Perhaps it’s that I’m the son of a school principal, and had run of the various schools that I attended growing up. Perhaps it was the many reunions and covered dish suppers our family attended in various country community centers. Perhaps it was even because I spent college summers working maintenance – painting and waxing all of the schools in our district. It might, in some small part, have something to do with my own long career as an educator. Whatever the reason, I’ve always had a fascination with school architecture. Just about any school can be interesting, but what catches my attention most are the old wooden framed country schools.

Driving through the country these are easy to spot.  The architecture is distinctive.  The buildings tend to be squarish with hipped roofs.  If it’s got an old bell tower, all the better.

Well, OK, they don’t all have to be white frame. There are some cool old brick schools, too.

Recently I was doing some research on the South Carolina State Archives website. There is a marvelous collection of photographs of old schools taken between 1935-1950 for insurance purposes.

Browsing this collection got me thinking about these old schools. They are great subjects for photography, and an excellent symbol of a bygone time. I wanted to see if I could find more of these old schools, and that meant making a list of potential targets using Google Earth. (more…)

Our recent photo trek through Laurens County raised lots of questions for me.  I had seen places about which I wanted to learn more.  There were the questions about name origins – Ghost Creek Road and Dead Man’s Curve in particular.  I wanted to know if there were documented incidents that led to these names.  I also wanted to know more about the spring we found on Bramlett Road – what rallies were held here, etc.

Of course, I first turned to online resources to see what I could find.  A simple Google search didn’t reveal much initially.  In fact, I was getting a bit discouraged.  I even turned to Facebook, and was able to get some anecdotal answers, but nothing documented.

I still haven’t found the answers to these questions, but I did find some great reference materials.  First up are the ones I’ve mentioned here before – SC DISCUS (requires login),  SCIWAY.net,  and the new South Carolina Digital Archive.  All of these have excellent primary source materials, or links to those materials. (more…)

In the current political climate of tea parties and voter polarization, the phrase “political civility” seems like an oxymoron.  It seems like everything has gotten downright nasty, with each group demonizing the other, and the word “compromise” taking on negative connotations.  Ah, for the good old days, when everyone believed in God, motherhood, and apple pie.

…or was it so great?

History is replete with examples of political rivalries that make the current climate look tame in comparison. There is the infamous pistol duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks in 1856.

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On my way back from my paddling trip to Beaufort I decided to take a brief detour and visit a couple of places I had wanted to photograph. These were the St. Helena Chapel of Ease and the Pon Pon Chapel of Ease. There are only ruins left of both chapels, but both places are filled with history and photographic opportunities.

According to Wikipedia, a “chapel of ease” is “a church building other than the parish church, built within the bounds of a parish for the attendance of those who cannot reach the parish church conveniently.” In colonial South Carolina the large plantations of the sea islands were remote. It was often hard for parishioners to get to the larger towns, so the local Anglican congregations built these chapels to accommodate the parishioners.

Probably the most famous of the Lowcountry church ruins is the Old Sheldon Church, which was once known as the Prince William Parish Church, located on Sheldon Road northwest of Beaufort. Even though Sheldon Church is often grouped with St. Helena and Pon Pon, this is not technically a chapel of ease, as it was a parish church in its own right. The brick columns and walls are much larger than the typical chapel of ease. I had visited Sheldon on several occasions, and wanted to focus on the other two smaller churches for this trip. (more…)

On the way back from our paddling trip on Monday Alan and I stopped by the Duncan Chapel Methodist Cemetery, better known as the “Children’s Cemetery.” Alan had never been here, and was unaware of the cemetery’s existence. I had visited before, and was both intrigued by the history, and disturbed by the amount of desecration. This visit there was a bit more weirdness going on.

The cemetery got it’s nickname because there are many children buried here, but there are also many adults. On this visit we noticed that most of the children’s headstones had either stuffed animals or little toys. One even had a couple of doll baby bottles at the base of the headstone.

Most of these graves were from the early 20th Century, so I don’t understand why the toys were left. I don’t know if it was some pseudo-paranormal group, someone even more deranged. I can only hope that this behavior is more respectful than those that have knocked over the headstones. It may be weird, but I at least it isn’t destructive.