Author: Phillip Stone

I've been the archivist of Wofford College and the South Carolina United Methodist since 1999. I'll be sharing college, Methodist, and local history, documents, photographs, and other interesting stories on this blog, which I've been keeping since December 2007.

The Civil War Begins – 150 years ago today

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date April 12, 2011

American historians and others today are commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, the event that began the American Civil War. Of course, events long before the first shot was fired precipitated the war, but April 12, 1861 was when the fighting actually started.

How did the Civil War affect Spartanburg and Wofford?

If we look in Dr. Phil Racine's Piedmont Farmer, we find what David Golightly Harris has to say about what happened in Spartanburg on April 12, 1861.

"War and Rumors of wars. Great excitement prevails at this time, on account of a report that Fort Sumter is to be bombarded immediately. The volenteers at Spartanburgh has been ordered to repair to Charleston. Late on the evening of the 12th Mr. Lanford's carriage came… to go to the village…. [We] remained in town all night and the next day until the [railroad] cars came with the all Important News that Fort Sumter was at that time being bombarded."

Harris found a note on his return home on the night of April 13 that begain "Dear Sir Rub up your Rifle the War has begun."

At Wofford, historian David Duncan Wallace noted the high state of excitement in the student body in the last months of the 1861 spring term. Here are some images of students from 1860-61 who soon left for war.

Most of the class of 1860, which was already away from the college, saw military service.

Eventually, the college sank most of its endowment into Confederate bonds, bank stock, and currency. The bonds are still part of the archives collection.

Over the next few weeks, I'll share some other documents and thoughts.

Dr. Mark Byrnes offered some commentary on his blog today that's worth reading.

Tonight on campus, Dr. Tracy Revels' American Civil War class will read selected letters from Civil War Soldiers. The event is at 7:00 in Leonard Auditorium.

Documents Methodist

Spartanburg and “blind tigers”

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date March 28, 2011

No, this has nothing to do with Clemson fans who can't see well. A blind tiger is an establishment that sells liquor illegally. In other words, it's a speakeasy, though apparently speakeasies were considered a little more high-class than blind tigers. The term became popular before and during Prohibition.

Again, some of my best postings come about when I'm looking for something else. Today, while looking for an article in the Methodist Advocate in September 1913, I came across a front-page story headlined "Spartanburg and Blind Tigers" suggesting Spartanburg had come under control of the "liquor devil"

A front page story? The Methodists in South Carolina were so concerned about alcohol that the existence of some illegal pubs in an upcountry city was worthy of front-page coverage?

The article compares the way several cities in the Palmetto State deal with liquor. In Charleston, the state's most open "wet" city, the local authorities countenanced it, mostly because the citizenry wanted them to. In other cities, like Columbia, there had been a recent crackdown.

The Advocate took note of a Spartanburg Herald story that proclaimed "mischief is afoot." "Liquor can be bought at any time of day or night without going a hundred yards from any of the principal business offices of the city. Vice flourishes, not alone in wary retirement to remote places. Professional gamblers are lying in wait for lambs to shear. The word has one out through all the region round about that in Spartanburg the pasture is open and fine for all that make prey of manhood…"

"All this is going on because nine-tenths of our citizenship simply does not realize the rapidity with which the control of the moral atmosphere of the community has been slipping away from them. If they were aware of all that went on during the past seven days, for instance, they would be amazed."

I never knew what a den of iniquity Spartanburg was in the 1910s! And I think I will refrain from comment on how the presence of the college gave the town even greater reason to purify itself and rid itself of a reputation as a "wide open town."

Methodists in the years after the Civil War had gotten pretty serious about alcohol, and the church newspaper in 1913 was covered with articles about temperance. One does wonder what they'd say today if they saw Morgan Square, with the Irish pub, the nightclub, and the other restaurants!

You can click on the images for larger versions.

Brushes with History Documents

Spartanburg hosts Lindbergh

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date March 17, 2011

Ordinarily I stick to writing about Wofford history, with a little Methodist history thrown in for good measure. Mostly I leave Spartanburg-area history to my friend and neighbor Brad Steinecke and his Hub City Historian blog. However, in going through some materials today, I found a copy of the program celebrating the visit of Charles A. Lindbergh to Spartanburg in October 1927. The festivities of the day included a welcome ceremony at the airport, a parade through downtown and Converse Heights, and a dinner at Converse that night.

The program itself runs 32 pages. Our copy was the gift of Wofford alumnus and Hampton Heights resident Rembert Stuckey '26. It's got a lot of information about Spartanburg's new downtown airport and the city itself. What struck me the most was the map of Spartanburg in 1926. Several of the streets carry different highway numbers today, but by 1927, the bones of the area's highway system were in place. The railroads that had so much to do with making Spartanburg the "hub city" were in place – and many of those rail lines are in exactly the same place today, almost 85 years later. Here's the map.

You can see the circle that defined the city limits and streets such as Main Street, Church Street, Reidville Road, and Union Street. Note that one of the rail lines- on the east side – is listed as a streetcar line. I believe that connected to Glendale. One of the two rail lines heading west toward Greenville was, I believe, the electric "interurban" rail line that was a passenger link to Greenville and Anderson.

Here are the two pages of information about the city, with its population of some 42,000. We don't have quite that many in the city today.

And finally, the cover.

Documents Sports Students

Baseball Games from 1902

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date March 15, 2011

The Wofford College Journal provided something of a season round-up in this June 1902 story.

Our base ball team went to Knoxville, Tenn. where they played two games with the University of Tennessee on April 25 and 26, respectively. A local paper at Knoxville remarked that the “Varsity expected to live on Easy Street while Wofford was there. But they were rudely awakened on the afternoon of the first game, the black and old gold waving above them with the score 8 to 7. The second game was still more decisive, the score being 17 to 4 in favor of the boys from South Carolina. Wofford pulled together beautifully, with something like the results expected in “ye olden times.” When the results of these games was announced on the Campus, the hearty reception of the news, the yelling, the singing, the speech-making reminded one of the famous days of ’99 and ’00. The boys of the team report excellent treatment by the Tennesseans.

The great South Atlantic States Music Festival annually attracts large numbers of the most cultured class of people from South Carolina and the neighboring states to Spartanburg. Wofford has always tried to do her part in entertaining these visitors. This year two games of ball were played on the college grounds.

On April 30, Furman came over from Greenville and crossed bats with the home team. There were no interesting features to the game, and Wofford added another victory to her list, having made 14 runs to Furman’s 1.

On May 1, Trinity and Wofford met, and a battle royal ensued. The game was hard played on both sides from first to last. Trinity has a splendid team and made it hot for the home boys, but the latter finally won by a score of 4 to 3.

The last game of the season was played at Clemson College. The Clemsonites there defeated the Wofford boys to the tune of 6 to 3 in a clean, snappy game of ball.

Brushes with History Students

Students and Politics

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date March 14, 2011

A few weeks back, a researcher asked me if we had any records about black student activism at Wofford in the late 1960s. I didn't turn up a lot of information, but I found a few news clippings tha I shared.

I found this one especially interesting. Some Wofford students visited a neighboring college to hear South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond – who may well have been at the height of his political power and influence in this era. The clipping tells the rest of the story.

The clipping was from the Old Gold and Black, Wofford's student newspaper.

Documents Faculty

The Chronicles of Zerrachaboam

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date March 1, 2011

A recent e-mail message led to a new acquisition this week for the archives – a typed copy of The Chronicles of Zerrachaboam, a piece of political satire written in 1954 by the late Professor Lewis P. Jones.

Dr. Jones was a scholar of many things, particularly South Carolina history, and even more particularly the late 19th century – an era he chronicled in his doctoral dissertation. During the 1890s, some anonymous observers had written, in language reminiscent of the King James Old Testament, a political commentary on South Carolina under the rule of Benjamin Tillman. They were styled the "Chronicles of Zerrachaboam." Dr. Jones would have been quite familiar with these writings, and when the opportunity presented itself again in South Carolina, he chose to write "Zerrachaboam II." His subject: The 1954 U. S. Senate race between Strom Thurmond and Edgar Brown.

When Senator Burnet Maybank died just before the 1954 Democratic Primary (the only election that mattered in those days), the state Democratic Party was left in a dilemma. They had to replace Maybank on the ballot, but they didn't have time to call a special primary. They chose to nominate longtime state senator Edgar Brown, known around the state as the Bishop from Barnwell. Strom Thurmond, a former governor and Dixiecrat candidate for president, saw his chance to run against the Barnwell Ring – he'd beaten them before in his 1946 governor's race. Several other notable characters played a role – Governor James F. Byrnes, Senator Olin D. Johnston, and others. Thurmond, of course, went on to win what was, until November 2010, the only write-in candidacy for the Senate. Just this year, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won a write-in contest, giving the 1954 SC Senate race a little bit of historical publicity as well.

The situation was ripe for commentary, and so Dr. Jones wrote about it in these chronicles. Click for a larger version.

Page 2

Brushes with History Documents

The Archives – an old curiosity shop

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date February 7, 2011

There's a lot of serendipity in archives. You just never know what you might find when you visit or talk to an archivist. Things that you never expected will appear from the stacks, the vaults, or the file cabinets.

Today, for example, Dr. Anne Rodrick from our history department mentioned on Facebook that today was Charles Dickens' birthday. It happens that the Wofford archives has, in the safe, a lock of Charles Dickens' hair.

How'd we get this artifact? The booklet's cover notes that it was given to us by David Gibson of the Class of 1941. Why and how that gift was made is lost to history.

Nevertheless, if you toss out an odd fact in front of a historian, a librarian, or an archivist, you never know what you might get in response. We like to share!

So, here it is:

Note that this was taken with an iPhone camera, which may account for the lower resolution.

Methodist Photographs

Methodist Ministers, the 1932 edition

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date January 5, 2011

Today I completed work on a photo gallery with short biographies of Methodist ministers who were serving in South Carolina in 1932. My student assistants and I have digitized the photos from Builders: Sketches of Methodist Preachers in South Carolina, edited by E. O. Watson in 1932.

The photos are available in Flickr – and can be viewed, searched, and even downloaded for Methodist churches who are looking for pictures of their former ministers.

This collection supplements three other ministerial photo collections – photo directories from 1901 and 1914 and a minister’s personal photo album, all of which are available online.

Builders

Here’s a slide show of some of those images

Documents Sports

Wofford’s Mascot

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date January 4, 2011

I had a question recently from an alum about the college’s mascot – specifically, could I share some pictures of different mascots through the years.

According to some research undertaken by my predecessor, Herbert Hucks, the first time the college’s teams were called the “Terriers” in print was in a November 1914 article in the Wofford College Journal. In 1909, an image of a small dog appeared in the Bohemian in a cartoon on the gymnasium team’s yearbook page.

The 1911 and 1912 Bohemians also featured more elaborate drawings of dogs that appear to be terriers, and the 1912 volume identifies the dog as “our mascot.”

It’s not easy to find a lot of images of the mascot until after World War II. This image appears to be common from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. It was in a 1965 Old Gold and Black.

Mascot1965

Several different types of terrier show up in various publications, Terrier Club newsletters, and the like in the 1970s to the 1990s. Here are a few:

In looking over the various images the college has used, I also found photos and stories about several specific mascots – dogs named Jocko, Baron Ben, Spike, and Blitz, among others. I'll work on something about those in the future.

Alumni Oral History

Patterson Oral Interview Part 5

Post author By Phillip Stone
Post date December 14, 2010

This is the final segment of the D. F. Patterson oral interview – it runs about 10 minutes. In it, he talks about some of the college's fund-raising experiences from his time on the board in the 1950s and 1960s as well as his optimism for the college's future. This tape was recorded in 1980.