I spent Sunday afternoon visiting my folks in Gray Court.  My parents had just visited my Aunt Ann, who turned 90 this month.  Therefore, much of the discussion involved family history, and we even took an excursion to a cemetery in Laurens County to look up some family history.

First is the picture above.  My Aunt Grace had brought it by this past week and my mother had asked if I could scan it, clean it up a bit in Photoshop, and print some copies.  I was able to enhance the image a litte and even get rid of some of the white specks that were on the image.  I scanned the entire matte, then desaturated the actual photo using the RGB channel mixer so that I could try to bring out more details.

The photo shows the family of John Lafayette and Elizabeth Dorn (Betty) Smith, my great-grandparents.  My grandmother, Annie Elizabeth, is located on the second row, third from the left.  My Great-Aunt Sarah, located on the front row, is holding a large doll.  The doll’s white face and dress tend to blend in with Sarah’s dress, but the legs of the doll are visible.  The effect is to make it look like Sarah has very short legs.  If you look carefully, however, you will see Sarah’s black shoes and leggings below.

The photo was taken on March 13, 1908, so it’s over 100 years old.  It’s interesting to note the stern expressions on everyone’s faces.  There are two theories here - one is that the process of having a portrait taken in those days was an unpleasant ordeal, requiring the subjects to maintain a rigid pose for a long exposure.  The other is that a stern demeanor was indicative of seriousness and piety.  I remember my grandmother laughing and telling jokes, but her public face was always one of seriousness with a hint of a twinkle.

Later in the afternoon my dad took us down to the old Providence ARP Church Cemetery.  This is located on a dirt road just off of the old road between Laurens and Clinton.  We were looking for the gravesite of my great-great grandfather, Nathaniel Callaway Todd.  The church is long-gone from this location, but there is a historical marker.  The cemetery itself has fallen into neglect, with the chain-link fencing down in several locations and the headstones in bad repair.

We found Callaway Todd’s grave in a corner of the cemetery. At least, we think we did. There was a gravestone for a Nathan C. Todd that was in the location Dad remember. However, it didn’t give birth or death dates. All it had was his service record from the Confederate States of America.

There were many other Todds in the cemetery whose names I recognized from my genealogy databases. In particular was Samuel Aiken Todd, a great-great-great uncle born in Ireland. I also looked for Thomas Todd, father of Nathaniel C., but couldn’t find him in the short time we had to visit.

Our route home took us through the heart of our family’s original land, including Rocky Springs Presbyterian Church, the farm I remember as a child, and several other historic family landmarks.

I’ve always been fascinated by odd bits of masonry - remnants of long past days. Nothing so grandiose as the Sheldon Church ruins near Beaufort, or the Tanglewood Mansion columns in Seneca, these bits can be just a piece of a stone wall, a bit of a column that remains, or a set of stone steps that now go nowhere. This last bit was the target of my photo journeys on Saturday.

I’d had lunch at Furman with Laura and had lingered to take a few photos on campus.  I had made my way to Travelers Rest and found myself at the location of the old Travelers Rest Elementary School, now the location of the TR branch of the Greenville County Library.  The old elementary school is long gone, but some remnants remain.  There are three identical sets of stone steps from the road up to the sidewalk, and another set of steps at one end of the sidewalk.  They obviously lead to something that no longer remains.

This TR encounter reminded me of other sets of phantom steps I had seen around town, and so I went on a hunt.  The larger streets in the area just north of downtown Greenville used to be populated with large stately houses.  Almost all of those are gone now, but there are some hints of their locations.  One of the most intriguing is a set of steps located behind St. George’s Greek Orthodox.  There used to be many more steps like this along this block on Townes Street.  Recent construction at the church has left only this reminder of the houses that were once here.

From Townes I drove the stretch of North Main from Academy to Stone.  Where there were once large homes there are now vacant lots.  Unfortunately, there are no phantom steps here.  There isn’t enough height difference between the street and the lot to justify steps.   Add to that the fact that most of these lots have been paved over, and the steps are nowhere to be found.

From Stone I drove down to the old Richland Cemetery area and hit pay dirt.   This historically black cemetery has lots of steps that have been closed off.  Strictly speaking, these stairs still go to their original destination, but they are no longer accessible.  This one was blocked off by a chain link fence…

Just a block away on Church Street is another intriguing set of steps.  There are twin sets that lead up to an old homeplace.  I like to imagine what the house must have been like that sat on the shaded hill overlooking the cemetery.

From the Richland Cemetery/Church Street area I headed over to Cleveland Park.  The narrow underpass for Washington Street appears to have an old set of steps that ascends from the lower street to Washington.

The park has several old sets of steps, but many of these seem to have been incorporated into the trails.  I guess they can no longer be categorized as “phantom.”

Perhaps the most famous steps that have lost their phantom status are those found in the Falls Park area.  These were built to provide access for Furman students to the downtown area.  When Furman moved the stairs fell into disuse.  Now that the Governor’s School is located on the old Furman grounds and the park is such a popular place, the stairs are getting much more use.

I thought of other possible places where I could find phantom stairs.  Old mill villages where the mill is gone seems like good candidates.  The area north of Academy Street beyond the Peace Center has not been developed, and seems like a place to find these.  I didn’t explore more today, but these might be places I try in the future.

Today I attended a workshop in Columbia on the state’s new IP video retrieval system.  Our district has been using the system for over a year now, so I was held up as an example multiple times during the workshop.  That was a bit uncomfortable, but it also meant that I didn’t get as much out of the workshop as some of the participants.

Most of the audience were “librarians”, not “media specialists”, who were approaching retirement.  The idea of video on demand seemed to be beyond them, and they were vocal about it.  Computers were just something with which they were not comfortable, so putting television on computers was the last thing they wanted.  At the very least, it needed to be very, very easy.

Which brings us to the demonstration portion of the workshop.  As part of this system each district receives a video encoder for doing live broadcasts acorss the district’s network.  The vendor demonstrated that the encoder could even be carried on field trips.  Since the encoder had a hard drive, it could capture the video camera output, then be uploaded to the video server on a laptop via FTP.

This is where I had to pose a question…

“OK, you want us to carry a camcorder, this large video encoder with a hard drive, AND a laptop to record a field trip, right?  Why don’t we just use the camcorder and encode everything when we get back?”

The presentation stalled at that point.

Each year we take student counts on days 1, 2, 3, and 10 of the school year.  We always compare these to previous years’ counts to see how our district is growing.  Typically, we gain anywhere from 200-250 students each year.  In three years time, thats a new school’s worth of increase.  No wonder we have a hard time keeping up with capacity.

This year, however, we’re completely off the scale.  We’re up nearly 420 students from this time last year.  That’s a new school’s worth of students gained in just one year.  In fact, three of our current schools have less than that number.

I haven’t looked at the student distribution by grade level to see if there is an age bubble.  If these are distributed across all grades, it might not be as bad as it could be.  Still, it’s much more growth than I was expecting.

I’d like to think we’re doing something right, and that these folks are just clamoring to get into our schools.  Perhaps we are.  Or, perhaps it’s just that USA Today named our football team number one in the nation.

The first week of school, and I’ve been flumoxed by small things.  Someone forgets to plug in a cable, and half a school goes offline.  Someone forgets to check a box on a piece of software, and our lunch system doesn’t get updated with our new students.

All of these small things have had a cumulative effect.  In the case of the lunch software it gets to be a real problem.  Money can’t be applied to accounts, free and reduced lunch accounts can’t be credited, PIN numbers and ID cards don’t work, and long lines of weary students start to form.  With that particular piece of software there have been lots of small things.

First, there was the updated software.  Subsequently, each of the point of sale machines had to be updated.  Our software sales rep waited until the last minute to accomplish this task, and it went very slowly.  I was with him until late a night before the first day of school, and there was no time to test the systems.  I was not happy.

Then there were missed settings.  The high school had its PIN numbers set to 9 digits instead of 12, so none of the ID cards worked.  It was a simple solution, but it took time to find.  Then there was the data transfer.  The company had forgotten to also update this mechanism, so none of the student data had updated since the suftware update.  Then the engineer forgot to check the box to enable overnight updates.  I’m just hoping it works properly tonight, because I know our schools are getting frustrated.

Of course, when these things go wrong, I’m the one who gets the calls.  I think that for just once I’d like to get a call telling me that things are going fine.