OLD STORE, MT.CARMEL SOUTH CAROLINA

 

Mt. Carmel is one of those towns that most people pass at fifty miles an hour, and thirty seconds later someone says, "Did you see that town?"

If the State Patrol was there, you'll know JUST where you wuz.

The speed limit is less than thirty, so slow down a bit and you might see something from a hundred years ago.

Get out and wander about and you will have entered a time warp.

The entire town is still there, from the furniture store to the ruins of the bank to the Grande Dames of the Antebellum. There are at least three churches, and none of them has seen a service for many years, possibly decades. Most of the buildings are uninhabited.

But they are also preserved. With their grounds often intact.

The layout of the entire town is almost just as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century.

SOMEBODY'S looking after it. Apparently a bunch of somebodies.

I'll be featuring this little burg in my next few installments. I already featured a few choice chimneys from there back a while ago.

So if you're ever tooling along the Savannah River in McCormick County, slow down and look around, because Mt. Carmel disappears awfully fast.

Saints preserve us and say it ain't so.

 

I was immediately drawn to the shutters. Likely hand-planed from local longleaf pine, they are fast and solid. The design is austere, but a faint pride of workmanship seems to flow from them. It was only faint because there was more work to do.

 

But the doors grabbed me and held me the way certain Vestiges do.

 

They have seen many successions of locks and handles, as evidenced by the round escutcheon (now empty of spindle and knobs) and by several holes that hint at a long-gone mortise lock. A closer exam of the latest padlock and hasp, partway up the meeting stile, shows that this door isn't even locked in the proper sense; the hasp is only attached to the door without the T-astragal and the screws are missing from the static door. If either of these doors were ever static, being in a store. In fact, the only thing keeping the doors together is the short hank of clothesline looped through one of the holes in each door and tied together in front.

The same lighthanded but striking workmanship can be seen in the lower panels of the doors that can be seen in the shutters; probably the same craftsman. But it is the upper panels that really catch my eye.

There are surface-mounted planks covering what was once possibly glass but more likely screen (which can be seen on the left panel sticking out behind the wood). The tops of these planks are fastened to the door with small tongues of steel shoved through loops of the same metal fastened to the upper rail.

 

It looks like these were not created when the store was closed up, but were likely put in place every night while it was in operation.

What I REALLY like about the panels is that they appear to be made of extremely wide wood. Still very thin (around a quarter inch), but wide as the Savannah. The cracks in them are curved and follow the grain of the wood, proving they are not laminated from smaller pieces.

The small sign at the right says "KINDLY USE THE TRASH CAN."

I like the word "kindly." I think it should be used more often.

I can almost hear the friendly arguments of the benchsitters outside while the sudden sound of the flyswatter slaps the front counter inside.

The screen door slams.