Day: November 14, 2013

In the previous post I described how a mule kick killed eight people, and we explored the Little Stevens Creek area. In this post fellow singer and explorer Tommy Thompson and I ventured further into Edgefield County seeking out pottery and abandoned churches.

Edgefield has long been known for its amazing pottery. ETV’s History Detectives even did a segment on one of the “face jugs” from the area. Of course, I was not as interested in the pottery itself as in the town that grew up around the industry. Landrumville, aka Pottersville was located just north of Edgefield. Robert Mills’ 1825 Atlas shows its location.

I wanted to see if I could find it. The site is on the National Register of Historic Places. However, since it is still an active archeological dig, all of the location information has been redacted. There are lots of scholarly articles on the site. But, just like the NRHP listing, any article I could find said that the kilns were on private property, and that the address was restricted.

As a workaround, I took the Mills map and tried to overlay it onto Google Earth. Matching the roads and landmarks from 170 years ago was not an easy task, but in the end I came up with an approximate set of coordinates. Even if I couldn’t reach Pottersville exactly, at least I would be able to take a photo of the area.

Read More “A Feud, a Mule, a Senator, a Potter, and a Ghost Town or Two – Part Two” »

I decided this is going to have to be a multi-part post. Otherwise, dear readers, you will be scrolling for an uncomfortable amount of time. We saw an amazing amount of stuff on Tuesday’s photo trek, and it all has an equally amazing amount of back-story.

Fellow Chorale member Tommy Thompson sent me an interesting story entitled “How A Mule Kick Killed Eight People.” The story was about a feud in Edgefield County, and we decided that we absolutely had to head down that way for a photo trek.

Of course, as interesting as the story of the feud was, a single location just doesn’t work for a photo trek. So, the night before I loaded up my GPS with several possible targets in the Edgefield area. The next morning I rendezvoused with Tommy down on Augusta Road, and we headed south.

There is always so much along this road that is of interest, and it’s tempting to stop and take photos of every rustic barn and old house. I’ve long found that if I allow myself to get distracted like this, I never reach my destination. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but sometimes not. We drove straight on through Greenwood and turned onto Highway 178. This route took us to the community of Epworth. There are some interesting old buildings there, and my great-great grandparents are buried only a couple of miles north of there. There is also the old Epworth Camp Meeting site. The only distraction I allowed was a brief turn onto the Epworth property so Tommy could see the old tabernacle and cabins. I had photographed and explored it before, so we kept going.

Read More “A Feud, a Mule, a Senator, a Potter, and a Ghost Town or Two – Part One” »