CHIMNEYS AT THE MT. CARMEL SCHOOL

                                        Mt. Carmel School, McCormick County South Carolina

These are couple of chimneys from the Mt. Carmel School in Mt. Carmel, McCormick County, South Carolina. I will be featuring Mt. Carmel a lot in this blog, as it is a nearly perfectly preserved (and mostly unoccupied) town dating to the late 1800s, and is chock full o' Vestiges. The school is obviously of Craftsman design, as evidenced by the pyramidal columns, exposed rafter tails, and triangular knee-braces. Probably dates from (or was remodeled in) the early 1900s.

The first chimney is a simple brick stack in the center of the rear ell; it probably vented a wood stove. I didn't get a chance to see the room it vented, but as it is in the center of the room, I'm guessing it may be suspended from a wood frame or metal rods that support a wood platform. This is a typical application in the rural south, and is rather shocking to see for the first time. A brick chimney simply should not be suspended in the middle of a room. Of course, it might not be. It might run all the way to the ground.  It might actually be inside an interior wall, I dunno. Don't listen to me.

What I like about it is the brick chimney cap. Simple, cheap, and easy to build, it would keep the rain from the stove below. The openings face southwest and northeast, which would allow prevailing winds to create the Venturi (or Bernoulli) effect that allows smoke to rise through any chimney. The eddy of the wind creates lower pressure that draws the smoke upward, dontcha know.

I don't like the fact that someone spray-painted the metal roof and got a bunch of overspray on the brick. Tsk tsk. As a craftsman, I object, but am happy the building is being cared for all the same.

The big chimney at the rear of the school is unusual in several ways. It seems its fireplace would heat the large room rather unevenly, roasting the teacher's backside while alternately freezing the kids in the back row. Most schools have central stoves, or one located on a side wall in more-or-less the center of the room; this heats more evenly. It's one hell of a fireplace, too.

If you look closely, you can see a metal tie-rod and turnbuckle that holds the side walls together (or at least prevents them from spreading apart). The lack of joists in churches, schools, and other buildings with vaulted ceilings makes this necessary. Churches often used buttresses in place of tie rods.

But around back, the stack's construction makes me wonder. Did they build the granite chimney first and when it leaned, they designed a cobblestone-and-concrete wedge to keep it upright? I don't thinks so. Closer examination shows the granite jutting into the cobble-wedge, effectively joining them together during construction. Unlike northeastern Colonial-era central chimney house designs, the chimney for this structure was built during or after the construction of the school. Colonial-era homes often have rock-walled basements and huge central chimney stacks that were dug and built first, with the timbers of the house coming after and using the chimney for support. I believe the wedge was built during construction, not as an afterthought.

The chimney is not cracked or leaning, so whatever the wedge was intended to do, it's doing it well. The mortar joints are tooled to a convex half-round, a common practice among turn of the century German masons, though Italians and Irish did this on a lesser scale. The addition to the left is fairly modern, as evidenced by the cinder block foundation.