History and Genealogy – Page 24

The Sad Fate of Chappells

June 1, 2011 Tom 62 Comments

After our Saluda River kayaking trip and post-paddling excursion to Chappells, I became somewhat obsessed with the ghost town and its history. Several left comments on that last post also expressing interest in what happened to the town.

Ghost towns fascinate me. At one time this street was bustling with traffic and activity, and now it’s completely overgrown and deserted. The how and why towns die out are varied, but in this case there are some straightforward reasons why Chappells didn’t survive. It appears that weather and bad luck dealt the worst blows.

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Exploring Chappells

May 31, 2011 Tom 14 Comments

One my posts that seems to get the most hits and generates the most discussion is the one on the Ghost Towns of South Carolina. In that post I mentioned that probably weren’t many true ghost towns, but only near-ghost towns — towns with a dying city center, but a thriving community around it. Monday … Read More “Exploring Chappells” »

Greenville Historical Aerial Imagery

April 5, 2011 Tom 3 Comments

History and Genealogy, Internet, Local

Sometime last week the Greenville Cageliner had an article about a new website from the Greenville County GIS Office (http://gis.greenvillesc.gov/historicalimagery/). The website features historical aerial photography imagery as a map, similar to Google Earth. Images are available for 1955, 1965, 1979, 1989, 1997, and 2009, and cover the downtown area, along with a bit of the county. Also included is the Sanford Insurance Map of the city from 1920.

I could spend a HUGE amount of time exploring the site. Looking at how the city has changed over the decades has been fascinating, and somewhat depressing. The patterns of urban sprawl are quite clear at a distance, and it can be sad to look back on landmarks that are no longer there. On the other hand, there have been some marked improvements in areas such as along the banks of the Reedy River, and these images show that very clearly.

I started with the area around the old Furman campus. I had never really understood the location of the old bell tower in relation to the rest of the campus, but this imagery makes it very clear. (Click on the images for a larger view.)

A Collection of Stereographs

March 25, 2011 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Photography

I finally got my hands on an actual set of antique stereograph cards. This is a collection of 32 cards by the H. C. White Company, and includes scenes from Havana, Cuba, Manila in the Philippines, several other interesting locations. There are also some humorous staged scenes included in the lot. These are all polychrome color cards, and have the copyright date of 1905 on them. I found some of the subject matter fascinating. This shot of the beach at Atlantic City is a far cry from today’s image of Jersey Shore…

If you look closely at the individual in the foreground, you’ll see that it’s a man and not a woman. He’s just wearing a weird yellow hat.

The Teacherage

March 22, 2011 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy

Rules for Teachers €” 1915

1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
2. You are not to keep company with men.
3. You must be home between the hours of 8 PM and 6 AM
unless at a school function.
4. You may not loiter downtown in any of the ice cream
stores.
5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you
have permission of the chairman of the chairman of the
school board.
6. You may not ride in carriages or automobiles with any
man except your father or brother.
7. You may not smoke cigarettes.
8. You may not dress in bright colors.
9. You may under no circumstances dye your hair.
10. You must wear at least 2 petticoats.
11. Your dresses may not be any shorter than 2 inches above
the ankles.
12. To keep the classroom neat and clean you must sweep the
floor once a day, scrub the floor with hot soapy water
once a week, clean the blackboards once a day and start
the fire at 7 AM to have the school warm by 8 AM when
the scholars arrive.

This list of rules for teachers has long since been proved apocryphal by Snopes.com. It’s one of those things of dubious veracity which get passed around via e-mail, or printed on pseudo-parchment paper and sold at Cracker Barrel for an exorbitant amount. It’s always pulled out to illustrate how you-may-think-it’s-bad-now-but-look-how-bad-it-was-back-then. (Although, it seems some politicians would have public teachers go back to those days.)

Even though the list is fake, there is more than a grain of truth to it, and I’ve even found some photographic evidence. I was browsing through the South Carolina Online Archives, specifically, through the old school insurance photographs, and I came upon a term I’d not heard before – teacherage. Similar to the word “parsonage”, it was a house or lodgings provided for teachers, most often unmarried females.

A Paddle and a Pow Wow on the Savannah River

March 13, 2011January 28, 2024 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Paddling, Travel

It was the second Saturday of the month, and time for another Lowcountry Unfiltered outing. For this excursion we were headed to the heart of some Civil War history along the Savannah River. The plan was to paddle a 5 mile stretch from Beck’s Ford Landing to Millstone Landing. It turned out to be a momentous trip for a variety of reasons.

I drove down right after work Friday evening and crashed at Matt’s place in Bluffton. The next morning we loaded up the boats at met the rest of the LCU guys at their usual meeting place, Grace Coastal Church. It was a small group – five of us met at the church, and James Martin came down from Columbia to meet us at the landing.

As we drove through the town of Hardeeville, small signs with the word “Pow Wow” and arrows pointing in the general direction we were going. When we got to the turn off for the take-out at Millstone Landing, we saw the following sign…

Apparently there was a big Pow Wow at the landing. We were starting to wonder if this was a good idea.

When we got to the landing there were tents set up everywhere and things were just getting started. Parking was just starting to get scarce, but we found places for two of our cars. We loaded up our boats into the remaining trucks and drove on up to our put-in at Beck’s Ferry Landing.

Stereograph Collections

March 10, 2011 Tom 1 Comment

EdTech, History and Genealogy, Photography

I think I mentioned that while growing up we had an old stereographic viewer and collection of stereograph cards as seen above. I used to love playing with it, and it seemed like we had quite the collection. While I was still on this 3D kick I decided to check to see if there were other collections online besides the one I found at the University of South Carolina Library. It turns out that there are an AMAZING number of images available online, if you know where to look.

The first thing I did was just a simple Google Image Search for the term “stereograph.” That turned up lots of interesting hits, and some potential sources for more images. It looked like a good many of these led back to the Library of Congress, and that’s where I hit paydirt.

My first search on the Library of Congress’s site led me to the Robert N. Dennis Collection, now housed at the New York Public Library. The stereographic images in the University of South Carolina’s online collection are from this collection. Dennis was not a photographer, but a collector, and he amassed a huge collection of these image cards. Many of these depict life in small-town America, but the collection itself spans the US and includes some European shots. Dennis donated these to the library in two batches, first in the 1930’s and later in the 1950’s. The collection consists of about 72,000 stereograph cards, of which a little over 12,000 have since been digitized and placed online.

The online Dennis Collection can be browsed by state, so I was curious to see what was available for South Carolina in addition to those I had already seen. I was surprised to see that there were several images of Greenville, including one for Reedy Falls and one of the old Furman campus and Belltower.

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Of Tricentennials and Tetrons

March 4, 2011January 20, 2020 Tom 13 Comments

History and Genealogy

Three unrelated events had the effect of catapulting me back 41 years. Several months ago I bought a Rubik’s Cube as part of a musical experiment. Two separate Facebook friends posted links to songs from South Carolina’s Tricentennial, and this week I met with my friend Tim Taylor about setting up a geocaching trail around the Roper Mountain Science Center. Those three events together created a time warp, and sent me in search of information about Greenville’s ill-fated Piedmont Exposition Park, and the geodesic cube designed by Buckminster Fuller that was supposed to sit atop Roper Mountain.

It was the 1969-1970 school year, and I was in Mrs. Medlock’s third grade class at Gray Court-Owings School. In third grade the social studies curriculum is all about South Carolina, so the timing with the state’s tricentennial was perfect. We all sang that we were good Sandlappers, and we learned about the various sections of the of the state, from the coastal plains to the Piedmont.

Slave Songs of the United States

February 25, 2011 Tom 2 Comments

History and Genealogy, Music

This past week one of the ETV channels was rerunning an episode of History Detectives. This particular episode had been produced to air during Black History Month, and featured stories about African American history. It originally aired in 2008, and I remember seeing it once before.

In the first segment investigator Wes Cowan visited Avery Clayton, president of the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum in Culver City, California. Clayton had found an old song book from 1867 entitled “Slave Songs of the United States,” and wanted to know if it might be the first collection of slave spirituals. The rest of the segment involved Cowan’s investigations into the origins of this collection.

Given my interest in old hymnals, this segment really caught my attention. There were other connections, as well – the investigations took them to Cal State Dominguez Hills, where Laura did her undergrad work, and to the sea islands of South Carolina.

Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 1

February 22, 2011 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Photography

This week I was looking for some resources on the South Carolina Digital Library (www.scmemory.org) when I saw that they have a new collection online. The collection is from the USC library, and is a collection of stereoscopic images of South Carolina.

The images were taken with a twin lens stereographic camera during and just after the Civil War. Most of these are of the Charleston area, and many show the devastation of the war, with ruined buildings seeming to be a favorite topic.

These images were meant to be viewed with a stereograph viewer, similar to the one seen below:

The image card would be placed in the holder, and the off-set images merged into a 3D view in the viewer. When I was growing up we had one of these antiques and a collection of cards, and I loved looking through them.