules legally disenfranchised blacks and the reinvention of the KKK ensured that African-Americans stayed in their white-defined place in society.

That sense of a "proper place," especially in regards to interacting with whites, defines this photo for me. As a black woman employed by this man, she very clearly has a subservient role to him. Yet, this photo documents a ceremony given in her honor. She seems to struggle with that place of honor while maintaining her "proper place," and I wonder if that is what her expression (and the awkward physical space between them) is all about. Combine that with all the memories of working for decades as a teacher in her struggling community and it's certainly an overwhelming experience.

This photo didn't come with any label and it took some effort to find her name. There was a newspaper article in May of 1964 that covered and photographed the retiring of three white teachers with a note in the final paragraph that a similar ceremony would be held a few days later for two negro teachers. As might be expected, no article or photo appeared in the newspaper for that event. I later found an older photo of teachers at Highland Elementary that included one of the retiring teachers, Mrs. Larcie Browning, the woman shown above. That provided the link to clarify her identity, and that's how I'm able to say who she was and what was happening in her life on May 28, 1964.

2010-10-18T18:25:00.001-04:00

Regaining Site

It's probably not too surprising to hear that nearly every structure in downtown Spartanburg is less than 130 years old. Go back to 1880 and you'd see that Spartanburg was a newly-chartered city of 3,000 residents, and the city looked forward to a bright future as textile-induced prosperity ushered along substantial improvements and expansion. Over the course of that 130 years, a ramshackle village evolved into a bustling Southern city. In the mean time, buildings have come and gone, and after over a century, any single site is likely to have supported a few generations of buildings.

Those layers are what make the walking tours fun. I love showing off the few nineteenth century buildings left downtown, but I also love showing images and talking about what's no longer around. Ideally, the tours give folks an impression of the layers in the downtown landscape: from Cherokee hunting ground to backwoods courthouse village to railroad hub and onwards. Walking through those layers equipped with photos and stories seems to get people a little more engaged and aware.

More often than not, any site's individual layers don't really connect with one another. It doesn't really mean anything that the 1787 log-framed courthouse stood where the traffic island west of the Morgan monument is now. It's interesting, but not meaningful, that an ironworks stood where the library's drop-off area is. But at least in one area, there seem to be coincidences between the different layers that make you wonder if the site itself might have some sort of intrinsic significance.

The specific spot I'm referring to lies on what is now St. John Street along the hill around the intersections with Converse Street and Liberty Street. Now the distinct landmarks there include the George Dean Johnson College of Business and Economics, the Chapman Cultural Center, and Barnet Park. All of these are relatively recent developments that grew out of the Renaissance Park idea of the 1990s. Peel back a layer, before the Renaissance Project, and you'd see the old National Guard armory, an automotive repair shop, a bar or two, and a paper retailer. Go back a few more layers and you'd find two mid-19th century buildings.

One of those buildings, precisely where the business school now sits, may have been originally built as a residence, but in later years was used as a school. For a time, it was the Spartanburg Male Academy, a private school for boys. In 1884, it was purchased by the city's early public school system and used as one of three graded schools, a recent educational innovation. It continued to serve that function along with the female graded school, located where the entrance to Barnet Park is now, until the city built the old Magnolia Street School, where the courthouse now stands. The third facility, the graded school for black children, was rented from Mt. Moriah Baptist Church.

Here are some photos of all this:

Male Academy/Graded School (white children, grades 4-7), northwest corner of Elm (now St. John) and Liberty.

Female Academy/Graded School (white children, grades 1-3), northeast corner of Elm (now St. John) and Converse.

1891 image of Mount Moriah, S. Liberty Street, where the graded school for "colored" children was held from 1884-1891.

Magnolia Street School, western side of Magnolia Street, the first building outside of Charleston built specifically for public education in SC.

1923 image of Dean Street School, graded school for "colored" children from 1891-1939. Site later redeveloped as Alexander Elementary.

After the school was built on Magnolia Street in 1890, the old male academy building went on to serve other functions until it was reinhabited by the Hastoc School, a private school for boys that had been established by Wofford professor Hugh T. Shockley, sometime before 1908. The Hastoc School first occupied a facility on the site of the Chapman Cultural Center, but later renovated and moved into the old graded school.

Students outside the Hastoc School, formerly the Male Academy and Graded School

Today, this site is still a center for education. The business school, finished in 2010, and the Chapman Cultural Center, finished in 2007, are both vital ingredients to the city's educational atmosphere. It's really quite remarkable that they sit on a site with such deep schooling roots. And it's entirely by coincidence. To my knowledge, no one at the decision-making level knew about these earlier establishments, and even if they had, it would have probably mattered very little amidst all the other considerations that go into site selection. In another culture, or at another time, place history might have been the tap root from which our decision tree grows. That's not the case in Spartanburg in 2010, although I dare to hope that we Spartans are a bit more tuned into the history of our surroundings than we were only a generation ago.

Chapman Cultural Center

Sources:

Spartanburg Co. School District Seven: The First Ninety-Eight Years, by Ella Poats (1982)

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

Spartanburg County Historical Association

2010-10-14T15:36:00.006-04:00

Place Matters

I've got another post in the works, but I thought it might be good to make a stopgap post in the meanwhile.

It's a core value for me that place is an important component of existence. I suspect that most people don't dwell on what place means quite as much as I do. It's second only to time in how I go about viewing the world, which says a lot coming from an historian.

Place has a lot of aspects that are fascinating to me. A place is both a construct and an external reality. There is no unit of place. Units depend on boundaries, and fundamentally, the only boundaries between places are arbitrarily imposed boundaries. Yet, despite its indefinability, place exists. Nothing is in isolation and there is no place that stands unconnected to the places around it, and there are no hard and fast ways to separate one place from an adjacent place.

A place not only connects to the places nearby, but also to the things that inhabit the place now, in the past, and in the future. A place can dictate the actions of the things in it or it can be changed by the actions of those things. A place can be special, ordinary, or undesirable. A place can mean different things to different people. A place can change and a place's meaning can change.

I won't even get into what it means to "own" a place!

For me, place even takes on a spiritual side. Despite the attempts of some, no place in the world is the same. Every place has thousands of stories; dramas enacted over time. Places nourish us. Our connections to our social communities and the community of life are made evident through place. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe... all of these come from a place that matters (or should matter) to us. These things depend on these places. Our bodies are made from these places. The stories that shaped us happened in these places. The stories and nourishment that made our ancestors came from these places. If places are disposable or insignificant as so many people seem to think, then we are disposable and insignificant, because we are, in so many ways, our places.

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2010-09-03T12:44:00.012-04:00

Bridges to the Past

Public infrastructure is an important feature in understanding the basic mechanics of how a society operates. Think about the Romans, for instance, and their grandiose infrastructure will almost surely come to mind. The aqueducts and bridges that still remain scattered across urban and rural European landscapes are surely marvelous. But at least to me, they represent more than the technological achievements of an ancient culture, they demonstrate a certain attention to monumentality and cultural craftsmanship.

I don't make the mistake of imagining that every Roman bridge was precisely hand-cut from the finest granites, or inlaid with fountains and marble relief sculpture, but I do see a gulf that stands between what Romans seemed to value in their public infrastructure and what 21st century Americans value.

Up above I have an image of an old covered bridge, Campbell's Bridge in Greenville County. Bridges like that once crossed a lot of the smaller creeks and rivers throughout the county, especially in the mid- and late-19th century. Like anything, they fell into disrepair, and when the roads were widened, and the vehicles got heavier, it became the reasonable thing to replace them. Below is another beautiful Greenville County bridge, the 1820s Poinsett Bridge:

Later generations were swept up in the steel craze that funded Gilded Age mega-corporations and eagerly utilized steel to solve engineering problems too daunting for wood. The bridges and trestles that were made in this era exhibited a kind of raw Beaux Arts strength that welded structure with beauty through rivets, planks, and crossbeams. The best known example of such a bridge is at Glendale, but bridges like these were very common in the city and in villages and rural areas all throughout the county. This example was where Heywood Ave. crosses Lawson's Fork near White's Mill:

Bridges of stone and wood were constructed too, of course, some humble, others spectacular. Even reinforced concrete, the medium of nearly every modern Spartanburg County bridge, was used with taste and a sense of craftsmanship. The bridge where US-29 crosses the Pacolet is a wonderful mid-1920s example:

Somewhere along the way, though, an aesthetic of simplicity paved the way for minimalistic, bottom-dollar construction without any sense of local pride or monumentality. Even in highly visible areas, very few modern bridges attempt to do anything more than span a distance with the least possible cost, to the detriment of the communities that see and use them. Bridges now are nothing to be proud of, and it seems that more often than not, they're an outright eyesore. You don't need to look far to find an example. Below is the view at Van Patton Shoals, on the Enoree River, with a 1990s bridge in the near background and the remains of an older iron bridge in the far background.
Clearly, public dollars need to be spent with an appropriate sense of priority. The tremendous needs of a community with the size and demographics of Spartanburg can mean that less money is earmarked for public infrastructure. But with the recent waves of stimulus-funded highway projects and the emphasis placed on infrastructural improvements as a means of job creation, surely the decision-makers that give the go-ahead to these projects can budget the extra expense to give these projects a worthwhile design that will make our community proud for the decades (or centuries?) they will see these structures.

As a final image, I'll show a photo of the widening project on the Pacolet River bridge on US-29 in the mid-1970s. Rather than carry on the decorative elements from the original bridge, the widened portion features the unadorned reinforced concrete typical of all modern bridge construction.

2010-08-20T15:55:00.001-04:00

New Chapters

It's far too easy to lose sight of the larger narratives in life. I often find myself so focused on my daily or weekly cycles that the monthly and yearly ones seem like distant, nearly motionless backdrops. But every now and then, events occur that remind me of the bigger picture. Here and there, I'm re-awakened to quests and mission statements and long-range goals. These are the narratives that take place in decades-long cycles. But in many ways their slow revolutions belie their great importance. They only move so slowly because they are so massive.

Today I'm reminded specifically of an important local narrative that seems steady and quickening: the revitalization of my hometown. The momentum continues to build, and I see new signs of its progress as significant pieces fall into place every few months.

One huge piece falls into place today when the Hub City Bookshop, the Little River Coffee Bar, and Cakehead Bakery celebrate their grand opening in the historic Masonic Temple on West Main Street. In the few short weeks this facility has been open, a new community gathering spot has flowered. I have yet to walk in without seeing friends and friendly faces, and I have yet to walk out without something delicious and wholesome for the body, mind, or soul.

For those who are sensitive to the micro-local economy of downtown Spartanburg, today you should feel a tectonic shift as a whole local community finds another big reason to spend their money (and support jobs) downtown. A reason to celebrate if there ever was one!

2010-08-09T09:29:00.003-04:00

Aesthetic Succession

One of the most curious things about beauty is that it changes. There are very few universal rules about beauty, and whether you're asking the opinions of two contemporaries or two generations, you're likely to get different answers. But although the definition of an ideal may vary, there are cycles and themes that come and go and return. This evolving and revolving aesthetic sense plays a big part in my role as an historian, particularly when discussing architecture and the changing face of Spartanburg.

I conduct downtown walking tours in which the participants get to see photographs of Spartanburg over the years. A lot has changed in our town's 225 year history, like it does anywhere after over two centuries. Change isn't inherently bad or good, and I'll be one of the first to cheer when something is improved by renovation or replacement. But a lot of the decisions in Spartanburg's past were made with a skewed idea about what constituted improvement. Some of those decisions seem to have been little more that psychotic spasms; the result of decision makers unhappy with the past or present who chose to take it out on bricks and mortar.

Perhaps Americans are particularly susceptible to wanting "out with the old and in with the new." Perhaps it's some kind of consumerist brainwashing that sees "new" as, by definition, an improvement. Perhaps our immigrant ancestors left us with the idea that if you can't get something just how you want it, don't fuss with trying to improve it, just start again with a clean slate. Or perhaps the appeal of newness is itself just another ideal that comes and goes... like the return of retro styles and revival architecture.

One of the clearest instances in which I see the revolving door of beauty is in the reaction people have to Spartanburg's courthouses. Currently, there is an idyllic grassy and shade-covered lot to the south of the county courthouse on Magnolia Street. It has the feel of a forgotten park without paths or picnic tables. This was the location of Spartanburg's prior courthouse, built in 1891 in a grand Victorian take on Romanesque Revival architecture, itself a remix of Romanesque architecture, which was a medieval resurgence of Roman style architecture... the lineage goes on and on. I have yet to meet a Spartanburg resident who is happy that the old courthouse is gone or who thinks it was ugly. Victorian architecture is adored now as a detail-rich feast of textures and rhythms and asymmetry. Spartanburg collectively mourned when the Arthur Irwin house burned recently and the few examples of it elsewhere in the city are treasured.

Not so in 1957. "[The Courthouse] is a monstrosity... and cannot be but an object of shame for the county." So spake the Spartanburg Herald in December of 1957. Despite unoccupied rooms on the third floor and a solid building free of major problems, by 1955 the county was well on its way planning a new courthouse, nominally due to a few crowded offices and an inconvenient floorplan. It was the post-war period and Spartanburg was doing its best to keep a fresh face as suburbs began to fan out in every direction. So despite a few grumbles from penny-pinching taxpayers, the county made the decision to plan a new $2,000,000 modern style courthouse and demolish the old one without future plans for the site. No one seems to have wanted the building. One state representative suggested using "a portion" as housing for a new county library, but the idea was immediately shot down. Ideas for the site abounded, the most feasible of which was for the construction of a new city hall. But everyone backed out in the end, and the site remains vacant over fifty years later.

I contrast the current and past reactions to the 1891 courthouse to shed light on perceptions that exist now about the 1957 courthouse that replaced it. I worry that if the money were readily available, Spartanburg County would be eager to tear down our current courthouse. I hear people describe it as plain, blocky, and dull. I see their faces shrivel when they look at the current courthouse after seeing the older one. They might not describe it as a monstrosity, but they certainly don't like it. They also don't see that they're enacting a cycle; they're only speaking from their place in the rotation of aesthetic succession. People don't like minimalist architecture now... they want detail and they value acknowledgements of previous styles of architecture. But the day will come when people start to rediscover the clean lines and dramatic simplicity of mid-century modern architecture, as many people already have.

Simple or complex, traditional or innovative: these are the fundamental variables in architecture and decorative arts. Any combination of them can be done well by a designer with a good eye for proportion, texture, and the other languages of visual art. Harold Woodward, the architect of the 1957 courthouse, chose simple and innovative, and articulated that decision well. Kenneth McDonald, the primary architect of the 1891 courthouse, chose complex and traditional, and executed that decision well. Both have been fine buildings that have served their purpose well. The tragedy comes when people let themselves be blinded by familiarity and think that they can best solve their problems, whether few or many, by starting over completely.

2010-08-01T18:07:00.003-04:00

The Seedy Underbelly

When I bought my house three years ago, I had the good fortune to meet Mrs. Patricia B. McKinney. Pat is a natural born storyteller whose memory of old Spartanburg could fill volumes. She lived in my house from the 1930s to the 1960s and has told me more than I could have ever hoped to find out about my little home on my own. I won't regale you with all of the stories she told me; I'll only mention one that left me a little puzzled.

Pat told me that in the late 1930s, when the city school district was building Southside Elementary (now the Spartanburg Charter School), the children zoned for that school were divided up and some were temporarily sent to Pine Street School. She told me about an incident in which a little girl from Pine Street told her teacher she needed to go wash her hands because she had accidentally touched a "southsider."

The bias that traditional white Spartanburg has had against the south side of town was well known to me growing up, but it had always seemed to me that the bias was racial and recent in origin. I knew plenty of people (and they still exist, especially in eastside Spartanburg) who looked upon Hampton Heights as a charming but crime-ridden neighborhood. It was only after I got a taste of life in New Orleans that I lost a lot of my preconceptions about "dangerous" neighborhoods in Spartanburg. Although crime does occur now and then, it's not nearly as common as some people think, and simple precautions all but eliminate the danger.

So Pat's story surprised me because it illustrated that the bias pre-dated the tumultuous civil rights era that changed the face of urban neighborhoods in Spartanburg. It seemed that the bias had an earlier root.

An email conversation with a doctoral candidate shed some light on all that and may have opened up a whole new perspective on research into the south side of town, and the Hampton Heights neighborhood in particular. This student is researching crime statistics among young women in the city of Spartanburg during the 1880s and 1890s. It's a fascinating topic already, but her research seemed to be revealing a previously unknown Red Light District! How about that!

It seems that crimes involving prostitution and robbery during illicit acts were concentrated in one specific part of downtown Spartanburg. Accounts frequently mentioned young black women accused of keeping a "bawdy house" and white men being led by black men to women-occupied "negro tenement" houses. All this was occurring in the block bound by Spring St., Broad St., and what is now Daniel Morgan Ave, just south of Morgan Square.

This new piece of information suddenly made sense of a whole lot more. Only a block or so away from this area was the city's earliest public black cemetery. It dated to antebellum times and held slaves as well as the town's few freedmen. Around 1910 the graves were exhumed and moved by Southern Railway to the much larger Cemetery Street Cemetery as part of a land swap. But the first location might have indicated the location of the city's first urban black neighborhood, just how the white Magnolia Street Cemetery indicates where most affluent white residents were living.

This block would have been the town's original "south side," since everything further south was occupied by large, semi-rural farmhouses that were outside of the town's tiny urban area. This, then, may have been the origin of the bias against Spartanburg's south side. This was even before the "Southside" African-American community based around S. Liberty Street, which formed after the Civil War. After the Southside community formed, the old urban black neighborhood in this block might have declined, with the result that it became known as a Red Light District.

Hampton Heights's early history may play a part in all this too. It is known that the neighborhood was named for West Hampton Avenue, which was named by Pink, Thomas, and Arthur Irwin for Governor Wade Hampton. Wade Hampton spoke at a huge festival in 1876 held on the outskirts of what is now Hampton Heights. The location of this speech was significant, because only a few years earlier it had been the encampment grounds of the Federal Army during the infamous KKK trials of the early 1870s.

If it's true that a bias against the southern end of town already existed by the 1870s, and that bias linked the southside of town to black neighborhoods, then naming Hampton Heights after a governor associated with the restoration of white rule in SC could have been an effort to distance the neighborhood from the southside's reputation in order to make the area appealing to wealthier whites. That might also explain why the southside seemed to grow a little slower than other parts of town.

Talk about unpalatable racial politics!

2010-07-05T09:35:00.000-04:00

Collecting Contemporary History

I try to stay involved with the current events that shape our community when I'm not too busy unearthing the past events that did the same. I've found that folks generally expect historians to document and chronicle the happenings of the present in addition to protecting the resources of the past.

Admittedly, it can be a difficult and tedious task. I have a few places in my house where I pile up programs, photos, and papers that document my life and the ongoing events of the community; but with so much being done digitally, I rarely take the time to sort or compile my email like I do with the few letters I receive. I have a couple of email accounts that date back to the dawn of my digital life in the late 1990s, but except for a few sappy emails to high school girlfriends, I long ago cleared those accounts of the minutiae that once filled them up. I delete less these days thanks to Gmail's huge storage. On that account, I have emails back to 2004. Ancient digital history!

I also have a sizable photo archive on an external harddrive, but hardly any of them have a physical manifestation, or notes describing them, and I really don't even take as many photos as I should. I'm lucky that I have friends who do, and who make those photos public on flickr.

Probably one of the better ways in which I document and reflect upon the events in my life is through my journal. I write in it about once a week and attempt to sum up the events that aren't documented elsewhere. If I talk about something documented in the newspaper, it's generally only because I have an opinion that differs from the version in the news, or I've heard something that isn't covered. Research (and contemporary experience) has shown me that newspapers aren't always the best sources for the gritty details. A 1921 story makes this clear:

John Floyd, Spartanburg's perennial mayor of the 1910s and 1920s, was up for reelection in 1921. He was challenged in the primaries by several men and the race was a hard-fought one, with allegations flying in typical Southern populist fashion. O. L. Johnson, a previous single-term mayor from the 1900s, emerged as a close second and the election went to a run-off.

The surprise came a few days before the primary, when despite the long, difficult fight, Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the race "in the interest of harmony." He thanked his supporters and explained that he wanted the city to prosper and thought a divisive race would only harm the city.

I suspect something else happened. What it is, I'll never know, because all the players are long gone and the newspaper never dug it up. Some of what I heard about Spartanburg's 2009 mayoral race also never made it into the newspaper, so I feel it's important to have events like these documented somewhere, and a journal is a perfect place.

I had the opportunity Saturday to acquire a piece of contemporary history when I attended Spartanburg's second LGBT Pride Parade. This was an extraordinarily controversial event after fissures erupted in City Council and divisions in the community were made clear following Mayor Junie White's proclamation in support of the event. The parade itself was a resounding success, with anywhere from 1,000-2,000 supporting participants and perhaps two dozen protesters. The parade was capped by a speech from Mayor White in which he issued the proclamation, emboldened supporters by announcing his commitment to secure equal rights so far as his power and influence allow, and spoke to his overall support of the effort to make Spartanburg a friendly, welcoming community for all citizens.

The speech was a major hit, and many people mentioned how reassured they were by Mayor White's public stance on the issue. After it ended, I approached Mayor White to ask if I could get a copy of the speech from him and he obliged by handing over the original. Only the proclamation itself would be more historically valuable, and I reflected on how easily the moment might have slipped by and been blurred by fading memory without protected documentation, in this case through the videos that were made and the copy of the speech now in storage.

It takes a lot of diligence to ensure that a community as broad and complex as Spartanburg is well documented. If it weren't for professional and amateur journalists and the newspapers, blogs, videos, scrapbooks and other documents they produce, minimalistic government records might be all that survive... that's been the case for many periods in Spartanburg's past about which we know very little.

One person can only do so much and I know that the documentary bias I have favors local arts and culture, progressive politics, and downtown Spartanburg. It's all I can do to keep up with these histories in addition to my family's history. I just hope that other folks out there are mindful of their own families and communities and are able to pick up and preserve the scraps and stories that slip past the attention of those of us who scramble to hold on to what has already been saved.

Luck is a poor filter, and too often luck is all that determines what is saved and what is lost. The library has a few issues of an African-American newspaper from the 1920s called the Hub City Observer. A complete collection could revolutionize our understanding about Spartanburg's African-American community, but luck only preserved a few copies. Luck also sometimes takes away our greatest storytellers, or burns our most treasured records. Whenever I speak to children or young adults, I always tell them the best thing they can do if they're interested in local or family history is to document the stories their oldest relatives tell them. Oral history is the most ephemeral resource and detailed family stories are some of the least likely histories to remain intact without documentation.

Protecting local history is definitely a community effort, and I think Spartanburg is better than most at protecting its stories. Let's hope it continues to be that way!

2010-06-22T09:47:00.005-04:00

A Symbol Reborn

A frantic call from my wife interrupted my lunch last Friday and her news hit hard and deep: the Arthur Irwin House, the flagship home of Hampton Heights, was burning. I raced to the neighborhood and found the house belching thick black smoke while firefighters surrounded the house and yard. Neighbors and friends formed a distraught chorus on the street and in yards nearby, watching in agony as the grandest Queen Anne residence in Spartanburg succumbed to a devastating fire. The fire engulfed the roof and part of the second story before being snuffed out by hard work, and 100,000 gallons of rushing water.

The scene on Friday could have hardly been any worse. That house anchored the entire neighborhood and was one of the most recognizable houses in the city. Additionally, until the fire, it had been in immaculate condition and held thousands of antiques and original documents and research materials. It really felt like the heart of the neighborhood had been ripped out, and as a bystander, I was completely helpless to do anything.

The Spartanburg Herald-Journal covered the awful details of the fire, so I won't rehash all that, but I did want to touch on the follow-up story that has yet to fully play out.

I went to the house Saturday morning and found salvage crews pulling out everything from the house. They directed me to Vivian Fisher, the owner of the house, and a friend and local history colleague. Vivian has been working on a comprehensive history of Hampton Heights longer than I've been alive and was months away from finishing her task. She had collected interviews and photographs and documents that detailed the history of the neighborhood and its residents from the Reconstruction Era to now. I had helped her in the last couple of years of her project and was one of the few people she knew who could share her joy in discovering the tiny surprises that come with such a project. Beyond her family's safety, what most worried me was that all this information would have been lost in the fire.

Vivian was by the garage when I found her and her first words to me were "you're just who I wanted to see because I knew you would understand." She went on to explain that she was determined to rebuild. She was as firm as iron in that moment, and I was relieved to know that the symbol of our neighborhood was in her hands. She also assured me that all her photos had been scanned and that those files along with the electronic draft of the book were off-site. It was such a relief.

I came back soon afterwards to find her on the second floor of the house, in the library, which was only slightly removed from the source of the fire. Waterlogged books buckled out of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and against the wall was what remained of her desk, with her soot-covered computer and papers and envelopes stacked nearby. She explained that although everything had been scanned, she had borrowed photos and books from folks for the book, and she worried they might have been ruined. Digging around a bit, we were able to find one stack that had envelopes full of photos, stained with soot and soaked with water. I offered to work with them to dry them out because I was concerned that they might be ruined if they dried improperly. She was happy to have me handle it.

We laid out a huge tarp on the lawn and I began to spread out photos as a few others brought out materials from the library. It was vital to dry them out individually before the photographic emulsion bonded to nearby papers and photos. My experience with other water damaged photos (explained in a blog post long ago) told me if they dried together, they would be completely ruined. I was less concerned about light damage, although I did try to keep as many in the shade as possible. I eventually laid out an impressive number of documents and waited for the warm air to work on them. After a few hours of careful pealing and patience, the photos were dry and intact. Many of the thinner papers curled, but that can be reversed if they are re-humidified slightly, pressed, and dried more slowly. Overall, it was an encouraging success in salvage conservation. I was amazed to see so many look as good as new.

Other encouraging signs were to be seen too. Furniture cleaning crews arrived and easily removed soot and water from upholstery before loading up other pieces for more detailed work. Inside the house, it was apparent that although the damage was significant, many of the historic details and fine craftsmanship would be salvageable. Moreover, the will was there. Vivian insisted that she was bound as a "good Southern woman" to be determined and resourceful.

I hope that when this harrowing chapter is finished, the Irwin House will stand as an even more powerful symbol of our once-struggling neighborhood: A grand, beautiful home that was nearly lost to a tragic mixture of negligence and circumstance, rebuilt and reinvigorated by determined homeowners.

2010-05-24T13:39:00.003-04:00

"Give Me Your Poor..."

Although I started off my local history journey as an amateur family history researcher, I've long since shifted my focus away from genealogy toward broader place and social histories. They overlap in many instances and for both patrons and my personal interest, I still occasionally go barking up the proverbial family tree, but for the most part these days, I stick to the bigger picture histories.

Every once in a while, though, newly discovered resources send me into a fit of genealogical epilepsy. That recently happened when I came across a dusty, unlabeled ledger that contained the minutes for the Spartanburg County Commissioners of the Poor from 1796 to 1827.

This ledger had been missing since the WPA era when a rough transcription was apparently made and the original vanished either from the state archives (where the transcription resides) or the Spartanburg County Courthouse. Its intervening history remains unknown. I found it in the history museum archives, but it had not been processed. What appears to be part of a WPA transcription form marked a page in the ledger. It was as if some transcriber stopped, put the book down, and never picked it up again.

There are several reasons this ledger could be particularly useful for family historians with a connection to Spartanburg County. The first has to do with its age. As you can imagine, there really aren't too many records from the late 18th and early 19th century in this part of the state. Courthouse records, military pension records, church records, the occasional family bible, and woefully inadequate census records form nearly the extent of the primary resources available. Combine the scarcity of resources overall with a documentary bias toward social elites (after all, wealthy landowners leave far more records than the forgotten, illiterate poor) and what you have is virtually no information for the small scale farmers and sharecroppers of that time period. From my own experience in tracing my family's history, some of those poorer families just disappear into the silence as you try to trace them further back. There just aren't records to show what their names were or that they were even alive.

This ledger, on the other hand, is focused on the destitute and the wealthier individuals and families that oversaw their well-being. The commission operated by distributing funds to folks who petitioned the commission on behalf of a neighbor who could not take care of him- or herself either because of old age, abandonment, the death of a family member, or some other extenuating circumstance. The commission then awarded the money for as long as the individual needed assistance. Essentially, it was the older form of welfare, and it's all documented here.

I hope to be able to browse through it soon and make it more accessible to patrons. These are truly the forgotten, and I hope this ledger can help reunite them with their families today.

2010-04-20T11:33:00.015-04:00

Taking it Personally

I've tended to use this blog as a platform for talking about topics in local history or as snapshots into my professional life as a local historian, but for this post, I thought I'd write even closer to home for a change.

I've mentioned before that my introduction to local history was through my family's history and that it later grew to a general reverence of place and how important place is to ones identity. I've spent a lot of time developing my perspective on the complex, eccentric identity of Spartanburg and the communities that form it, but at least on this blog, I haven't spent much time developing my own family's identity.

Seasons revolve, time marches and spins, and life's path doubles back on itself from time to time like a switchback mountain trail. You never retread the same ground, but sometimes you brush back against it, or catch a view of the same path from a different angle. I feel like I'm on that reflective path now and it's caused me to rethink where I am, where I'm going, and what forces brought me to this point. So all this self-examination makes me want to work out some family identity issues on paper (or whatever this is).

The oldest member of my family, my great-grandmother, passed away a few weeks ago at one hundred and a half years old. Of course I knew her my whole life, and I saw her at least twice a year from the time I was a toddler until I was in my early 20s, when I saw her even more frequently. She was a witty, feisty (and tiny) old lady and a big source of my family's smartass streak. Even towards the end, she was sassy and spirited with everyone in earshot. Barely able to walk, see, or hear, she explained to my uncle recently that she was a lost little elf my grandparents had found in the bushes in their front yard.

Born on suburban Long Island, she was the daughter of Austro-Hungarian immigrants who all but refused to talk about the old ways in Europe now that they were Americans living in America. So like so many Americans, she was born rootless. She loved her hometown as a girl, but so did everyone else. She stayed on Long Island as long as her husband worked there, but once that ended, off to St. Louis and California and Florida they went. To illustrate her lack of appreciation for heritage, you need look no further than the photo album of her honeymoon, a sweeping roadtrip to tourist sites along the East Coast, which shows her at Mount Vernon with a look that screams, "what do I care?"

In that regard, she and I were very different. I'm so interested in examining my roots that I work professionally doing it, spend a fair amount of my free time doing it, and type out blog posts about it during my lunch break.

But despite that, there are certainly other elements about my identity that trace their source back to her. She was decidedly irreverent and had a healthy playfulness; traits that have come straight down the line to me and to most of her other descendants. She and my great-grandfather were both that way and their antics frequently straddled the line between pranks, mischief, and honest-to-God roguery. The list of dubious behaviors reads on and on and sometimes I don't know whether to wag my finger or drop my jaw. During World War II, they worked alternating day and night shifts for military subcontractor Grumman Aircraft. Photos show GG (that's what I always called my great-grandmother) as a mildly risque cabaret dancer in a company play about the Moulin Rouge, but there aren't any photos of the black market transactions that helped pay the bills or the stolen company property.

But except for a few property laws, homefront commerce laws, and moonshine laws, they weren't lawbreakers as much as they were pranksters who didn't shy away from looking out for them and theirs. Their daughter, my grandmother, may have been the only one who kept a clean record (at the very least, she keeps mum about her trouble-making days). Her brother certainly got into it, and my father and uncle were right there with him. One of my father's favorite troublemaker stories was his teenage act of environmental terrorism in Fernwood. He and my uncle used to ride motorcycles along Lawson's Fork Creek in its pre-Cottonwood Trail days. To hear him tell it, he and his friends actually cut a lot of the trail that is still used. Anyway, the early 1970s were not kind to Lawson's Fork and they would frequently come across pipes that dumped raw sewage into the creek. Sensing the ecological injustice, he took a cylindrical traffic barrier and threw it into a manhole cover next to the outflow pipe. It immediately lodged into the hole and caused the sewage to back up, allegedly knocking out sewer service in Fernwood for a day or so.

But outside of my family's scurrilous streak, one of the recurring themes that has resonated with me about GG was the intensity of her relationship with my great-grandfather. They started dating when she was a teenager and he was a strapping young lad from Ohio who had journeyed to Westbury, Long Island with his brother, operating a tree surgery business. She was a clothing merchant's daughter and they met in front of her father's store. He was the most handsome of the boys she snapped in photos at Bar Beach in 1926, and she would walk with him down the aisle of the village Catholic Church in June of 1929. They smile and laugh in all their photos together. They wasted no time starting a family and exactly one pregnancy term after they were married, they had their first child, my grandmother, followed by my great-uncle two years later.

They were very close. Despite the nearby city, they lived very rural and suburban lives. He worked mostly as a homebuilder while they tended a peach orchard and grew raspberries and strawberries. They took trips together and enjoyed life together. They swam in the ocean together and won jitterbug contests together. I often look upon their family as a model of how to value the things that matter and let go of the things that don't. They enjoyed themselves and their surroundings and didn't let their jobs, past drama, or the troubles of the world get in their way. They were always peeking behind the veneer of life for something that might be fun or adventurous. I have to remember sometimes to ignore my tendencies towards earnestness and, instead, (for all its triteness) "seize the day." There is a lot out there to enjoy, it's not hard to find, and it's what makes all the other mundane details worth it.

I was fortunate to know her and to know her for so long. She was a glimpse into another life and another era. She embodied the kind of lessons that can be learned from the past, and I feel blessed to have had the sight with which to read them.

2010-04-02T10:07:00.006-04:00

Last month I was asked to participate in Roebuck Elementary's annual Career Fair. It was really fun and also pretty enlightening. To prepare, I typed up and photocopied some handouts and gathered up a few artifacts... still not entirely settled on how to handle the presentation. I haven't had much experience with fourth graders since I left the fourth grade, so I didn't know what level of comprehension and background knowledge they would have. I knew the general concepts I wanted to cover but beyond that, figured I would just play it by ear.

When I got there, they shuffled me along to the media center where they assembled all the presenters and filled us up with coffee and bagels. It was pretty funny to look around. I think kids have a pretty skewed exposure to the types of careers that exist and are common. At least when I was that age, I remember talking more about zookeepers and cartoonists than about distribution managers and sales representatives. Well, in looking around the room, it was clear that selective forces had already been at work. There were nurses and pharmacists and photographers and farmers, but not very many representatives of boring but more common jobs. Everyone also seemed to be trying to fit into what a child would see as their role. I know I thought about it when I got dressed that morning. I wore a red plaid shirt and a brown corduroy blazer with khakis. Pretty typical fare for me, but it definitely had a deliberate academic air. The other presenters were doing the same thing, though. Policemen in dress uniform, nurses with a stethoscope, the whole bit.

After a mini-interview on their closed-circuit morning news, I went off to Mr. Green's fourth graders for my first of six 20-minute presentations. I ended up having a few components to my spiel. I impressed upon them the value of local history and how it could have as much or more relevance to their lives than national-level history. Then I discussed kinds of resources useful in my job, and I wrapped it up by talking about how to gather and preserve family history.

I was really surprised at how well it went. They paid attention and asked questions and were generally very interested. After each presentation, half a dozen or more would come up to me and hurriedly tell me about some family story of theirs, or plead to look closer at the Civil War-era diary I brought as an example. I left there thinking how much potential there is to sow the seeds for a more widespread interest in local history. They had just been learning about the French and Indian War in social studies, but I could tell it was distant and irrelevant to them (no big surprise there). On the other hand, they were fascinated by seeing old photos of Spartanburg and were eager to orient themselves ("ooh, that's where Wild Wings is!!").

It was really encouraging, not only to actually expose these kids to an interesting field, but to see how receptive they were. I think there is a real opportunity to get local history into schools again, especially once teachers see how it can make their social studies curricula sink in. Plus, an early interest in local history could help encourage hometown pride, which could be good for the local economy and help retain the talented kids who are too often eager to leave when they turn 18. Other benefits include a greater interest in historic preservation and better support for local history institutions. Is there a career opportunity here?

2010-02-23T09:49:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the months-long hiatus. I've taken on a few too many projects these days and blogging has fallen close to the bottom of the pile, along with cooking and bathing. (ha?)

I'll try to make it up to you, my legion of loyal viewers, by showing you an incredible resource, just recently released.

For those of you not constantly immersed in the research and library worlds, folks in this field have been doing a lot of soul-searching for the past decade or so as more and more information is accumulated and transferred to digital formats. Ideas abound about what this means for the preservation and accessibility of information for present and future researchers, and what this means for the future of other, non-digital formats.
I'm not properly prepared to enter this discussion, it's really messy and scary. I'll just say that libraries everywhere have had to reassess what their core purposes are, and how they can best keep up with this wave of change.

This all hit close to home recently when I was doing a random Google search and I turned up a few unexpected hits. A little exploration revealed that Google had digitized and indexed the complete catalogue of Spartanburg Herald-Journals from 1875 to the present. The effect this has on local history research can't be overstated. A little trial and error has shown that the index is far from perfect. The OCR read missed a ton of keywords, and issues are missing, but it doesn't matter. This is a gigantic new resource for local researchers and the most locally-significant digitization effort since Ancestry.com finished the U.S. Census records.

But there's another side to this. For over a decade, the library has undertaken its own project to index the Herald-Journal, issue-by-issue, by article subject. Right now the responsibility for this project falls on one person's shoulders, with minimal digital assistance. This is and will still be a significant resource, but it can't be ignored that Google's lightning-fast, loose and inaccurate indexing certainly lessens our projects's impact.

I don't know how long it took Google to do this, but I can imagine that with a bank of automated, high-speed microfilm digitization stations and nearly unlimited memory and processing power, they could have digitized the 1000 or so rolls of microfilm in a few days? A week? Add to that another week for an OCR read, and maybe a few days to make the transition to being online? It's incredible. And to think it's taken over a decade for a far different kind of non-digital effort.

One thing the library still has going for it: you can't print or download the pages from Google, but copies from our set of microfilm cost 20 cents.

2009-12-01T11:09:00.007-05:00

Historical Humor

Humor can be extremely revealing. It can give voice to otherwise inexpressible thoughts and it can be used as a tool to bond the humorist and the (humoree?). For these reasons, expressions of humor can be a valuable resource for historians eager to gauge the opinions and perspectives of a particular person, place or time. It can also give insights into fleeting historical contexts.

I recently stumbled across just such a piece of historical humor that hits upon the most sensitive chapter in Southern history. Despite its purely benign intention, it is a joke that would never be made today. In fact it's so sensitive that I've been nervous about sharing it for the past couple of weeks. My hope, however, is that I can give enough context to make any reader understand why it is important to expose and study this without casting any scorn on the people and institutions involved. Here's what I found:

My first reaction after seeing this in the clubs section of the 1900 Converse College yearbook was a surprised expletive or two. Converse had a chapter of the KKK active on campus?! And they were proud enough to show it off (names included) in the yearbook?! But after the shock faded, it became clear that a few of my assumptions were wrong. Taking a closer look at the rhyme, I saw that the organization's mission was to "torment the faculty." Also, by including the names of the members, it clearly wasn't a secret society. Plus, the photo is a hokey, staged depiction of a night-time raid, complete with a lantern and an over-abundance of firearms. And then of course, I remembered that the KKK wasn't exactly a women's institution.

So this was a joke: a pretend student club to terrorize college professors. It would be funny without the awful, heavy, blood-soaked baggage. But what exactly is that baggage and what changed to make this so terribly distasteful?

The answer lies in the precise period in which this joke was made. It also helps to have some background on the history of the KKK. The oversimplified (and still controversial) story is that the KKK had two periods of activity and that its mission shifted between those two periods. It was born in late 1865 just as the South entered Reconstruction as a reaction to perceived wrongs committed on the Old South ruling classes by newly emancipated slaves, carpetbaggers, and unsympathetic Southerners. The corruption and mistakes of Reconstruction-era politics are well documented, and the KKK was widespread among otherwise benign Southerners because it was a counterbalance to other wrongs. Two wrongs don't make a right, but with any luck they can make a tense standstill, and it was a long time before violence stopped begetting violence. But by the 1880s, with the end of Reconstruction coming in 1876, the KKK had lost its need for existence. By 1900, it was a foggy memory. Enough time had passed to make it an acceptable joke. It reminds me of the South Park episode that reasons that 20 years is the amount of time that has to pass before a serious issue can become a joke.

The reason that this joke can't work now, though, is primarily because of the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s. While the previous incarnation stressed the wrongs of a corrupt political structure, this newer version was more explicitly white supremacist and xenophobic. Hatred towards various ethnicities, non-Protestant religions, and Communism became a key point of the revised rhetoric. As the decades passed, it was also much more of a fringe organization, while the earlier version had more widespread sympathy.

With this context it becomes easier to understand how a group of teenage college girls could laughingly violate what has become one of the strongest American taboos. 1900 was a window in time when the KKK didn't exist and reviving its memory could be funny to a group of wealthy white girls. It was also over half a century before the Civil Rights Era would begin to push out the antebellum ideology that assumed white superiority.

Only true history dorks need read further.

I want to issue a disclaimer that I'm aware of some of the racist agendas that have been put forth using this "Dunning School" interpretation of Reconstruction as a period of corruption and mismanagement. Here's my view: Despite the best intentions and limited successes of some who were involved in Reconstruction politics, post-war politics anywhere are bound to be messy, particularly when a large percentage of the electorate is so new to the political process. Rational evaluation, that cornerstone of the democratic process, is nearly impossible for anyone in such a situation, especially when there are so many forces desperate for a piece of the pie in a war-torn state of economic collapse and near anarchy. In such a state, corruption and mismanagement seem almost inevitable.

2009-10-28T17:06:00.008-04:00

Spartanburg's Nightmare Days

Rather than rattle off the story of a murder or haunting, my post this month has more to do with the ghost of a vision, one that haunts a lot of the leadership in Spartanburg. With municipal elections less than a week away, this ghost was suddenly resurrected about a week ago by one of the mayoral candidates.

The ghost I'm referring to is one of the darkest chapters in downtown's history: the period from the 1960s through the 1990s. This was when downtown was depopulated and crime-ridden and city leaders tried one scheme after another to revitalize our crumbling town. Typical of most small American cities, suburbs and the white flight trend that populated them sapped money and interest from downtown. This was compounded by the slow decline of the textile industry that had buoyed up a lot of the business in the city. Top it off with a series of misguided planning errors and downtown Spartanburg had four decades of loss and stagnation.

One of the earliest attempts to get people back downtown was to widen and expand the roadways. I guess the logic was that a smoother traffic flow would get people circulating and take them to their destinations downtown faster.
It didn't work. Instead, we still have buildings with their sides and fronts lobbed off. Downtown became little more than a speed bump between the east and west sides.

Perhaps the second major attempts were the well-documented Urban Renewal projects on the southside and northside. The goal was to move impoverished families out of the sub-standard housing and into more modern (and more compact) housing. Vast, depopulated boulevards (East Daniel Morgan and Hudson Barksdale) were created in their wake. Needless to say, all it did was further embitter the African-American community and wipe out small businesses.

The best known attempt was the Main Street Mall, which closed vehicular traffic to East Main Street between Converse Street and Church Street from 1974 to 1989. This project was modeled after similar pedestrian malls in other cities and was believed to be the best way to compete with the suburban shopping malls that themselves mimicked downtown storefronts. There was great hope for this million-dollar project, but as in other cities, the project failed and downtown continued on its downward spiral.

Another aborted plan was the Spartan Centre project, which sought to reconfigure Morgan Square and replace the 19th century storefronts that lined the square with an enormous mid-1970s indoor marketplace. This project lost momentum quickly, but not before the north side of the square was leveled, including Spartanburg's first skyscraper, the 1912 Andrews Building. The resulting lot (called the Opportunity Block) was vacant from 1977 until 2003, when the Extended Stay headquarters was constructed. This project even had fatalities. Five people died during the unexpected collapse of the Andrews Building during its demolition.

The late 1980s also produced another plan to reconfigure the square and build a hotel in the vacant Opportunity Block. This plan also recommended the removal of the Main Street Mall, the only part of the plan actually implemented.

It's difficult to put a finger on how things began to turn around. But beginning in the 1990s, my sense is that people began to take a little more pride in downtown. It may have been the 1990 construction of the Spartan Foods Tower (now most often known as the Denny's Building). Another possibility could be that the events held downtown started bringing return visitors who took notice of the urban landscape. The 1997 construction of the new Spartanburg County Public Library headquarters certainly had a huge impact. Perhaps the 1999 historic facade easement program, which led to the restoration of several downtown storefronts, encouraged people to notice the decorative brick building facades. The construction of the Extended Stay Headquarters and the Advance America Building brought white collar workers to downtown every day, as did the QS1 Building. Beginning in 2005, Hub-Bub provided consistent nightlife and cultural options and gave downtown a boost of creative momentum leading up to the 2007 completion of the Chapman Cultural Center.

2005 was also the year that approximately 2 acres of sterile blacktop was unearthed and replaced with a verdant community gathering spot that has hosted Wednesday Farmer's Markets, Jazz on the Square, homecoming celebrations, outsider art shows, community pep rallies, and scores of other events. Our historic city center is now the ultimate spot of pride, and our downtown has begun to flourish around it.

Thinking that our downtown park should be ripped out is emblematic of a flawed understanding about how communities thrive, not to mention short-sighted and monetarily wasteful. In my mind there is no doubt that Spartanburg has positive momentum going and the progress made in the past several years has been uplifting and beneficial to our community. Spartanburg's nightmare days are past us, but the understanding it takes to continue forward is only barely grasped by city council. With the passage of Bill Barnet's mayoral tenure, the city faces a critical transition. I just hope that the city council continues to build upon the first successful foundation our downtown has created in 50 years.

2009-09-22T11:10:00.007-04:00

You might have noticed from some of my previous posts that I have a fascination with land use. In particular, I enjoy dense urban spaces, sweeping rural farmland, and untended wilderness. But truth be told, the suburban middle ground has always been tricky territory for me.

Call it nostalgia, but when I look at maps and aerial photos of Spartanburg before cars became quite so widespread, I envy the development patterns I see. The first true aerial photograph I've ever seen of Spartanburg dates from about 1927 (not surprising since that's the year the airport opened). That photo shows a dense downtown pretty much the same size as the one still there, urban neighborhoods, a tight ring of suburbs, and miles upon miles of farmland.

Of course the 82 years that have elapsed since that photograph was taken have brought substantial changes. But in at least one way, things actually haven't changed much at all. Based on the way land use has changed in Spartanburg, you might be tempted to think that our population has exploded. But that's just not true.

The population of the city in 1930? Just over 28,000.

70 years later in 2000? 39,000.

That's a growth of only 39% despite seventy years of border expansions, baby boomers, and all the rest. To add a little more perspective on that, Spartanburg's population rose by about 24% in just the ten years from 1920 to 1930.

In many ways, that meager 39% is the story of small town America, and compared to most, Spartanburg has done well.

But that's really not what I think about most when I look at that photo and compare it with what I see here now. I wonder: Why are we using all this space despite such a small population growth? Is this really the best way to lay out a society? Are we really willing to pay this price for land-use freedom? Why should "the market" dictate this for us? Ignore for a minute all the political complications in this and just think about it: using so much land is wasteful and irresponsible.

And who or what can change it? Our society needs an answer because it needs to change somehow.

2009-07-30T14:22:00.003-04:00

Part of what makes the Carolina Piedmont such a distinctive area within the South is the ancestry of its inhabitants. While other parts of the Carolinas are filled with large populations of folks with English, French-Huguenot, West African, and German heritage, ours is largely Scots-Irish. So understanding the characteristics of the Scots-Irish is vital to understanding the cultural heritage of the Carolina Piedmont. The continuity of this culture is so strong that it's even been said that if you want to meet the Scots-Irish, just go find a redneck!

While for some, the terms "redneck" and "hillbilly" conjure up negative stereotypes, for others, they can be a source of pride and a basis for identity. After all, the backwoods hicks of South Carolina pioneered this remote frontier in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, defeated the British Army at the Battle of Cowpens, stood up to unbalanced tariffs during the Nullification Crisis, fought and sacrificed for Southern independence, formed the backbone of the 19th and 20th century textile economy, and have given their sons and daughters to the causes of liberty and justice around the world. In fact, one of the strongest threads that runs through the combined histories of the Scots-Irish pioneer and the Carolina hillbilly is their fierce independence.

Many historical chapters illustrate the independent streak of our local population, but I was reminded of one recently when the museum accepted a rather large artifact into its collection. We were given an heirloom that had been passed down in the donor's wife's family since 1928, when Deputy Sheriff John William Becknell retired from the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department. As a retirement gift, the officers of the Sheriff's Department presented Mr. Becknell with a copper whiskey still that had been confiscated during a raid in Spartanburg earlier that year. His family kept the hand-forged copper vat until donating it recently.

Homemade spirits have been produced locally since shortly after crops were first grown by Scots-Irish settlers, and despite taxes, laws, and violence, moonshine remained a part of the backwoods way of life. Folks who have studied this topic in the context of Southern history and economics will tell you that moonshine is, in many ways, a product of the Piedmont and Appalachian landscape. When small-scale farmers were able to produce anything beyond what was needed for basic subsistence, transportation became one of the biggest roadblocks. Transporting crops to market is difficult for isolated communities linked only by hilly, mud-filled roadways, and crops might spoil by the time they reached a market. It was far easier and more cost-effective to repackage your corn and grains into a substance that was more compact, brought in good revenue, and would keep unspoiled for years. Moonshine was just such a substance. When homemade spirits became taxed, regulated, and eventually outlawed, it pitted independent-minded locals against agents of the government, a common theme in local history. These battles between moonshiners and "revenuers" intensified during Prohibition, when distilling whiskey became especially profitable for farmers still reeling from the arrival of the boll weevil. Even now, raids do occur, although changes in the economy, and the overall decline of rural life have all but squelched the moonshine tradition. This time, though, it's being given up voluntarily.

Chalk up another victory to redneck independence!

2009-06-23T13:38:00.002-04:00

Even though it was the closest thing to civilization for miles around, early Spartanburg was far from civilized. Stories abound about these "wild west" days from the 1780s to the 1850s, when the village was much closer to the American frontier.

Supposedly a couple of Charleston lawyers once had business that brought them to the Spartanburg Courthouse. After an arduous journey of several days through wooded hillsides and treacherous muddy roads, they finally made it to the courthouse square where they found lodging between a couple of saloons. Since it was around dusk already, they bedded down for the night and went to sleep. They were awoken in the middle of the night by a crowd of a dozen or more drunk locals whooping and hollaring in the middle of the square. Just as the two gentlemen lawyers got to the windows to see the commotion, the crowd grew even more unruly and started firing their guns into the air with wild abandon. Astonished and frightened for their lives, the two hunkered down for the night and departed at daybreak, determined to escape this bastion of lawlessness and immorality without delay... court affairs be damned.

The laws entered into the books also give a glimpse of some of the other problems with Spartanburg's unruly population. The flat stretch of East Main Street, between Converse Street and Pine Street apparently was popular among young men who would race their horses without regard to pedestrians and other traffic. It is so surprising then, that this area would give birth to NASCAR in later years?

The large number of downtown saloons, the unruly population, and the complete lack of churches in downtown Spartanburg resulted in one visitor (possibly one of the Charlestonians) labeling Spartanburg "that wicked little village."

Although the saloons stuck around--to say nothing of the unruly population--Spartanburg presumably ceased being wicked by the mid-1830s, when Baptist and Methodist congregations were formed nearly simultaneously.

2009-05-11T09:08:00.001-04:00

To all the fans of Spartanburg, please show up to this event on May 27th at 5:30pm on Morgan Square. It should really be a blast.

Read all about it here: http://www.showupforspartanburg.org/

2009-04-28T16:11:00.008-04:00

I was browsing through materials in the Kennedy Room recently when I came across a fascinating 1788 summary of the debates that took place in the SC House of Representatives on whether or not to consider the adoption of the current United States Constitution. One quote, a reply from Charles C. Pinckney of Charleston to James Lincoln of Ninety-Six District, particularly caught my eye. Remember that as it was originally adopted, the Constitution did not include a Bill of Rights.

"With regard to liberty of the press, the discussion of that matter was not forgot by the members of the convention; it was fully debated, and the impropriety of saying any thing about it in the constitution clearly evinced. The general government has no powers but what are expressly granted to it; it therefore has no power to take away the liberty of the press--that invaluable blessing which deserves all the encomiums the gentleman has justly bestowed upon it, is secured by all our state constitutions, and to have mentioned it in our general constitution would perhaps furnish an argument hereafter that the general government had a right to excercise powers not expressly delegated to it. For the same reason we had no bill of rights inserted in our constitution, for as we might perhaps have omitted the enumeration of some of our rights, it might hereafter be said we had delegated to the general government a power to take away such of our rights as we had not enumerated; but by delegating express powers we certainly reserve to ourselves every power and right not mentioned in the constitution."

The argument General Pinckney makes here is still strikingly relevant. The framers of the Constitution were so interested in preserving individual liberties that they deliberately left out a listing of rights in the Constitution for fear that rights beyond those listed might be eroded by future federal laws. The counter-argument to this, I suppose, would be that without the guarantee of certain rights by the federal government, states might take away individual liberties. Either way, it demonstrates the very high premium the framers of the Constitution placed on maximizing individual liberties and minimizing federal authority.

This is a tricky topic for me. On the one hand, I generally favor maximum local control. I sympathize with folks who worry about the decreasing power of local governments and the increasing power of national and international forces. This dovetails with my serious concern over globalization and the homogenization of cultures worldwide. I lament that, like so many Southerners of my generation, I have only a very minimal Southern accent and I'm frustrated by how similar Spartanburg's suburbs look to the suburbs of every other town in the United States. How much this has to do with the balance of power between levels of government is tough to say. I won't get into it here, but I think the answer has to do with the power of corporations and the power of government to limit them.

So I would be all about maximum local control (within the current framework) were it not for a few huge issues that cannot be solved on that level. Managing the issues resulting from globalization (such as runaway corporate influence) is one of those problems. The other is the environment. Spartanburg could become the greenest city in the world (ha!), and it wouldn't make a dent in the problems facing the environment. That's not to say that anyone should give up. Every effort is desperately needed. One way or another: it HAS to be solved. Or we go extinct. People need to get extremely serious about this. There is no counter-argument that can be made. Unsustainability = human extinction.

And that's a whole lot bigger than worrying about whether someone in Columbia votes for something or whether someone in Washington does.

By the way, every single representative of the Spartan District at the 1788 SC Constitutional Convention voted against adopting the United States Constitution, presumably because of the loss of local control.

2009-04-10T18:35:00.000-04:00

Now that I've been working as a full-time local historian for about two years, I've grown to realize that my primary historical interest has to do with land use and urban spaces. That's not to say that I don't have other interests within local history also, but I seem to frequently come back to investigating changes in the visual appearance and use of space in Spartanburg. The two primary research media for those interests are photography and maps. Photography comes up all the time in my work, and I hope to someday make it an even more central part of my job, but I seldom get the opportunity to focus much time on maps.

Fortunately for me, though, I've been spending nearly all of my time at the history museum lately working with historic maps and blueprints. All this work is in preparation for the next exhibit, which opens at the end of this month. The exhibit, Charting our Heritage, focuses on maps depicting Spartanburg and surrounding areas from the 18th century onward. At this stage, there is still a good bit of work left to do, although my current focus (encapsulating maps in conservation-grade plastic) is wrapping up. (punny?)

It should be a really wonderful exhibit, so please come and check it out. And for those of you in Hampton Heights, Converse Heights, the east side, or downtown, there will be more than a few maps of your neighborhood worth checking out.

By the way, as much as I wish the illustration above were a real book, I should confess that it's merely a shamelessly Photoshopped real atlas cover.

2009-03-12T18:20:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the long gap in posts. I recently took on a position in the public library's local history room, bringing my job count up to three. Woo-hoo!

The new schedule is a little hectic and on top of it all, I've got a tenacious, but not entirely debilitating cold. Excuses. excuses. excuses.

I'm excited about a new program I'm spearheading as part of my job with SCHA, though. We're now hosting downtown walking tours once a month, and more often as demand allows. For $10, participants can take a tour of downtown while looking through a notebook of historic photos that date from the 1880s to the 1960s. We share funny and informative stories about downtown Spartanburg, lament the loss of great old buildings, and imagine alternatives. In addition to the healthy light exercise, you experience downtown in a vastly different way when you walk rather than drive. It's a great way to spend about an hour and a half. So if you're interested, tell me!

Here's all the info (click to enlarge):

2009-02-03T18:54:00.002-05:00

White Gold

One of my regular conservation tasks involves removing photos from old frames that can (and often do) cause damage to the original photographic print. Usually the damage comes from the acidity of the board used to back the photo, but sometimes the glass has trapped in dust and grime that stain the photo. Other times, the nails or tacks have rusted and discolored the paper. In one case, water damage had sealed the emulsion to the glass in a bond that would not be broken. I tried a few different techniques to separate them, but nothing seemed to work and all the materials I read seemed to agree that my efforts were probably useless.

Lesson of the day: matte your prints!

Fortunately most frame removals aren't so catastrophic.
Today I removed a World War I print from a 1920s-era frame after noting the dirty glass and acid-stained backing. Here's the scene, minus the photo itself:

It's always a treat to see what people used as backing for these photos. Any stiff paper will do, so from the 1950s on, most do-it-yourself framers used cardboard, which is extremely acidic and very damaging. But this framer used part of an old movie poster.

A little research turned up the name of the movie: White Gold. For those of you not immediately familiar with unsuccessful silent movies from 1927, here's one heart-stopping scene:

Now the question is: what am I supposed to do with a scrap from a 1927 movie poster?

p.s. - The secondary paper backing, which appears in the photo, seems to be wallpaper!

2009-01-19T15:40:00.008-05:00

More Collections Goodies!

As part of my duties as Collections Manager, I accept and process artifacts that come into the Historical Association's collection. About once a week or so, someone will call or come into the museum with something they would like to give us. More often than not, it is something that doesn't fit the parameters we've set up to determine what gets accepted by the museum. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes it's just too big and costly to maintain. We've turned down wagons and pianos because we really can't accommodate them, even though they might be great pieces. But we've also turned down 1960s hair driers and metal trash cans. Most frequently, though, the reason for turning something down is that it doesn't relate much to Spartanburg County.

I tend to be somewhat conservative about accepting the bric-a-brac that is offered to us, but there is one broad category of artifacts for which I'm a real sucker: documents and photographs.

What coerces me into accepting documents and photographs is that they take up so little space and require relatively little upkeep. They're also loaded with information, sometimes valuable, sometimes not. In short, I love them... especially the photos. There is nothing like seeing an image of another time. Beyond reliving a memory, it's the closest I get to time traveling.

Because of all this, I had difficulty composing myself last week when we received a quite large donation of photos and papers from the Montgomery family. If you're familiar with Spartanburg, you're probably aware of the Montgomery family, who have had a significant influence on the affairs of the city and county since the late-19th century. And because they've been in the midst of prominent business and social circles for so many years, the documentation of their lives sheds a lot of light on the history of the city and county.

For example: how many families do you know that have original 1880s-era photos of Morgan Square tucked away with family snapshots?

This one shows the Square sometime between 1884 and 1890.

The Montgomery family is also responsible for a few of the skyline changes to downtown. Here's one example you just might know:

Before, ca. 1900

After, ca. 1925

I've got a lot to go through. 2009 is shaping up to be a great year for the SCHA collection!

2009-01-08T16:35:00.004-05:00

First collections donation of the new year!

Harry Price of Price's Store for Men, a downtown fixture for over 100 years, brought in a couple of 1920s-1930s account books from his store on Main Street earlier today.

Account books, though somewhat dull on the surface, can be a hidden source of great information often not found in more standard research media. These specific books list standard details such as names of store patrons, dates, descriptions of purchases, and prices. But unlike many other account books, they also often list addresses and patron employment information. A typical entry looks like this:

Mr. L. L. McMillan
c/o Post Office

1928
June 2: Suit ($35) and Hat ($5): $40 debit
June 16: 1 Belt: $1 debit

June 2: $15 credit
June 16: $10 credit
July 20: $3 credit
Sept 5: $3 credit
Sept 19: $5 credit
Oct. 5: $2.50 credit
Oct. 19: $2.50 credit

Sure, there's a lot of insignificant information in there, but there are a few good details too. For instance, Mr. McMillan worked for the Post Office, and he bought one complete outfit on credit in the summer of 1928. He paid it off by the end of the year in steady payments.

These books also tell us something about Harry's grandfather. During a very turbulent time in race relations, he allowed African-Americans into his store and even extended them credit. Also, many of the store credits were never paid, which made riding out the Great Depression even harder for his business.

Anyway, it's a great addition to the collection. Many thanks to Harry and especially to Harry's grandfather for alphabetizing his records!

(By the way, Mr. McMillan had, at the time of his purchase, very recently completed building his new home in Hampton Heights, and 81 years later it became my house!)

2008-12-22T12:08:00.003-05:00

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Thanks for a great first year of Hub City Historian. I've appreciated all the feedback I've received, and I hope to continue to hear from you. I hope you and yours all have a great holiday and a happy new year!

-Brad

2008-12-01T18:00:00.002-05:00

Two posts ago, I left off with Thomas Williamson donating (or selling... two sources differ) two acres of his land to the county for the construction of a courthouse, jail, and public square. The map I mentioned earlier suggests that his land may have been chosen because of its central location in the county, but I still wonder how those particular two acres ended up as the site.

Those couple of acres happen to be on the western face of the sloping ridge that separates the Pacolet and Tyger River watersheds. They're not on the highest spot of land on that ridge, and in fact there is land very close by that is situated at a higher elevation. So why wouldn't they have placed the town at the peak of the ridge? The answer may lie in the basement of a building on Magnolia Street.

I like to pay attention to topography... if you keep an eye out, sometimes you can catch a good view of distant hills or spot a tiny stream of flowing water on its way to the ocean. In an urban landscape, sometimes it can give you historical clues too. You might notice that Magnolia Street dips down a little bit between Morgan Square and St. John Street. Check out the parallel streets and you'll notice that a little valley begins at that little dip. On Church Street between Main and St. John, there's not much of a dip at all, but there's a pretty big one on North Spring Street in that block. Well, underneath the sushi restaurant on Magnolia, there's a tiny little spring that bubbles up and flows (now through underground pipes) towards Greenville Branch, a tributary of Fairforest Creek. Greenville Branch is piped under West Main Street near Wakefield's, but you can catch glimpses of it elsewhere on its course. It used to be the source of the mill pond at Spartan Mills.

Anyway, that little spring may be the reason for Morgan Square's exact placement. The original courthouse stood so that its front door was only a step or two west from where the Morgan Monument stands now. Across the Square, near where the fountain is now, was the original site of the jail. In addition to those two buildings, there was a whipping post, stocks, and a pillory. I believe that the jail may have also contained a scaffold for hangings. A tree nearby might have served the purpose also.

In the square's early days, there was little else other than the public buildings. By 1809, 22 years after its establishment, there were six small buildings on the square that served mainly as hotels for folks with business at court. In 1810, Jesse Cleveland supposedly became the village's first merchant when he built a dry goods store about where the old waterworks building is now. Others soon followed, and by 1831, the residents of the little village received a charter of incorporation and Spartanburg became a town with a mayor, elections, and the authority to tax.

More on the evolving shape of the "square" next time...

2008-11-15T14:13:00.004-05:00

A few nights ago, I faced a significant trial of priorities when I attended the city's monthly Historic Architecture Review Board (HARB) meeting. This board is designed to make decisions about the appropriateness of architectural changes in locally-established historic districts, which currently consists only of Hampton Heights and the Morgan Square area. They have a set of guidelines that allow them to make informed decisions about the costs and benefits of preservation versus restoration versus alteration.

At their recent meeting, an applicant had requested the authority to replace two windows on the facade of his house, primarily because they were significant sources of energy loss. The applicant is attempting to get LEED certification for his house, and if he is successful, it will be only the second LEED-certified house in South Carolina, and one of the first historic houses to be certified in the country. LEED-certification is a way to show that a building meets several measures of energy conservation and low environmental impact. It's one of the few ways to verify that a building really is "green," and getting certification is a very big deal. It's hard to do in new buildings, much less drafty older buildings.

The applicant who wanted to change out the two windows had recently moved to Spartanburg from Madison, Wisconsin, where he had been studying environmental science for several years. He's hoping to be a part of Wofford's new environmental studies program.

Several years ago, most of his house's windows had been replaced by new double-paned window sashes which are enormously more energy efficient than the original loose, single-paned sashes. Additionally, most of the original panes of glass had already been replaced by mass-produced glass that lacks the wavy characteristics of historic glass. We were shown photographs of the proposed new windows and photographs of the "original" windows (the ones with the replaced glass). The photographs were nearly identical. Without a caption, I would have had no idea there was a distinction. These windows are simple "1 over 1" windows, with only large single glass panes. Furthermore, the proposed replacement windows were to be wooden, rather than vinyl or aluminum.

The strict preservation standpoint in this case would hold that the energy efficiency can be addressed by storm windows, which are permitted in the guidelines, so the original windows should be left intact, regardless of their only partial originality.

The energy efficiency standpoint would hold that the new wood windows would be more efficient than the old ones and would allow for free airflow during good weather (which a storm window of the kind proposed would not). Others costs to consider would be the environmental impact of the production of the new window and the destruction of the old, which the owner envisioned using for other projects. Reuse of un-used materials is an element examined during LEED-certification.

This was a highly-contentious case in part because it would set a precedent for LEED-certification of historic homes, and no one wants to see charming historic windows ripped out without consideration for historic integrity. Similarly, no one wants to make it impossible for an historic home to be LEED-certified. In fact, we should want to encourage this. Especially if Spartanburg has the chance to be one of the first in the nation.

In the end, I actually fell on the side of allowing him to replace the windows. When I came to the meeting, I leaned towards the strict preservation interpretation. But it seemed to me that the visual match of the new windows with the old windows, the homeowner's interest in reusing the older materials, and the advantages of a new, energy-efficient window were all very significant points. By no means should historic windows be discarded as a standard practice in eco-restoration, but so long as the charming elements (the pane configuration, the hardware, the visual texture, and the crisp definitions) are left intact, why not save the earth a few thousand tons of carbon dioxide... and some money to boot?

So, historic-minded citizens of Spartanburg, what do you think?

2008-11-06T15:40:00.011-05:00

Morgan Square is the center of the city of Spartanburg, both historically and geographically. For a time, though, it could be argued that it was not the cultural or economic center of the community. In those years, downtown was crumbling and nearly abandoned, a victim of shifting demographics.

When I was a youngun in the 1980s and early 1990s, Morgan Square was a curiosity on the way from my parents' house to the west side of town. It was a place where I might marvel at the older architecture for a few minutes before we got back to the highway once again. We hardly ever stopped, or looked back.

Fortunately, Morgan Square is doing far better these days. At least in my world, it has once again resumed its role as the epicenter of community life. I live, work and play downtown... something that would have been far less common just ten years ago.

So in tribute to Morgan Square's increasing relevance, I thought you might enjoy hearing about its beginnings to gain an understanding of why things are situated the way they are.

First, a little background:

Although European traders and explorers had been venturing into this area as early as the 1500s, settlement didn't really begin until the mid-18th century. By that time, settlers had begun inching up the Tyger, Fairforest, and Pacolet Rivers, gradually pushing the frontier northwestward towards the mountains. It took a while for the law to catch up to this area, and for much of the mid-century, custom and force were the only governing principles. Militias took care of matters when things got out of hand, and land transactions were handled further away in Ninety Six, SC.

By 1785, the state government was ready to begin subdividing the hinterlands of the state so that the few courts in existence were less encumbered and so that they could gain a firmer grip on these lawless backwoods. In recognition of the Spartan Regiment mustered near modern Glendale during the Revolution, they named this district the Spartanburg County (later District and later still County again).

The first court session was held in June of 1785 at Anderson Mill, a grist mill that still stands on the North Tyger River. There they selected a sheriff and a coroner. The next two court sessions in September and December were held on the plantation of Thomas Williamson, whose land straddled the borders of the Pacolet and Tyger watersheds near the center of the county.

That December session, though, the court decided to establish and build the court house and public buildings on a small hill overlooking Fairforest Creek near where South Church Street crosses the creek now. The next four court sessions (March, June, September and December 1786) were held here until an order from the governor directed the court to be moved back to Thomas Williamson's.

Sometime around the new year, 1787, the decision had been made and the court moved back up to Thomas Williamson's. Williamson transferred two acres of his land to the county and soon afterwards a courthouse, jail, and public square were built. This is now the land that makes up Morgan Square.

But why (other than an order from the governor) was Thomas Williamson's land chosen?

This question seemed to be unanswerable based on the historic record until I began closely examining the oldest map of the county held by the museum. It shows a detailed, if skewed, view of the county along with principal roads, waterways, and points of interest. There are two lines that seem to divide the county into quadrants, running just off of the cardinal directions. Where these lines intersect, a circle is drawn along with the word "Center." Immediately beside this word is written "Williamson's." "Spartanburg" does not appear anywhere on the map.

This would suggest that Williamson's land may have been chosen because of its location in the center of the county (at least as it was drawn in this map and with its original borders). I've never heard this as an explanation, but based on this map and the actual location of the city, it seems to make sense.

Take a look at these places sometime and try to imagine the city being centered on Fairforest Creek or imagine downtown as a rural landscape with its natural hills and streams intact. If things had worked out only slightly differently, that's the way things would have been!

More on Morgan Square's history next time...

2008-10-22T16:08:00.009-04:00

I love my job the most when I take the role of a magician. How is a local historian like a magician, you may ask? With a few magic words, I can transform any number of broken pieces of old trash into objects of veneration and interest.

For instance, we've got a piece of a crumbling old brick in the collection. Big deal. Well, what if I tell you (with the authority of a real, live historian) that it was the first parcel package mailed by the Spartanburg Post Office around the turn of the century? Suddenly, it's kind of interesting. You might think, "Huh!" or "I'd like to see that."
Magic.

But I'm as much a victim of magic as I am one who wields it. Bits of junk catch my eye all the time and I want to snatch them up for the collection or for me. I'm particularly vulnerable, apparently, when it comes to stone.

Construction will soon begin on the new USC Upstate School of Business between the Cultural Center and the Montgomery Building on St. John Street. On my walk to lunch one day, I spied a hunk of granite half buried in the dirt a few feet from the sidewalk. So, as is my wont, I began thinking about the history of that site. There was a car repair shop and an abandoned railroad spur. Before that there was a National Guard Armory and a Southern Railway Freight Depot. Further back on the site, there was a loom factory that dated to the late 1800s. There was also an old private school, the Hastoc School, located on that site. Almost certainly, though, the granite has one specific origin: the 1920s-era National Guard Armory that had two-foot thick solid granite exterior walls. The building was demolished in 2002 to make way for the Renaissance Project and most of the granite was hauled away.

So after work one day last week, I put on some jeans and boots and brought my shovel to do a little on-site poking and prodding. I ended up unearthing several large chunks of granite, many of them finely coated with concrete grout remnants. Knowing that the whole site would soon be graded and the excess soil simply discarded, I took home these stones for some backyard landscaping projects. (It's not stealing, it's salvaging!)
I've also "salvaged" about two dozen local granite cobblestones and inherited (as in, they came with my house) stones used in Soil Conservation Service camps throughout the county.

But these aren't simply stones, they're nearly forgotten pieces of local history. They hold a kind of magic that prior human use has somehow given them, made all the more special by their re-discovery. I'm certain that this allure is what draws people to history museums and historic sites in the first place. Most of these things are insignificant without their stories. And a good storyteller can make any object, place, or experience holy. For me, having a head full of local history makes everywhere I go a sacred place. I try hard through research and exploration to add the lenses of the past to my views of the present. I want to be able to look past the years and see these places and these people at the different stages of their existence. I'm always excited to meet someone with deep family roots here because it means I can speculate that my ancestors ran into or knew their ancestors. And although I'm always sad/angry to see an old building go, I feel like I have a secret when I can look at a site and see what stood there years before, when others might only see a vacant lot or a newer building.

Want to know the secret to becoming a magician? Learn some local history!

2008-10-10T12:31:00.004-04:00

Just a short post this time. I recently put up the museum's latest exhibit, which explores some of Spartanburg's haunted places. It opened on Tuesday and we have had an extraordinary response since that time. Apparently lots of people are interested in local ghost stories.

Most of the ones I wrote about in the exhibit appear in publications about ghosts in the upstate, but the exhibit also includes a map of the city, with ghost sightings marked on the map with red circles. Several people have contributed their own stories, and we've added marks to the map accordingly.

Ghost stories are best told orally, so I dare not ruin any of the good ones by trying to reproduce them here.

I will, however, say that there are some spots in Spartanburg that need ghost stories, in my opinion.

Very few people know that there used to be stocks, a whipping post and a pillory on Morgan Square, or that the original jail was also located there. Although I've never heard one way or another, I speculate that the jail may have also had a gallows. The later jails did.

Then there is the story of John Henneman, the German-born jeweler and clock-making merchant who later became mayor of Spartanburg. He was murdered after trying to break up a fighting couple sometime in the very late 1800s. Can you imagine today if Bill Barnet heard a domestic squabble, drew his gun (presumably while carrying his concealed weapon permit), walked up into the house, and got shot dead? Don't do it, Bill!

I wonder whether there are any trees still standing where lynchings took place. Comparatively speaking there weren't that many in Spartanburg. But talk about a scary image: A lightning flash illuminates a dark figure, dead weight hanging from a tree limb, a twisted and beaten face.

The best haunted house I ever visited was in an old mill house and ever since then, I've thought that old mill villages at night were very creepy places. Generations of struggling families that could be kept on or cut off by the company at any given moment. Surely, some poor mill worker somewhere got fired and evicted and killed someone as retribution.

That's enough scariness for now. Don't these scenarios have the perfect elements for a good haunting? Maybe these ghosts do exist and no one has known enough to piece the elements together.

If you have a ghost story that takes place in Spartanburg, tell me!

2008-09-04T16:07:00.012-04:00

For those readers interested in local ecology, I thought I might present a few things to shed some light on the local environment and our changing relationship with it. I'll begin with a quote:

"At this day, the upper country of South Carolina presents a very different aspect from that of the same territory in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was then new and beautiful and as remarkable for the luxuriant richness of its landscape as it is still for the striking features of its rolling hills and its towering mountains, but under the iron tread of what is called a progressive civilization, its ancient glories of forest and flora and fertile soil have been well nigh washed and ruined."

If you're tuned in to environmental issues, you almost certainly wouldn't be surprised to read a quote like this in a modern publication, where people are increasingly aware of the changes our society is making to the ecology of the planet (as well as the ecology of our backyards). What might be a little surprising to you, though, is that this was written in 1859... long before asphalt, kudzu, gasoline, non-biodegradable plastics or any number of modern environmental ailments plagued this area.

John Henry Logan, who wrote the above in his History of the Upper Country of South Carolina, goes on to describe the native forests and wildlife of this area. The details are astonishing.

It is estimated that one in four trees was a towering American Chestnut, now extinct.
The trees were large and widely spaced, such that you could easily deer or buffalo at a great distance, with none of the scrubby undergrowth of today. In lush bottomlands, there was said to be nearly six feet of rich dark topsoil above the red clay we now consider to be the ground. Every waterway was crystal clear. You could see catfish swimming along the riverbeds in the six and ten feet deep waters of the Pacolet River.
Elk, buffalo, panthers (after whom the Tyger rivers were erroneously named), Carolina parakeets (native parrots that were later wiped out by lowcountry rice farmers), bear, wolf, otter and other rare or entirely gone animals were all common in our native woods. There were also patches of prairie formed by grazing buffalo, who established many of the trails that became Indian paths, which became wagon roads, etc. Blackstock Road and the old Georgia Road (one of the ancestors of I-85) are two examples of old buffalo trails.

The primary problem that Logan was referencing was intensive agriculture. Agriculture had existed in the Americas for over a thousand years by the time European settlers arrived, but most Native Americans used it in conjunction with hunting and gathering. Agriculture formed only a part of their diet because it is more susceptible to drought and requires a ton of work. And who wants more work than necessary?
Our native woods were in many ways the handiwork of Native Americans, who used controlled burns to clear out forest undergrowth and enrich the soil. They are also thought to have spread North America's largest native fruit, the Pawpaw.

Not only did intensive agriculture, as practiced by European settlers, clear forests and disperse wildlife, it dislodged the rich dark soils that had been held in place by the deep roots of the native forests and grasslands. As a result, even by 1855, much of the productive soil had washed away with every rain. This problem remain mostly unaddressed until the 1930s, when the Soil Conservation Service established one of the first erosion control projects in the country right here in Spartanburg County.

The Soil Conservation Service should get credit for a lot of things. They increased awareness about erosion control, they found practical methods to prevent erosion and they implemented those measures on dozens of farms in the county. And it's my understanding they did it for free, saving Great Depression-strapped farmers hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, though, the SCS itself had to learn about the dangers of non-native invasive species as a result of their efforts. They found a miracle plant that was entirely edible, took root easily in local soils and prevented erosion even in the worst gullies. The only problem is that once established, it entirely dominated the landscape, preventing native and more stable plants from reestablishing themselves. As you might have guessed, the plant they spread for many years was kudzu. Another non-native invasive species that has posed slightly less of a problem is lespedeza.

But despite their mistakes, the SCS made major advances in the cause of local environmental activism, long before the modern environmental movement came into being. Spartanburg in many ways is only now reawakening to the detrimental effects of runaway human activity on our landscape. But with any luck, effective land management, planning, and grassroots awareness will have even greater long-term repercussions. Just this past weekend, I stumbled across a small family, whose house stood close to a creek and nature preserve. They were watching with disgust as another neighbor was clearcutting land and moving loose soil with a bulldozer on the banks of that creek. As disheartened as I was to see the bulldozer and the irresponsible land use on the opposite bank, I was comforted by the awareness and strong feelings of the Mabry family, standing by their cozy little home. It's beyond me why some folks think that having concern for the local environment is an elitist, foreign idea. It strikes me as about the most down-to-earth practical belief one could have.

2008-08-21T11:09:00.011-04:00

Imagine that for every experience you've had over your many years of being alive, a little pearl has materialized that sums up that experience's impact on you. Some experiences may produce black pearls, or oblong pearls, or tiny barely-visible pearls, each depending on the flavor and significance of the experience.

When you're still young, there aren't enough pearls to see any emerging patterns, possible designs or groupings; but as you age, you may suddenly see a winding thread that links many of the pearls. Maybe there comes a time as your identity forms when some of the pearls somehow snap together, as if suddenly magnetized.

My interest in local history has emerged from this tabletop of pearls and I can trace back my interest through the years to memories formed when I was still a toddler. Now the linkages seem clear, but it has taken many years for them to be made apparent.

Probably the first such memory is of me visiting the hospital, where my grandmother lay dying from stomach cancer. I was barely three years old. I was the only grandchild my grandmother would ever know and my birth had rescued her from decades of depression, stemming from the loss of her first-born. My other memories of her are far fuzzier. Opening Christmas presents in her living room; playing with toys on a rug in a small room while she sat in a leather chair nearby. This particular memory is very clear, though. There are no photographs to crystallize it. I remember being short, straining to see up onto the bed where she lay smiling and talking with me. Her voice has disappeared over time. There was a hospital meal tray on a rolling stand nearby. I remember being called over to her. She had a gift for me. She leaned over to the drawer by her bed, pulled it open and handed me packets of Captain's Wafers that she had saved from her lunch of hospital soup. Thanks, Grandma! I loved crackers. I tottered back to my mother, who was dressed nicely to visit her ailing mother. She leaned down to me and in a soothing but sincere voice she urged me, "Brad, remember this."

Years later I would be sitting in a doctor's lobby with my great-grandparents, waiting for them to be called back for a routine check-up. My great-grandfather, a lively storyteller, was around 95 years old at the time. I was maybe 10. His voice bubbled and made long cello notes as he told stories. Understanding his speech was an art I had only begun to practice; my mother was an accomplished artist. While my mother tended to my great-grandmother, Poppa Stan began spinning a yarn about men waiting in trees. Or at least that's what I remember. It could have been anything, really. Lunatic fans at a baseball game, an experience in the First World War, stories passed down from his Confederate grandfather. I've tried to piece it together through the years, but the elements are too sparse and flimsy: men, in trees, waiting. It could just be the grainy snapshot invented by my mind. Were they jumping down on someone or something?

There was never a time my mother visited her grandparents without me after I was old enough to walk. These had been the only grandparents she'd known and they had raised her nearly as much as her own parents. She dearly loved her grandfather, a popular man in Cowpens. Being with him meant parading around town, receiving candy and compliments from smiling strangers. My mother was determined that my brother and I would know them, so we visited every few weeks. Most of the time, we took them out to dinner (not to be confused with supper). The venue varied, but the experience was nearly the same. I would watch them eat steamed cabbage, pinto beans and other oddities while I stuck close to my mac and cheese and hamburgers. Other times he would pitch tennis balls to me from a whitewashed swing as I wielded a broken plastic baseball bat. I hear that memory more than I see it. A light green comet streaks into a nearby field: "Whoo-wee! Looooord ahhv muh-see!" His high-pitched laughter echoing through the shady yard.

The historical details would only be pasted on in retrospect or visible to my adult eyes through the videotapes made during one of our visits. Poppa Stan had been a textile league baseball player throughout Spartanburg County from the 1910s through the 1940s. In the video, he comes back into the house after pitching balls. Winded, but with glistening eyes, he tells the room, "Boy, I wish we could really play ball."

These memories laid some of the foundation for a family history report I created in the 8th grade. Poppa Stan and Greatma were gone then, but my mother had plenty of stories pass down from them. Relatives, newspaper clippings, and books in the library had others. I treasure these stories as inherited memories and the details invented by my mind to fill in the tiny gaps made them that much more real. There's the memory passed down from Poppa Stan's grandfather, the Confederate soldier from White Plains, in eastern Spartanburg County. On a cold night in Virginia, early in the war, my ancestor and his fellow men were in camp talking and thinking of their families hundreds of miles away. It was December, almost Christmas. They had expected the war to be quick and decisive, but there was now no question that the war would take months more, at least. They knew the Union Army was nearby and that there would be a battle soon. During a moment of frozen silence, they hear through the grass the metallic tones of some far-away music. As they strain to pick out the notes, a change in the wind suddenly makes clear the distant harmonica playing "Silent Night."

Of course there are pearls from other branches of the family too. There's the photograph of my great-grandfather, Walter Steinecke. He is around five years old, smiling, his head encircled by a warm white glow. When the photograph was taken around 1898, Walter's father, William, owned and operated a photography studio in Brooklyn, New York. William's father had been a respected portrait painter and engraver before he left his wife and children and began a new life in Chicago. William had only barely gotten to know his father, the source of his artistic heritage. This photograph of his son shows him as a jewel, the pride of his father. Undoubtedly, he had sworn to be a better father to his son than his father had been to him. But just as William would only barely know his father, Walter only barely got to know William. William died only a few years after this photograph was taken, never seeing his son grow to become a steel executive and amateur artist.

My 8th grade family history report was the clasp or maybe the string that began to link these experiences. From there it grew into a hobby, something I tinkered with during my free time and a frequent source of conversation. As my family's history touched the history of South Carolina, I would delve into the stories of my community as extensions of my family's heritage. In 1753, one ancestor, the descendant of 17th-century Swedish immigrants, settled briefly on an Upstate South Carolina creek that came to be known as Dutchman's Creek after the small Nordic settlement that grew on its banks. Another creek was named for my Surratt ancestors. They were also participants in movements and events that affected the area: early settlement, various wars and military encampments, populist causes during the 1920s and 1930s, agriculture, small-scale businesses... all of which I researched out of curiousity. Of course since Spartanburg was my home and the home of both of my parents, I saw or heard frequently about the changes that have occurred in the past 40 or 50 years and I gradually became interested in the changes before that time, even if they never directly effected my family. Over time, I built up a repertoire of local history facts and stories, each with a lesson, an explanation, or a bit of humor. Eventually, I had gained a sturdy knowledge of research techniques and an understanding about organization and documentation, all of which had a significant influence on my career in museum collections and research.

I feel like now I have a framework installed for my interest in history and I can gradually build it up by adding stories and information, so that it can eventually be a grand palace of historical anecdotes! I've spent perhaps a little less time developing some of my other interest such as ecology, art and design, and theatre. But as time allows, I hope to begin to trace out those passions more fully. I'm glad I've got some time to work on it!

2008-08-07T14:54:00.002-04:00

In my last post I noted how I believe that the high cost of oil will a good thing for the resurgence of downtown Spartanburg. This is a theory I've been kicking around for several months and I'm eager to see if it plays out like I believe it will. Let's hope so!

High gas prices, if they continue to rise, have the potential to entirely restructure freight and passenger transportation in this country, for the better I believe. Interstate highway travel will be the first to stumble if gas prices stay high. We have a railroad system that has languished when compared to the railroads of other industrialized nations; but even if a major railroad expansion were to occur, it would be very difficult to accommodate the bulk of intercity and interstate trade that currently takes place through the use of trucks and interstate highway travel.

So what could this mean for the future of trade and land use? It's my hope that these conditions will cause a resurgence of locally-produced food and goods and the collapse of urban sprawl. Land use could begin to follow early 20th century patterns of dense urban centers surrounded by agricultural lands. Prices for homes and land in suburban areas could bottom out as it becomes more difficult to travel long distances regularly and crumbling cookie cutter subdivisions could become the new low-income housing areas. Residents in these areas might find work in the farms blossoming in the areas which have remained rural. Small towns would find themselves repopulated with former suburbanites who wish to have closer access to the goods they've grown accustomed to. Land prices in cities and small towns would rise as population increases and businesses follow. The job market might look more interesting too as more products are produced locally. Trades that had become consolidated and marginalized by giant national and multi-national corporations could reemerge as it becomes more expensive to ship goods. Imagine how small towns will look when they're more populated by small-scale craftsmen, who actually have the ability to make enough money to support themselves.

Of course this is the rosy longer-term outlook. In the short term, goods will be generally more expensive and the economy will struggle to readjust. People will have to scale back and either hope that their government can bail them out or find a place in the new economy. If the government does try to bail the economy out, I just hope they don't try to prolong the transition away from an oil-based economy, because one way or another its days are numbered.

Historically, it seems new economies have also been fertile grounds for exploitation, although it's difficult for me to figure out how that might apply in this case. I think of the rise of sedentary agriculture which was the ultimate root in the split between the haves and the have nots. And there was the collapse of the Roman Empire's economy, which resulted in feudalism as protection against marauding gangs. The rise of industrialization resulted in ghastly factory conditions for low-wage workers who wanted steady funds rather than unpredictable agricultural earnings. And some have pointed to the repeated disasters within the German economy during the 1920s as a root cause in the rise of the National Socialist Party.

But with any luck, people will be able to seamlessly reinhabit an economy similar to one practiced just 80 years ago. We can hope that the cultural memory of that older economy isn't so far out of reach that people aren't able to make the adjustment.

Who knows? Maybe the poor under-appreciated small town historians of the world will finally be able to make some money as economic advisers!

2008-07-17T10:32:00.003-04:00

Spartanburg has gained a better reputation for historic preservation in the past ten years through the implementation of a facade renovation program for businesses downtown, the establishment of local historic districts, and the emergence of a local non-profit dedicated to renovating historic homes and increasing home ownership in historic districts.

The Preservation Trust currently focuses on the Hampton Heights Historic District, but before long it may expand into other historic neighborhoods in the city.  My wife and I bought our home in Hampton Heights with the help of the Preservation Trust, which allows buyers to absorb the costs of renovations into their home's purchase price.  Our house only had a few interior renovations, but other homes have been almost completely reworked.  As a result, the neighborhood has undergone a dramatic shift in the past several years.  Not only has the neighborhood's appearance drastically improved, but the it also has a younger face, is safer, and residents walk and bike frequently to downtown.

So with all this renewed interest in this old neighborhood (recently named by This Old House as the best neighborhood in the country to buy an old house for families), I thought I'd include a few tidbits from the collection that shed some light on the area's early history.

By the mid-19th century, most of the land currently making up HH belonged to Major A. H. Kirby, whose house sat at the top of the hill about where Bethel Methodist currently sits. That hill is still called Kirby Hill, and if you look at the Northwestern horizon from the top of that hill, on a clear day you'll see the mountains, crisp and blue. I'd love to see that whole intersection redone in a way that takes advantage of that vista. At one time, that intersection was also the site of Spartanburg's Confederate Monument, which has since been moved to Duncan Park. Kirby Hill was also the encampment grounds for the Union Army during the most tumultuous days of Reconstruction.

Major Kirby moved to Spartanburg in 1837 and the above plat shows his land in 1852. Notice that there is really only one street shown and it's labeled "Laurens Road." This refers to South Church Street, which was then (as it is now) the route from Spartanburg to Laurens. At the time this plat was first drawn, Laurens was the local gateway to the rest of the state because it was the nearest railroad terminal. The winding unpaved road that led to Laurens was notoriously difficult to travel; creeks would often flood and steep hills would become slathered with thick mud. The plat also shows some of the small streams that are still present in the Hampton Heights neighborhood in their aboriginal condition. For instance, the small branch that cuts between Carlisle Street and Brookwood Terrace is shown stretching up all the way to Church Street, as does the branch that now runs in the woods behind Cecil Court. Conspicuously absent from this plat is West Hampton Avenue, the backbone of the neighborhood. There is a clue to its future existence, though, in a stretch of a property boundary that appears to follow the current route of the street. That boundary forms a little nook that would later house the Methodist Mission that evolved into Bethel Methodist.

So the Kirby land was eventually divided up and one of the larger landholders was the Irwin family, for which another prominent street in the neighborhood is named. The Irwins ran a dairy farm and orchard in much of the neighborhood prior to its subdivision into smaller lots. These lots continued to subdivide well into the mid-twentieth century, when there were still many undeveloped lots to be had in the neighborhood.

Over time, the neighborhood filled with the range of Spartanburg society, business executives, bank clerks, government workers, mom and pop retailers, teachers, and laborers all occupied the neighborhood. The styles of their homes reflected the variety also: Queen Anne, Neoclassical, Arts and Crafts, and Revival styles all line the streets, dating from the 1880s onward.

The neighborhood continued to flourish along with downtown until the 1960s, when the textile industry began floundering, the spread of automobiles caused sprawl and less centralized downtown activity, and racial tensions scared many wealthy whites away from downtown. Also, as most of the neighborhood entered its fiftieth decade, new buyers saw little appeal in homes that seemed out of step with modern aesthetics. So the 1960s and 1970s were pretty rough on the neighborhood. Older residents held on to their old homes while generally poorer individuals and families moved in as prices dropped. Most of these residents either lacked the funds or the desire to restore a neighborhood in decay. Fortunately a wave of interest came in the 1980s that saw a small number of dedicated homeowners move into the neighborhood with an active interest in saving their historic homes. Things picked up slowly through the 1990s, and as the century turned, a wider interest blossomed and a substantial number of new homeowners moved in to restore the old homes. Today the neighborhood has a reputation as a hipper and funkier Converse Heights (a similar downtown neighborhood which fared better during the mid-century). Many of the residents are young and active and the neighborhood is still vastly more affordable than Converse Heights, despite being closer to downtown. Although there are still plenty of homes in desperate need of work, the neighborhood generally is in far less danger of neglect than in any time in the past fifty years. Hampton Heights' success story bodes very well for the revitalization of downtown, which has been an ongoing goal for the city since the 1960s. With any luck, the neighborhood's success, the continued dedication of our city leaders, and the sustained high cost of oil will determine the overall success of downtown.

High cost of oil? You bet. But I'll save that for the next post.

Those of you familiar with the neighborhood's history, let me know if there are other details I should add!

2008-07-03T11:35:00.001-04:00

For many years, Spartanburg had a reputation for tearing down historic buildings and neighborhoods with reckless abandon. There are two classic examples in Spartanburg's history that illustrate what frequently happened in many places in the city and county.

From the time of its establishment until 1977, Spartanburg's downtown center, Morgan Square, was flanked by rows of storefronts on its northern and southern sides. By the turn of the 20th century, businesses filled these buildings while decorative masonry, store signs, window displays, and awnings filled their facades. This continued until the 1960s and 1970s, when sprawl and "white flight" left downtown nearly barren. In a short-sighted attempt to revitalize the square, city leaders cooperated with developers to transform the northern block of Morgan Square into a large shopping complex. The icing on this development's cake: the basement level was to have an ice-skating rink! Ooh-la-la!

The city got things started by leveling the entire block. All the buildings between Morgan Square, Magnolia St., St. John St., and Church St., including the oldest building still then on the square, were lost to the wrecking ball. Additionally, five workers were killed during the sloppy demolition of Spartanburg's first "skyscraper," the 1912 Andrews Building. By the end of 1977, Spartanburg had an empty city block and an unfulfilled promise. The development never came. In fact, the lot along the square remained a parking lot until 2003, when the "Opportunity Block," as it came to be called, was sold and the new Extended Stay America headquarters was constructed, filling a block that once held distinctive 19th and early 20th century buildings that mirrored the square's southern side.

Another preservation disaster to affect Spartanburg during the 1960s and 1970s was the destruction of South Liberty Street and the historic Southside community. Once again, believing that renewal at any cost would pay off, the city allowed an entire neighborhood of turn of the century homes to be leveled and the streets reconfigured. The result? Thirty years later we still have a curiously spacious boulevard that winds through what had once been a busy downtown corridor. An under-utilized park lines the street and the memories of a vibrant downtown neighborhood grow fainter.

Thankfully, the days of Spartanburg's complete disregard for its architectural history have passed and although not every historic structure is saved, leaders and residents in the city are far more attuned to historic preservation. Keep an eye out for an upcoming post on Spartanburg's greatest preservation success story.

2008-06-25T10:17:00.001-04:00

Every now and then I come across some unexpected gems in the collection that pull me aside from the task at hand. A few weeks ago, I happened to be perusing some files in our archives repository when I came across a folded note on some blued paper which read, "This is supposed to be 'Arabic' and was written by 'Uncle Moreau,' a slave of Gen. James Owen, and given to me by him. H. T. Tennant"

So I opened it up and here's what I found:

Needless to say I was pretty excited to find what to my untrained eyes looked like an authentic Arabic document written by a slave.

So, I did what I usually do in these circumstances, I decided to start digging. The first stop was to check our files to see what information may have been included when we first acquired the artifact. Fortunately, our files held a good bit of information and included a letter written to the 1982 owner of the document translating the document and offering up a few other clues. In this case, it wasn't so much the translation that was interesting, but rather some of the other details. But, lest I let you down, here's the loose translation anyway:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate - in the name of God and the Prophet Mohammad, the Goodness is dependent on God only, thanks to God who created the people to worship him and who look after their actions and deeds.

I am writing this letter on October 1, 1853. I am sending this letter with a fine man called Tilly, and with Kitty Tilly, and John Tilly, and Harriett Tilly.

All types of perfect praise belong to God alone, the Lord of all Worlds, Most Gracious, Ever Merciful, Master of the day of Judgment, Thee alone do we worship and Thee alone do we implore for help. Guide us along the straight path - the path of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy favours, those who have not incurred Thy displeasure, and those who have not gone astray. Amen.

I lift my eyes to you O Lord, you who are in heaven, help your servants to the hands of their masters, and guide the Nation behind her Ruler. We also lift our eyes to you O Lord, have mercy on us. Bless us O Lord bless us and forgive us as we have suffered a lot and our souls have been filled with much suffering.

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Surely, we sent down the Quran during the Night of Decrees. How shouldst thou know what is the Night of Decrees. The Night of Decrees is better than a thousand months. Therein descent angels and the spirit by the command of their Lord with their Lord's decrees concerning every matter. It is all peace, till the break of dawn - Surat Al-Kafirun

We must believe in the Night of Decrees for Goodness, and happiness and in all that the power of God, our Creator, our owner, and Thee alone look after us.

Whew! Ok. So, a few things of note here. The translator's note tells us that the grammar and spelling are rather loose, which could reflect the writer's non-Arab ethnicity, education, age, or a dialect unfamiliar to the translator. Also of interest is the fact that although the Quran is loosely quoted, the verse is incorrectly cited, which could suggest several things. It is possible that the writer quoted this verse from memory or that he was not a very serious Muslim. It is unlikely that a slave in the Southern US would have had access to a Quran, so my suspicion is that this was quoted from memory... quite a feat considering this slave probably hadn't seen a Quran in 50 years. Remember that it was illegal to import slaves into the US after 1808. Finally, the writer ends a verse with "Amen," which is not typically Muslim, so it may be that the writer had been Christianized. The last note written by the translator was that the back of the document notes that the letter was sent by a man named Omar (presumably the author of the letter).

With these details in hand, I decided to check out a few other sources. The first was to Google some of the names in the English portion of the document. The first name I tried was "General James Owen." And I got lucky and found this on the NC Museum of History website:

1831 - Omar ibn Said, a enslaved African and Arabic scholar, writes his autobiography in Arabic. Intrigued by his slave’s abilities, Said’s owner, General James Owen, gives him little work and permits him to study an Arabic translation of the Bible. Said had learned English and converted to Christianity, becoming a member of First Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville in 1820. He will die in 1864 at the age of 94.

Then I found this on another site:

Among the noteworthy residents of Fayetteville in the early 1800’s was Omar ibn Said, a native of Senegal who had been a scholar before being captured, enslaved, and transported to the US at age 40. He escaped from a plantation and fled to Fayetteville where General James Owen befriended him. Ibn Said’s knowledge of Arabic language and literature and his extensive writings brought fame to him and his adopted hometown. One of his best-known scholarly manuscripts went missing early in the 19th Century but was rediscovered in 1995 and is now on public display.

So it looks like I may have made quite a find and discovered a remarkable individual along the way. Further Google searches on the name Omar ibn Said turned up quite a few hits and if you're interested in learning more about this man's fascinating story, I suggest you check them out.

UNC Article

Wikipedia Article

NPR Article

Google Books Page

2008-06-16T17:12:00.000-04:00

Dog lovers out there may be aware of a small breed named the Boykin Spaniel, which is (so I've learned) the state dog of South Carolina. Boykin Spaniels have a funny history that originates (in part) in Spartanburg.

Legend has it that the president of a Spartanburg bank was walking between his home on East Main Street and church when a scraggly stray dog wandered up to him and followed him along the way. Feeling sympathy for the little mutt, he decided to adopt him and name him Dumpy. But, since he already had a number of dogs for duck and quail hunting, he soon sent the dog to his friend, Whit Boykin, who lived near Camden, SC. Boykin liked the size of the dog and bred him with another dog and the resulting litter was the first to carry the name Boykin Spaniel.

I received a research request today from an author who is writing a detailed history of the Boykin Spaniel. Specifically, he was trying to narrow down a few details about the residence of A. L. White, the president of the Merchants and Farmers Bank, and the adoptive father of Dumpy. Probably the best place to begin researching information about buildings in the city are the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which are easily accessible online as long as you have a Spartanburg County Public Library card (I've pretty much got my card number memorized because of this database). Sanborn maps were created for cities throughout the country beginning (at least in Spartanburg) in the 1880s. They show invaluable information about each building in the city, including building materials, number of stories, porches, general shape and often even the number of windows. So with a minimum of information, you can get a ton of information.

Sure enough, I was able to find Mr. White's home on East Main Street, next to where the Bell South building is now near Pine Street. It looks like a big house with a two-story porch and numerous outbuildings. It seems that then, as now, bank presidents have it made. Thanks once again, Sanborn Maps, you've saved the day!

2008-06-16T12:28:00.000-04:00

Hi! I'm reviving this long-dormant blog in order to record some of the historical quests I undertake as a part of my job with the Spartanburg County Historical Association.  Other residents or researchers of Spartanburg, South Carolina may find this information useful, especially since very little of it has been published on the internet.  I look forward to your comments and questions!

 
Image: Library of Congress Image of Cowpens Cotton Manufacturing Company, circa 1912.