Seems a cowboy could hitch his horse and get a shot of whiskey here.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Interstate Act. Nigh 70 years later a grid of steel, cement, and asphalt makes it impossible to see little of interest. Despair not. You can still find a state’s true face along back roads.
Highway 76 is such a road at times. It eases into South Carolina from Tar Heel Land and heads toward Georgia. Let’s get our kicks on Highway 76. First up, the Little Pee Dee where I spy a tire hung from a tree near the Spring Branch Country Store.
Echoes of the Old South ring from crumbling mansions reminding me that glory once lived here. Killed by I-95 and tobacco’s demise.
From a weathered mansion’s column, a framed deer head stares at passersby. Soon comes the Great Pee Dee that missed renown in Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” Spying the Suwannee River on a map, Foster preferred “Swanee’s” lyrical fit.
A “Broken Arrow” incident, the country’s first, happened at Mars Bluff. A B-47, No. 876, left Savannah’s Hunter Air Force Base for North Africa. At 4:19 pm March 11, 1958, it accidentally dropped an unarmed nuclear bomb behind Bill Gregg’s home. Its explosive trigger blasted out a crater 50 feet wide and 35 feet deep. No one injured or dead.
A gunboat sleeps way down beneath the Pee Dee River. The Confederate Mars Bluff Naval Shipyard built the C.S.S. Pee Dee. Because Sherman was coming Confederates sank the Pee Dee March 15, 1865.
“Breaker 19.” JB’s CB Shop, reminds me of the 1970s citizens band craze. Outside Mayesville, veins of tar run through 76. From here came Mary McLeod-Bethune, civil rights leader and founder of Bethune-Cookman College.
There stands the last old-growth bottomland forest, Congaree National Park, where world-record trees take their place among arboreal legends.
Blind to cityscapes I approach Riverbanks Zoo where two rivers form a third. Thankfully 76 soon curves into Ballentine, named for a man who ran a general store here. Angie Rhame opened High Noon here. An elderly woman walked in.
“This does my heart good. I was so afraid they’d tear this place down. I have so many memories here.”
Before High Noon Farm House Antiques operated here from 1995 until 2006. The proprietor? Carlos Gibbons, father of Leeza.
Prosperity’s old train depot sits near a 1935 granite block building. Bedenbaugh Mules and Horses operated here. Saturdays, farmers bought horses and mules. To gauge an animal’s temperament, they walked them around the square.
Down the road a ’50’s gas station says volumes about I-26’s arrival. Near Clinton, tiger paws adorn a shed’s roof near a Christmas tree farm. In Joanna the Blalock mausoleum dominates the Veterans’ Memorial.
I journey on past aluminum frying pans hanging over some precious garden plant.
On to Anderson — Electric City — the South’s first city to transmit electricity long-distance. On November 14, 1931, Amelia Earhart landed here to promote Beech-Nut products.
I shoot beneath I-85 to La France past Pendleton’s outskirts, birthplace of Samuel Augustus Maverick, an ornery Texas rancher who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and gave us the word, “maverick”.
U.S. 76 crosses Lake Hartwell and the Seneca River whose inundated riverbed joins the Tugaloo to create the mighty Savannah. On to Westminster. Just outside Sumter National Forest all that greenery turns a trailer’s purple roof radioactive. Now the Chauga River runs beneath me. Few know of its class VI rapids where the Earth too wild to tame exists.
The Wild West appears in Long Creek. A strip mall seems a place a cowboy can hitch his horse and get a shot of whiskey. Now the land plunges and falls away. Straight ahead looms the wild Chattooga. I walk onto the 76 bridge and plant my left foot in Georgia, my right in South Carolina, and watch the river run.
Dark falls. You can’t step into the same river twice; nor can you drive the same road twice. I cross into Georgia to find another way back.