I needed to do something totally unrelated to dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. For several months Debbie Weeks from the Upstate Cemetery Preservation Alliance has been inviting me to join them on several outings, but the timing just never worked out. This time the planets aligned and I was about to join them. Antioch Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg County had contracted with Len Strozier from Omega Mapping Systems in Columbus, Georgia, to do a ground penetrating radar survey of their cemetery. Len would be doing a show-and-tell of GPR technology to the Alliance. Of course, I jumped at the chance.
I had been completely unaware of Antioch Presbyterian prior to Debbie’s invitation. It is a historic congregation, founded in 1843. Antioch is in the Cashville community in Spartanburg County. Cashville has been on my list of ghost towns, and has several historic locations. There is the Cashville Mercantile and the old Hurricane Tavern, which appeared on the 1825 Mills Atlas and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The current church structure was built in 1929. In recent years the congregation had dwindled to five members, and eventually died out completely. In 2020 the congregation was reconstituted, and now has an active group of about 90 members. The church’s cemetery is still active, and Antioch had contracted with Omega Mapping to see what spaces were still available for interment.
Prior to the meeting I contacted Debbie to see if she and Len would agree to an interview for the Carolina Ghost Towns podcast. Both agreed immediately. I would meet with them on Monday to get some ambient audio and to do the interviews, then Len would do the show-and-tell on Wednesday for the larger group.
When I arrived on Monday morning Len was already out in the cemetery running his scans. I met Debbie and Pastor Zach Groff and we chatted a bit. Zach told me that the congregation had recently been reorganized and that in just a few days a regular set of elders would be elected and that he would be installed as the pastor of the church, rather than as just outreach minister.
Zach took me for a tour of the interior of the church. It has a double entrance, much like the early churches that one door for men and another for women. Given the architecture and this design, I would have thought that the structure had been built much, much earlier than 1929. The interior had been remodeled, with movable chairs instead of pews, but it still retained some unique features.
Along the sides of the main sanctuary were counter-weighted panels that could be raised into slots in the ceiling to open onto side rooms, increasing the size of the sanctuary.
When closed, these became Sunday School rooms. All of the panels were missing their counter-weights, so most were either permanently open or permanently closed. One room served as the pastor’s office with a permanent panel in place, bit the ceiling pocket door still worked.
Zach said that a more modern pulpit was available, but he preferred the one that had been in the church in the 1800s. That’s the one that is now in the sanctuary.
Behind the original building is a small addition containing kitchen, fellowship hall and restrooms. This was added sometime in the 1950s.
Back outside Len continued his scans. I strolled through the cemetery with Debbie, browsing the historical markers. There had already been a thorough clean-up of the cemetery, removing brush and cleaning headstones. Most shone white, having been cleaned with D/2 cleaner. These were interspersed with more modern headstones.
There were also quite a few field stones marking graves. These were either originally plain stones, or were headstones that eroded so badly that they were unrecognizable.
In an open area somewhat removed from the church there was an obelisk that commemorated the Native Americans and slaves that had been buried in unmarked graves on the property.
There were several unique markers that appeared to be hand-carved. The letter W on these were carved like twin V’s with an X formed in the middle.
Debbie and I found several signature stones. None of these were the Charleston regulars that I often find, but were local carvers from Spartanburg and Union.
By this time Len had made his way back toward us, so I walked out and introduced myself. We walked along together as he continued his scans. Len described the GPR equipment he was using and showed me how the results appeared on the screen.
Len looks for anomalies that indicate a disturbance. This could be an air pocket where there had once been a wooden casket or just a body wrapped in a shroud, or something more substantial. At one point we could see an arched vault and even make out handles on the sides of the vault.
When Len finds an unmarked grave he rescans that area to determine the extent of the grave, then marks it with orange spray paint. Len then places a marker flag at the center of the grave. From the size of the marks and readout from the GPR Len can determine whether this was a child or an adult, and the type of burial, whether shrouded, casketed, or vaulted.
As Len was demonstrating this process we made a discovery. There was a grave with a Confederate iron cross, indicating that the interred had been a Civil War veteran. Right next to that was vacant space with no headstone. Through GPR we discovered that there was a burial in the supposedly vacant spot, but there was no burial where there was a headstone.
According to the marker, the individual had died in the war. What we suspect was that he had been brought home and buried, but the headstone was added much later, and that it was placed in the wrong spot.
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