TRAMPLING OUT THE VINTAGE; Making Wine While the Sun Shines

Dahlia 'Purple Powder Puff'

I started a new job recently, ending the old one more abruptly than I’d planned.  I came out of my last afternoon class in the first week of the fall semester to find a message on my phone calling me to an interview. Dropping my books in the parking lot, I begged the department chair to hang on, telling him I would break all traffic limits getting to his office in a campus on the other side of town.

I signed the new contract at 5:00 p.m. and never set foot again in the college into which I’d been pouring my heart, my soul, and my terrible grammar jokes for the last five years.

Miss Billie drinks up

The situation at Tomahawk Community College* had become untenable in so many ways.  The story of a top-heavy administration making decisions that consistently hurt students and undermine morale is pathetically ordinary; rather than bore folks with the details I now serve up my variation on the light-bulb joke.  (How many academic vice-presidents does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer: None.  They’d much prefer students and faculty to be kept in the dark...) 

While the learning-curve on a new job can be daunting, and this one certainly is, I’m so happy and grateful to have found deliverance in a functioning institution of higher education that I’m tackling all the new systems and curriculum head-on. 

What can’t be avoided is giving all of one’s time to this process until the stage of mastery kicks in, and for now that means looking through the window at the garden while I grade papers on a Sunday afternoon rather than being out in the beds with the dahlias and Miss Billie.

I’m grateful for the three week break in August that allowed me to squeeze out two distinctive vintages before diving into the new semester: I managed to finish a second novel I’d begun in May which had claimed my attention to the exclusion of everything else, and my husband and I harvested muscadine grapes from the ‘Noble’ vine I planted on the vegetable-garden arbor three years ago, deciding that with such a stupendous crop we were obligated to make wine.

Late last winter I had dragged my old Master Gardener pruning diagrams out into the garden and cut the vine just as the notes advised.

I didn’t expect it to make much of a difference, but I became a pruning convert after seeing the vine covered in fat black fruit by summer’s end; the sweet smell of the grapes ripening in the heat could make you swoon if you stood too long at the gate.

Muscadine 'Noble'

Over the years of reading 19th century southern women’s journals I’ve come across entries referring to seasonal wine- and cider-making, but if recipes are included they are rarely adaptable.  (“For every bushel of fruit, use a hogshead of sugar…”) The friendly staff at the Traveler’s Joy* Library helped me out in that respect.

In late summer I was spending a good deal of time at the library’s tiny History Room, a cubicle with collections of odd local lore and family history.  It was here, while looking through volumes of coroner’s inquests from southern counties during and just after the Civil War, that I found the account of a young woman accused of murdering and burying an unwanted child, a young woman who gripped my imagination and refused to let go until I’d written her story.

On a break from researching, I mentioned to my library friends that I had a mind to try making wine from my muscadines. These three librarians appear to know every soul who currently lives and breathes in Traveler’s Joy and which one of these souls possess remarkable skills or attributes.  All are familiar, by reputation, with a congregant of the Reformed Presbyterian Church who has a famous recipe for the stuff.  His brew calls for cornmeal in the fermentation process, a southern influence if I ever saw one.  My old neighbor Steve S. had given me a copy of the church’s cookbook, and there I found the recipe.

On a warm day FK and I plucked the grapes with the mockingbirds scolding – smart squatters that they are, this social-climbing couple built a stout nest deep in the arch of the vine.  

After mashing the grapes to pulp in a roasting pan, we filled two 1-gallon plastic jugs with the fruit, peels and all.  Over the fruit we poured the sugar syrup, and lastly, I lowered the cornmeal packets – one tablespoon of plain cornmeal wrapped in cheesecloth and tied with string, into each jug.  The recipe calls for a ‘big, strong balloon’ to be placed over the mouth of the jug while it ferments, to allow the gas to build up without exploding the jug.  I couldn’t find balloons big enough to fit over the jugs’ mouths, so we settled on the brilliant idea of affixing surgical gloves, instead.  Jugs, fruit, gloves and all went on a shelf above the washing machine "someplace that stays warm and about the same temperature, for 3 to 4 weeks, or until the balloon stops filling."  

Straining the mash

Four weeks later we took the jugs down, removed the balloons and the cornmeal sachets, poured the juice out carefully without stirring or shaking the fruit, and strained it into bottles.  The color of the young wine is identical to the ‘Purple Powder Puff’ dahlias that are blooming in the garden now, and the taste isn’t half bad, if you like your liquor sweet.  

Our batch filled five recycled whiskey bottles and went into the slant-back cupboard in the kitchen to age in darkness and tranquility.

Muscadine wine, ready for aging.

*****

Work in 2014 has taken on the dimensions of a valued but voracious animal: it consumes all the food and attention lavished on it and growls for more, threatening to leave the caretaker with nothing but the tending. We have no option but to work hard.  However, we must hold out these little pieces of our natures that restore us to ourselves, that allow some minor tributary of the creative force to flow in our veins, lending flavor to homemade wine and encouraging us to turn forgotten lives into fiction.

I'll drink to that!

THE GIRL AT THE WINDOW

Lewis Hines' photograph of a child worker in the spinning room at the Cherryville Mill, NC,early 20th c.

            I heard the historian Steven Hahn pose the big post-modern question about history in this way:

“What is knowable about history?  What cannot be known?”

I think that is the post-modern question about human existence, as well, and maybe we are all talking about the same thing, since history is human beings mostly trying to find better ways to live while they persevere through the lives they’ve been given.  Even my English students.  History is human beings taking risks and suffering and striving and, once in a great while, triumphing.

            But here’s the important thing that often gets overlooked, and which I wish I could make clear to Mallory: there is no history at all, no defeats and no triumphs, unless someone is telling the story.

#####

Supervisor's house at Glencoe Mills, restored mill village in Burlington NC

Summer ends officially for me with the start of classes on August 18.  With money and reliable transportation an issue this year (anyone who is trying to pay the bills as ‘contingent’ college faculty knows what I’m talking about), my husband and I stayed mostly close to home this summer, exploring the historical byways of South and North Carolina, as I’ve documented in previous entries. 

Perhaps because I’ve lately toured so many down-at-heel mill towns and farming communities, and because I am constantly trying to retool my strategies for teaching students who have spent their lives in these communities, I’ve been thinking back to the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar I attended in Elon, North Carolina, four summers ago, during which we studied the cultural and economic factors that produced the ‘New’ South.  I wrote a paper as my final presentation for that seminar that I have been rereading in preparation for going back into the classroom.  That essay, in which I tried to articulate the insights I gained after partaking of some extraordinary lectures and field trips offered by that week-long examination into how the Carolina Piedmont developed as it did, has reminded me of just how challenging my job is, and also, how rewarding.  This is what I wrote:

The Girl at the Window

Working, writing and curing hams as if your life depended on it; reflections on survival in the Carolina Textile-Mill Belt

I am thinking about pigs and windows.  The windows I will explain, in a bit.  That I am thinking about pigs is not surprising because I am eating a chopped pork sandwich and studying the barbecue restaurant’s napkins and tee-shirts depicting happy hogs (and why would the hogs be happy, anyway?), but even if I were not eating barbecue I would probably have pigs on the mind because I am in central North Carolina where pork is paramount. 

Mill houses at Glencoe

I lived here once, sixteen years ago, and when I first encountered this place it was so foreign from everything I had ever experienced up until then in the cool, sophisticated, tolerant, Buddhist-leaning, vegetarian Lotusland where my husband and I had been raised that we turned to one another back in that time, we joined hands, and we leapt into it like joyous human sacrifices leaping into a flaming caldera, while our loved ones stood on the rim and screamed as we descended.  Even our seven year-old embraced it, when she stood and looked up at the giant trees that didn’t seem to end and looked down at the turtles in the sleepy creek and the house with the crooked roof and asked, “Is this Heaven?” 

We went somewhere to eat and the waitress asked us where we wanted to sit and we said “non-smoking section, please.”  She raised her eyebrows which is what passes for a laugh in these parts and she put us at a table downwind of four men eating fried liver mush and smoking cigars.  We laughed almost hysterically, because we were truly happy, and there is no laughter more releasing than that, when you laugh because you are happy and you did not realize until that moment that you were unhappy.

The Garrett Farm, early 19th c., Alamance County, NC

We were happy to be taking a crazy risk to live in a place that we didn’t understand.  Maybe we thought we were following in the footsteps of our reckless progenitors, who were forever moving beyond the charted territories of respectability and common sense, who were forever ‘betting on the come.’  Or maybe we were willing to take that leap because living somewhere where people talk and eat and think and live differently from what you are used to can shake your moorings enough to make a new view possible – a new way of ‘seeing.’  This is the kind of miraculous window that some people (like me, I’ve discovered) live for.  I looked through this window when I was four or five years old and lay naked except for my dish-towel loincloth, crowded in the teepee in the backyard with my three sisters who were also wearing dish-towels (we weren’t really gender-confused; but my oldest sister had caught on to the fact that braves had more privileges in the tribe than squaws, and we were young enough to think we could opt out of being female if we dressed the part).  So I lay looking up through the smoke-flap at the Milky Way and asked the stars, “Is this how it was for the first people – was everything this bright and quiet?  Did they fit into the world this way, like they belonged here, like they were all tiny leaves on a very big tree?”

Cat at Glencoe Mills

That is history for me.  It is a window that opens.  The window doesn’t provide answers; it just shows you the complicated reality.  Sometimes it is a window that flashes past you, as if you’re speeding by it on a train.  But when you’re lucky, like when you are deep in South Carolina outside Woodruff or Cowpens and you walk into a bait-shop in hopes of coffee, and there are two men lounging by the register in mechanic’s overalls and one of them turns to look at you, and he has a sunburned face as hard as a manhole cover with ice-blue eyes and a wary thin mouth and you saw this face just a few days earlier in a Matthew Brady photograph of Confederate prisoners and in those few long moments when you look at him before it starts to get a little weird for everyone, the window sash is raised, and what you see through that window takes your breath away. 

Child's bed made by Thomas Day in the 1860s, free African-American carpenter, NC

 It is not the same as seeing actors dressed up as people from the past, although reenactments are a goofy pleasure in a class by themselves.  ‘Seeing’ history is not about seeing an imitation of what happened in the past; it is about ‘knowing’ what happened in the past in your heart and your gut and your solar plexus and your collective unconscious all at the same time.  It is like walking through the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and seeing the shoes.  If you have been to that museum, all you need to say to one another is ‘the shoes.’  And then you will have to sit down, or swallow the lump, or duck behind a door and have a little cry.  Because when you see the shoes, or remember seeing the shoes, you ‘know.’  That is the excoriating experience of understanding history.

So that is why I am thinking about windows and also about pigs.  And thinking about pigs makes me think about my English students, but perhaps not for the reasons you suspect.

I am seeing that raw lump of pork in the wooden bowl on the table outside the smokehouse at the 300 year-old Garrett farm in Alamance County, and the sunny man from West Virginia missing most of his teeth who explained that the pork would typically be rubbed in ashes to discourage maggots, or, as he put it, to “keep the critters from kissin’ on it.”

And I am reading from the sign about the many lengthy steps that were required to turn the hind-quarter of a hog into an edible smoked ham in 1835.  It could take up to nine months, as long as human gestation. 

If I want to serve a ham at a dinner party (which is problematic because a significant number of people I know and who would accept an invitation to my house for dinner, even people born and raised in the Carolinas, do not eat meat, or they eat it selectively, eschewing pork or beef and favoring chicken or perhaps limiting their flesh intake to fish, so long as the face has been removed).  But.  If I want to serve ham I drive to Charlotte or to Spartanburg and head for a high-end supermarket.  I buy a processed ham and bring it home and cook it and that is all.  I do not have to chase after a terrified, 200-pound hog who shrieks for mercy as he batters the rails of his pen trying to dodge my sharpened ax.  I do not have to bludgeon him senseless with the ax handle and hoist him on a rope by his hind feet above a vat where I slit his throat and let him bleed out.

Garrett farmyard

And it is suddenly quite clear to me that I am expecting the impossible from my students when I expect them to know how to create meaningful, coherent, well-researched essays in fifteen weeks, each one constructed painstakingly, step by complicated step – from invention to discovery to research to analysis to synthesis to first draft to revision to final draft.

Like me, none of my students (or very few, although one or two have been to war, and I recognize that they’re different…) but few of my students have ever had to make or build or cook or plant something as if their lives depended on it, whereas the lives of our ancestors depended on their doing these things, and since they were our ancestors, they did them correctly.

What I see is that my students don’t understand why they should have to slaughter a hog on a cold day in late autumn and cut it up and rub the hind-quarter in molasses, cayenne and salt and throw it in a cold hearth and get it good and sooty and then hang it in a smokehouse over a smoldering fire that never goes out and check it and poke it and cut the mold off and before it starts to go bad from the heat in spring, cut it down and bring it into the house and start all over with the rubbing and sprinkling, and then cook it over a good flame for a day or so and finally, finally, yell for all seventeen children and the in-laws and the one-legged husband to come running and eat the damn thing. 

My students and I can simply go to the store and buy one already baked and even sliced, and we can run it home in twenty minutes and eat it in front of the television with our cats beside us nibbling on the scraps.  And in eating it, we give no more thought to the life lived by the pig who provided our meal than we give to gravity, or relativity, or other mostly incomprehensible conditions of existence. 

The Pacolet River at Pacolet Mills, South Carolina

In other words, my students must wonder why Ms. Rivers goes on and on about the necessity of constructing a meaningful essay in one’s own words when they can push a button on the keyboard and watch Google spit out the choices and then they push another button and Wikipedia disgorges some paragraphs which they don’t really see any reason to read because they contain the assigned keywords, “financial meltdown,” “intelligent design,” “gay marriage;” and then they push another button and download the paragraphs into a Word file, and they do this a couple of times, and then they type their names and the date at the top of the paragraphs and print the pages and then they’re free to download the latest Rihanna video while they’re online and then a couple of things on YouTube and then they check Facebook and give a couple of shout-outs to their friends and they feel like they’ve really slogged away at their homework. 

But here’s the thing.  And this is why I’m thinking about happy pigs.  Because if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about my students, it’s that they don’t seem all that happy.  I realize they would probably be much happier if they weren’t in English class, but I’m really talking about another kind of happy.  I mean the kind of happy where you know, and feel, that you belong in the world, like you are a tiny leaf on a very big tree.

Shagbark hickory, Garrett Farm

This ‘knowing’ kind of happiness opens a window on the past and you see through it and understand how you are connected to what came before and you see the path that will carry you into the future.  I suppose this is hope, as much as it is happiness.  My students are mostly still quite young, but they don’t seem hopeful.  Maybe this is because they already know everything there is to know, and so what is there left to discover?  What is there to work for?  Or maybe they’re just afraid.  

One girl, "Mallory," sat through the entire spring semester last year without smiling once.  It became a challenge to me, getting her to smile.  I saw her mouth make a crooked movement upwards one morning, when she was working in a group and a boy said something funny to her.  But for me, she won’t smile.  I drag out all my rusty grammar jokes and adverb puns (yes, there are such things: “I’m going off to kill Dracula,’ declared Tom painstakingly’”…) and my favorite story about the rule of prepositions:

"Mallory," I said, looking straight at her.  "A blonde and a brunette walk into a bar.  Brunette says to the blonde, ‘Where’s your birthday party at?’ Blonde says to the brunette, ‘You must never end a sentence with a preposition.’  Brunette says to the blonde, ‘Where’s your birthday party at, BITCH?’"

The other students laugh, covering their mouths with their hands; it is Schopenhauer’s ‘sudden perception of incongruity’ exemplified.  But Mallory is determined not to laugh, not even to smile.  It is because she has to show me that this class has no value for her.  She works nights in a nursing home in Gaffney; she has a troubled family down in Pacolet.  The girl is just trying to get a certificate to be a medical transcriptionist and then she will be soooo gone from this school; she does not care what a syllogism is and it makes no difference to her if we are reading the Declaration of Independence or Mein Kampf, it is one and the same.  Every day she comes to my class tired and stressed and angry, and she does not see what there is to be happy about. 

Original cabin at Garrett Farm

Somehow, I must convince Mallory to slaughter a pig.  If she were to hoist her imagination on a pulley and let the ideas pour out where she could look at them… if she took time to let the message rot and reek and turn different colors and then she shaved off parts here and there and finally determined that it was ready for consumption… and if she served up this thing that she had made, from scratch, by herself, as if her life depended on it, I believe she would feel better about herself.  She would feel capable. And yes, perhaps, she would start to be happier.

Maybe the key to this lies in getting Mallory to see that she has a history, that many dead ancestors struggled to put her on this earth and would want her to exult in who she is and to test the limits of what she could yet be. 

I think about telling Mallory that in a file drawer in the National Archives in Washington there is a photograph of her great-grandmother when she was ten years old.  She seems to be wearing an older brother’s shoes and she is painfully small for her age; her shoulders and the dark braid down her back are frosted with lint from the alley of cotton-threaded spindles that stretches into the distance behind her.  For just a moment, the girl turns her back on the spinning room and the rest of the Cherryville mill and in that moment the photographer Lewis Hine captures her looking out the window at the bright world from which she’s been exiled.  She is like Persephone longing to be carried out of the underworld into the sunshine, like a Cherokee child behind a reservation fence, or a black sharecropper’s son strapped into a sack of cotton bigger than he is.  But Mallory will never see this photo of her great-grandmother at the window.  She doesn’t know that the little girl’s job was spinning in the mill for twelve hours a day, six days a week, at 75 cents per day, but that her work was her: Mallory.  Locked in the spinning room, the child was saving her own descendants from a hard life of suffering with her life of exile and toil and pellagra, like a little boddhisatva. Like a lint-covered Christ.

I heard the historian Steven Hahn frame the big post-modern question about history in this way: What is knowable about history?  What cannot be known?  I think this is the post-modern question about human beings, as well, and maybe we are all talking about the same thing, since history consists of human beings making decisions and mostly living their lives in the best way they can.  Even my English students.  History is human beings taking risks and suffering and trying to survive.  But here's the important point that often gets overlooked, which I wish I could make clear to Mallory: there is no history at all, great or small, without someone telling the story.

###

Photograph by Lewis Hine, early 20th c., of child worker in Cherryville mill, NC

A` LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

The former Cates Store in Glenn Springs is becoming one with the forest

A common refrain heard from those who find progress a mixed blessing is the rate at which quiet old communities are subsumed by the ugly trappings of modern enterprise, disappearing under strip malls and cheaply built subdivisions.  In the American south, however, I marvel at how often the reverse is true.  South Carolina in particular abounds in towns that were once crowded and bustling with commerce, but today are largely deserted, their once-proud buildings crumbling into the kudzu. 

            Each town has its own story to tell, but the main reasons for the decline of historic communities are broadly shared: they include the great migration of black sharecroppers and agrarian workers north and west after the collapse of Reconstruction; the flight offshore of the textile industry, leading to the shuttering of many mills throughout the Piedmont; and the twin economic blows wielded by the Great Depression and the boll weevil, which crippled a farming population already living at subsistence level.

Closed mill

I set out to explore some of these towns with my husband as co-pilot when a writing project spurred me to research South Carolina history in the mid-nineteenth century more systematically than I have done so far.  I’ve been returning to some well-thumbed plantation diaries, slave narratives and collections of Civil War soldiers’ letters that already had a place in my library, as well as new volumes that have come my way like

The Hammonds of Redcliffe

and

Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War

.  I found the latter volume at the tiny library in Traveler’s Joy* and soon became immersed in this collection of letters written by members of the Anderson, Brockman and Moore families in 1853-1865, when numerous sons and fathers from the Spartanburg-Reidville area left home to join the Third, Fifth, Thirteenth (the Brockman Guards) and the Eighteenth

SC Infantry Regiments.

Reidville Academy Faculty House, SC, built in

 1858

            Wanting to see the area so vividly depicted in their letters, I headed for Spartanburg and that portion of the county south and west that is fed by the Tyger and Enoree Rivers, a region whose place names echo the prominent family names of these correspondents and their neighbors: Moore, Duncan, Woodruff, Fincher, Switzer and more.  It amazed me to realize how quickly one can be driving through farmland and dense woods after leaving the noisy thoroughfares of exurbia; less than fifteen minutes after pulling off Interstate 85 my husband and I were parking under the willow oaks at the Reidville Academy Faculty house.  Coincidentally, the night before I read the letter written in May 1858 by the prosperous planter David Anderson to his son John Crawford Anderson, away at a boarding school in Columbia (The Arsenal), telling him how “…we have finished the brickwork of the professors house.  The workmen have covered it and will have it ready for plastering in a few weeks” (

Craig 3

). This building is one of two structures remaining from the original school established by Reverend Reid for the purpose of providing a good Presbyterian education for the children of local gentry, the other one being the Female Academy’s dormitory, which, on the day we visited it, housed an antiques business in the process of closing down.  

Farmland

The Reidville Academy Faculty House is described on the town’s website as being home to the Reidville Historical Society, but no organization seemed to be operating out of the striking old building when we stopped there.  The windows were shuttered and wasps were building nests below the eaves.  In fact, the town is so sleepy and undeveloped that it takes no great stretch of imagination to see it as it must have looked over 150 years ago, before many of the town’s young men and several of the school’s instructors joined local brigades and marched off to war.  

Dr. Leonard's Store in Reidville, built in 1905

A significant number failed to return from northern battlefields, including the most loquacious correspondent in Tom Moore Craig’s book, Andrew Charles Moore.  Andrew and his younger brother Thomas were the sons of Andrew Barry Moore, the doctor whose family established Walnut Grove Plantation in Roebuck (Becca) early in the nineteenth century, an historic farm which I have visited several times.  After the doctor’s first wife died childless, he married a local woman 34 years his junior and she bore four children, including the boys.  Many of the letters in the collection are between these young men and their mother, Nancy Moore Evins (Dr. Moore died when Andrew and Thomas were still young), bearing evidence of the close relationship they enjoyed with her and of the universal nature of a young man’s experience being away at college.   The requests for money are ceaseless, with Thomas, studying at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina, Columbia) complaining about his roommates: “I have been bored nearly to death by some Charleston fellers above me.  I am going to take another room…” and pleading with her to send him shirts and two feather pillows to replace the cotton ones he’s been issued because “I had as leave lay my head on a log.” Thomas John’s revelation about higher education will sound familiar to anyone who teaches college freshmen, when he writes to his mother in January 1859: “I was under the impression before I left home that anyone could get through College without much study, but since then I have found out better.” 

Black-eyed Susans

             Meanwhile Andrew, studying law at the University of Virginia, scolds his mother for indulging his younger brother Thomas’ “extravagance,” and struggles to break the sensitive news to his mother that he has got engaged to his second cousin, Mary Foster -- “I ought to have told you long ago”

(Craig 19).

            Thomas survived the Civil War, spending the last two months of it in the federal officer’s prison on Johnson’s Island, Ohio.  He returned to his family’s estate of Fredonia but it was empty save for the cotton bales filling the rooms on the ground floor, stored there by Moore’s prudent overseer, Mr. Hill, against the day when the blockade would be lifted and Moore could make a new start with the proceeds.  His mother and stepfather had died by then, as had his older brother Andrew, who was struck in the right temple by a minie-ball at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 29, 1862.  Thomas reported this in a letter to their sister, Margaret, who had traveled north to Virginia on the train accompanied by her slave cook, Louisa, intending to find her brothers and her husband, Sam Means.  She missed them all through an infuriating scenario of bad timing and misinformation, including, at one point, being told by a soldier that her husband had been wounded when he was actually unharmed.  Thomas wrote to Margaret that he went looking for Andrew (‘Bud’) on the battlefield after someone else in the Eighteenth Regiment reported seeing him fall; when Thomas found his brother’s body he wrapped him in two blankets and buried him in the grave he dug with his own hands.  Before doing so he cut a lock of his brother’s hair to give to Andrew’s young wife, who had written to her husband only three days before he was cut down charging a Union battery

(Craig 107)

.

On this beautiful early summer day in Reidville the wheat was standing high in the fields surrounding town, and on the hillsides a teenage boy on a tractor was cutting hay.

On Main Street it was as quiet as 1860.

My husband and I walked from the Professors’ House to Dr. Frank Leonard’s store on College Street to have coffee and share a piece of homemade cake.

The store sits directly across from the elementary school, which occupies the site where the original Female Academy stood.

The academy survived a brush with Union troops camping nearby at the end of the war who were bent on burning it, as the story goes, but could not withstand the wrecker’s ball when it was finally torn down in 1948.

Souvenir of Reidville: set of antique compote dishes bought

for a few dollars at the former Reidville Female Academy dormitory

            It is much the same story in Glenn Springs, which we viewed on another day, taking Highway 150 south from Tomahawk County* across the Pacolet River.  This road is virtually a see-what-happened-when-the-textile-mills-closed-down tour, taking motorists on a winding trail through the three depressed towns of Pacolet Mills, Central Pacolet and Pacolet, where a sturdy but rundown early 20

th

century mill house can be purchased for very little money but where jobs are a lot harder to come by than houses. 

Bridge over the Pacolet River, approaching Pacolet Mills

          Glenn Springs, which is not far from Reidville and is mentioned once or twice in the letters in Craig’s book, has a different story to tell.  The mineral springs in this area attracted entrepreneurs as early as 1825, when developer John B. Glenn opened an inn beside the springs and advertised it as a healthful summer retreat.  By 1838 a much larger hotel and spa were attracting summer visitors by stagecoach from throughout South Carolina, and the town expanded to accommodate permanent residents who seemed to have led highly social lives.  

House in Glenn Springs

This resort peaked around the 1890s, by which time Glenn Springs mineral water was being shipped as far away as the U.S. Capitol, where it was served in the Senate cloakroom.  

Glenn Springs Post Office

By World War I, however, the town was losing its popularity, and by the time the hotel burned down in 1941, the development of roads and highways that bypassed what remained of the village had already sounded its death knell.  What structures remain habitable in Glenn Springs are impressive by way of the faded grandeur they exhibit, but more striking are the ruins being swallowed up by vines and groves, like dinosaur bones sinking into the tar pits.

 We passed through Cross Anchor, another town whose heyday dates from a previous century (in this case, the late eighteenth, when Methodists settled here) but which is now merely a crossroads, where we viewed a man at one corner selling watermelons from his truck and on the opposite corner an old brick store and a Masons’ Lodge collapsing into the brush.  At last we crossed the Enoree River into Laurens County and finally arrived at our furthest western destination that day, the county seat of Laurens.

Cross Anchor, SC -- what's left of it

  Laurens has certainly seen better days but it is still hanging on, with many of its stately homes looking as stately as ever and the courthouse square showing more encouraging signs of life than I remember when I last visited the town fourteen years ago.  At that time the Klan Museum and Redneck Shop was still housed in the old Echo movie theater on the square, the sight of which gave displaced Yankees the heebie-jeebies so bad they hightailed it out of town as fast as their rented cars could take them.  Since then the shop, its owners, and the stranger-than-fiction story that embroiled them and the town made it into the New York Times.  (“Uneasy Neighbors in a Southern Gothic Tale,” January 12, 2012 -- see the link below).  

Laurens Courthouse and monument to Confederate dead

My husband and I poked our heads into a little artist’s co-op on the square, a good sign for Laurens’ potential as a tourist destination, and I asked one of the friendly women minding the store what was up with the Klan Museum.  She explained that everyone in town was hugely relieved when the shop’s proprietor finally announced that after years of wrangling over the establishment’s ownership in court and running it at a deficit he was closing the place.  The editor of Laurens’ newspaper was so pleased by this turn of events that he ran a celebratory front page story announcing that fact.  

Laurens front porch

This so enraged the Klan-loving business owner that he announced he had changed his mind and was keeping the shop open.  He only managed to prolong the closing, however, not maintain the business, but that contrariness speaks volumes about the character of a certain kind of native-born South Carolinian who starts a civil war out of spite, or tries his best to blacken the reputation of a town trying to haul itself into the twenty-first century.  Fire-eaters, indeed.

            Any day-trip through the eastern portions of South Carolina’s upstate country is ended fittingly with a visit to historic Morgan Square in Spartanburg, called “the village” in antebellum times.  The streets radiating out from the statue of General Daniel Morgan, a Revolutionary War hero, have become livelier in recent years (a reassuring bucking of the trend) with the addition of the Chapman Cultural Center, numerous restaurants, and Hub City Bookshop, an excellent independent bookstore and small press that has acquired a kind of literary landmark status since it opened in 1995.  

On the day we stopped by the shop, housed in the old Masonic Temple on Main Street, the associate working there was enormously helpful with our questions and book searches.  I found their regional history section to be extensive, including, among a number of books about nineteenth

 century upstate life, copies of

Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War

.  Naturally, no self-respecting bookstore can operate without supplies of strong coffee and baked goods close at hand, and Hub City delivers with an interior entrance to the neighboring Little River Coffee Bar and Cakehead Bakeshop. 

            We discovered Hub City to be a good way to decompress gradually, after spending long hours submerged in the land that time forgot.  With apologies to Proust, the past is a highly absorbing place to visit (and remember), but I’m glad I don’t have to live there.

###

WORK CITED

Craig, Tom Moore, ed.

Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War; Letters of the Anderson, Brockman, and Moore Families, 1853-1865

. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

LINKS & INFORMATION:

The New York Times,

“Uneasy Neighbors in a Southern Gothic Tale,”

January 12, 2012. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/us/in-laurens-sc-the-redneck-shop-and-its-neighbor.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&emc=eta1

The Hub City Bookshop, 186 W. Main Street, Spartanburg, SC 29306

864-577-9349,

www.hubcity.org/bookshop

History of Reidville, South Carolina:

http://www.townofreidvillesc.org/2.html

Laurens house

5TH OF JULY

Patriotic prepping

My husband and I are the kind of couple who throw a good party every twenty years or so.  Our last rewarding bash was not quite two decades ago – I remember a Poetry Party held one cold October night at the dawning of the 21

st

century where the guests made up haiku from words printed on wine corks and we recited our favorite life-changing poems around the fire.  My high-school-aged daughter and her best friend donned berets and served appetizers along with French accents. That was a keeper.

Flowers from a friend's garden

Now that marriage has extended our small family, however, the possibilities have expanded for gathering people who share not just friendships but kinships.

It’s a good feeling.

Since my husband and our son-in-law have birthdays very close to each other and those birthdays share a national holiday, it seemed crazy not to take advantage of that synchronicity and hold an Independence Day bash in the garden.

F.S. & K.S. take advantage of the shade

The number of factors that cannot be controlled at any outdoor summer gathering were legion, of course:

the heat, the weather (thunderstorms always a possibility), the insects, the tendency of people to burn, the tendency of certain neighbors in Traveler's Joy (the ones in the beaten-down trailer on Shagbark) to pop open the hoods of their car trunks and demonstrate the power of their giant speakers to visiting friends, and so on.

T.T., N.B., L.V.P. & C.T. (Birthday Boy) submit to gamma rays from the

Sword of Valor wielded by Birthday Wizard (F.V.P.)

We tried to plan for all these eventualities as best we could, my husband erecting canopies and an oscillating mister for relief from heat and the southern sun (or downpours,if needed), iced drinks in volume, and earnest prayers that the Shagbark noisemaker be otherwise engaged.

He was, and the weather came through for us with the balmiest, most beautiful July day anyone could remember experiencing in the Carolinas.

T.T. in vintage hat

M.S. and P.S. enjoy the music

All that work in the garden paid off, despite the early heat and low rainfall that choked off bloom production.

If nothing else it was

green

, and the private corners tucked under shade trees and rigged with hammocks proved as inviting for our guests as I had hoped they would be.

Chillin'

Best of all, you could sit anywhere in the garden and hear the bluegrass band play ‘Ruby.’

If music be the food of love, play on.

Joe Sutton and the Rock Springs Bluegrass Band provide the vibe

#### 

ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES (and a couple we miss)

Rosa 'Madame Alfred Carriere'

May brings the return of longed-for friends.  Their time with us is fleeting, especially when a heat wave accelerates their season, but whatever its duration the visit lifts our spirits immeasurably.  Tall bearded irises take the stage first, overdressed grande dames that make up for in color what they lack in flexibility. 

Tall Bearded Iris, name unknown

This spring the best performer among the lot was an unknown bi-color I call, imaginatively, “Church Iris,” in appreciation of the small Unitarian garden I once tended.  (If any reader recognizes the cultivar from the picture included here, please send me a comment.)  

Roses follow, the original cast of own-root heirlooms joined by newcomers like thornless ‘Zepherine Drouhin,’ and vigorous scarlet climber ‘Cadenza.’ ‘Cadenza’ is already making a start at masking the chain-link fence. 

Several clematis have settled in well with the pillars and climbers and have clambered up the canes to find the sun: fair-faced maidens like ‘Silver Moon,’ the blue-hued white ‘Huldine,’ and magenta ‘Ville de Lyon.’  The most appreciated bloomers this spring may be the southern peonies.  These two plants were dug up from the front yard where their distinctive foliage crept above-ground during a lull between mowings.  My sharp-eyed neighbor spotted them from his kitchen window about the same time I did, and with his encouragement I dug them up three autumns past and planted them in my sunny border.

  

Clematis 'Silver Moon'

Rosa 'Souvenir du Dr. Jamain'

Peonies take a prodigiously long time to get accustomed to a site, and longer still to bloom well, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover both plants bristling with buds earlier this spring.  I was even more delighted when the buds opened into shaggy-headed blossoms the size of small cabbages.  When they started to open I guessed they might be an old strain of ‘Festiva Maxima,’ the commonest and one of the best-performing peonies in southern climes, but ‘Festiva’ has flecks and streaks of crimson on its white leaves, and these flowers are snow-white with only a reddish stamen at the center.  

Southern peonies with 'Gladiator' allium and Japanese maple

It’s likely that these are more of the long-enduring survivors from the garden planted and tended by the Thomas* sisters on this lot decades ago. (See an earlier post, ‘The Best Gardener in Traveler’s Joy’ for more on these ladies).  That would explain why they are much better adapted to my stone-hard clay and climate than the pair of peonies I introduced – despite the fact that early May ushered in a string of sweltering, rainless days better suited to August than mid-spring, these rediscovered divas bloomed lavishly, with nary a bead of sweat in sight. 

 My modern peonies didn't produce a single bud.  Weaklings, both.

  

Unnamed southern peony

One familiar face that was missing this season was the one we shall miss the most.  In April our neighbor Steve S. sold the house where he’d lived for 47 years and moved across the river to Tomahawk County’s* seat.  (Again, refer to ‘The Best Gardener in Traveler’s Joy.’  That post profiles Steve and his wondrous garden. ) He had good reasons for making the change; however, he was a wonderful neighbor and a valued gardening pal, and we miss him terribly, along with his surviving cat Dolly.  (Dolly’s sister Molly died this past winter.)

Rosa 'Veilchenblau' on a May Morning

For me, the lesson of these last few months has been to appreciate the goodness while you’ve got it.  Nothing is for keeps, and that’s true for people and for pets as well as peony flowers. 

Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn the peony’s secret to longevity.  It may hinge on soil pH and sunlight hours but from what I’ve witnessed it essentially boils down to never giving up. That’s also a lesson I’m taking to heart. 

Steve & Molly, bless her heart