South Carolina Photos

I went with my mom to spread my dad’s ashes in South Carolina. He grew up there and the Woodward family has been in the area since white people first came around. We’ve still got a lot of relatives in the area. I lived in Columbia S.C. when I was in 4th-6th grade before I moved to Alabama, but I hadn’t been back for a long time.

The goal was to hit a number of places he and his parents lived.

The first stop was North, South Carolina where my grandmother was from. There’s a famous family story where on her first day of class at college (at Winthrop if I recall correctly), they had to stand up and introduce themselves with their name and where they were from. My grandmother stood up and said “I’m Berdye (pronounced Birdy) Byrd from North, South Carolina.” and she was asked to leave the class for being a class clown. I can’t recall if she was in tears when she left or not, but the professor was very apologetic when he learned that really was her name and where she was from. She credited his guilt with her passing whatever class it was (math maybe). She later went on to teach biology for many years at Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama. She was an amazing person and students loved her.

The path to North was full of fireworks and the color blue that I often associate with these backroads. Plenty of churches.

The decay of small towns is something I really like visually, but which makes me feel bad if I think about it too much. You see beautiful old buildings and hand-made signs, often from businesses that have since failed.

We went to try to find the graves of her parents. The information we had was vague. It’s always a bit disturbing to see how fast information is lost between generations. That’s part of the reason I’m writing this here. It’s a bit more personal than I usually get on this site, but I want to get it documented. Granted, I then have to think about how long this site will live on. One step at a time.

In the past, I’ve mainly been in pretty old cemeteries and generally ones with lots of rules. The cemeteries we were in didn’t seem to have that and it led to interesting things.

We did find the Byrd family plot.

Another stop was Woodward, S.C.

The main marker there was the Brice store. The Brice family is entwined with the Woodwards. My dad’s middle name was Brice. I’d been to this store when I was younger and when it still had a Woodward sign on it. You can just make out Brice on the main sign on the left if you squint and know it’s there. The place was well locked up. I’ve got a picture somewhere of me as a child outside which I’ll have to find and add at some point.

Oddly, there’s a church right there that says it’s in Woodard rather than Woodward. The graves there also have Woodard as the name.

The Concord Presbyterian Church is were we found some Woodward family graves. There were also Mobley graves which is another family connected to the Woodwards.

We went to the Woodward family graveyard where Thomas William Woodward (aka The Regulator) is buried. I was named after him. I’d been here before as well back in the 1980s. It has been cleaned up and repaired since then. I was told a lot of the graves had been broken open by Union troops looking for gold. When I was there last, they were in pieces.

My mom said when she visited with my dad in the 1970s they went into the woods near there and were able to see the ruins of a former Woodward house. I don’t know where or which house that might be.

We stayed in Columbia, which is where I lived. Both the elementary school and middle school had been rebuilt, but our house remained pretty much the same.

I spent the majority of my time in S.C. decked out in full camo running through the narrow strip of woods that ran behind that house and a strip mall. There was a small creek and swampy areas that prevented more development. I really wanted to go back in the woods, but the houses all had fences now and grown men wandering into people’s yards was not likely to be looked upon kindly. I tried coming in from the strip mall side, but the trails were no longer active and the woods were really dense. There were also just tons of mosquitos. Big ones. I recall one of the younger brothers in our group getting stuck in thorns there and crying because he was getting so swarmed by mosquitos. I did see a giant yellow spider, but further exploration was going to require boots, pants, and probably some bug spray.

We ate at Lizard’s Thicket. “A meat and three” as my mom referred to it. It’s right by the house and we’d eaten there back in the day. I had fried chicken, butter beans, mashed potatoes, and fried okra. Not quite Key & Peele level soul food, but close.

The 3 Little Pigs BBQ place we ate at regularly for the “pig pull” appears to have gone out of business.

Then we went to the capitol.

I always forget how semi-tropical South Carolina is.

There’s another Thomas W. Woodward in there.

So far from a full account, but better than nothing.