CHURCHES IN MT. CARMEL SOUTH CAROLINA

Mt. Carmel, though mostly abandoned, has a number of well-preserved churches, and though I'm sure they are of different denominations, I won't be mentioning them here. Suffice it to say they are all Christian churches.

 

The first is a tall Classical Revival church with arched windows on the side and peaked windows on the front. It is quite heaven-oriented, what with its tall ceiling and skyward-stretching lines. The glass is highly convoluted, making me believe the church may be older than the town proper, which was fully populated in the late 1880s. This structure has some elements that hint at the mid 1800s.

 

This next church has several details I like, but it is apparent that it hasn't been used as a church in some time (like the others were). At the right of the picture is an attached steel shed that is presently used to store large equipment, but some elements jump out to tweak the observer right on the nose. The chimney on the left side of the building is a simple single stack that likely vented a wood or possibly a coal stove situated about three quarters of the way from the back to the front of the church. That way the preacher and the first few aisles of the congregation could keep somewhat warm in the winter months (to hell with those in the back). I especially like the doors at the front with their Palladian transom and arched panels, but it's the exquisite trim mouldings that really make the door stand out. Some pieces are missing, but their depth, contour and stand-out ZZZZAAPP! just takes the eye and holds it. It did to both of mine, in fact.

 

I also like the huge hasp and the ancient padlock that proves how long this church has been unoccupied (uncongressed?).
 

 

The thing must be petrified with paint. In addition, the shutters on the windows seem superfluous. They face north, so they aren't there to protect the interior from the sun, and their hinges are of many different sizes, making me wonder just how often they were used. But a lot of work went into their fabrication, so they weren't an afterthought.

 

Finally, I present the Church on the Green. Mt. Carmel has a huge multi-triangular green that has probably seen some picnics and parades in its life, but is just a crossroads now. What I wouldn't give to run a metal detector there. At its west end stands this church. I present it to you now.

 

The lines are turn-of-the-century late Victorian, but it has several Vestiges that scream out to me. The corners and door treatments are right out of the Classical school, with Doric pilasters and triangular pediments yelling out for Greece to come and claim them. Just what is behind the side doors in the entry vestibule, I don't know, and I should, as one of the doors was open. I probably looked inside but was so overwhelmed that I don't remember. Closets, I think.

I especially like the gingerbread in the arch; several pieces are broken, but a lot of work went into fabricating and placing it there. It also seems to buck the austerity the rest of the building exudes, as if to say that there is more to this place than just rules and angles of approach. There is a touch of curvilinear jocularity.

 

Just don't tell the preacher.

My favorite features of the building are on the roof.

One IS the roof.

 

 

The roofing is composed of terne metal that likely took weeks to install. Each flat panel was crimped carefully into the run below it to create a waterproof surface, and each side overlapped the raised 'v' of the other piece which made an interlocking surface, and these were crimped as well. This is before the soldering of any edges, of course. If you consider that "terne" is a basic sheet steel that is hot-dipped into molten zinc, then crimped into place, you might get the idea that this stuff stands up pretty well to the weather and the years. You'd be right. Just look at how little paint still adheres to this roof. Yet it doesn't leak.

But I said "features" which means there is more than one.

The ladder is not one I would care to climb. Permanently installed to (I guess) access the now-missing chimney (a ridge patch to the right shows where it was), which would occasionally spring a leak, this has likely remained unclimbed for many decades.

Good thing.

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.

 

WOOD TRANSOM DOORS

ANDERSON SOUTH CAROLINA

Anderson, South Carolina is a beautiful upstate city with one of those rare gems of small-town America; a Carnegie Library.

Andrew Carnegie donated a slew of these opulent structures to lucky communities throughout the country in the later years of his life, and their architecture is varied and rich.

What caught my eye about this particular building was the front doors. They seemed overly tall for the building....

But upon closer examination, I saw the transom doors, separate entities of their larger twins below. I didn't get a chance to see them from the inside, so I have no idea if there are actual glass transoms behind them.

 

They are the only wood transom doors I've ever seen.

 

 

BAY WINDOWS, CENTRAL AVENUE HISTORIC DISTRICT, HOT SPRINGS ARKANSAS

 

One of my pet peeves in the preservation business is seeing boarded-up windows that seem to scream "NOBODY CARES HOW THIS BULDING LOOKS!"

I can't tell you how many second story windows above active storefronts have been outfitted thusly when all it takes is a little imagination to disguise the fact that the second story is empty. Unpainted cinder block looks even worse.

                                     Cinder-blocked windows, Morrilton Arkansas

 

 

This set of beautiful bay windows can be seen across the street from the Arlington Hotel on Central Avenue in Hot Springs. They look perfectly functional until you see that the glass has been painted to hide the empty interior. Where window sashes are entirely missing, plywood can be installed and painted with one color representing the wood sash and another, usually gray or black, as the glass.

I am, of course, only guessing that the upstairs is empty. Many of the upper stories along this street are empty lofts, but who knows what folks might be doing up there?



STRANGE DORMER AND CHIMNEY

2200 BLOCK OF LOUISIANA STREET, LITTLE ROCK

 

The question is "WHY?"

Did the dormer come first, then they decided to put a much-needed extra chimney in the very place the dormer was built?

Or did the chimney come first and when they added a dormer in front, they decided it looked lopsided and built one around the chimney to help balance the house.

Either way, I doubt anyone can see much out that window.

STONE FENCES, NORTH STONINGTON CONNECTICUT

Running along many rural roads of New England, stone fences are a ubiquitous part of the architectural landscape. Most folks, including ancient locals, refer to these as 'walls,' but they are quite wrong in their terminology.

A wall is built to keep things out; a fence keeps them in.

And though these fences do both, they were originally built to keep livestock from wandering onto the neighboring farm, where they might be claimed. Ben Franklin said "Good fences make good neighbors." It was these to which he was referring.

New England is underlain with granite, schist, gneiss, marble, slate, and all manner of hard rocks that seem to surface every year in plowed fields. The farmer of yesteryear (it's true today as well) knew that before the ground thawed but the field was snow-free enough to locate the stones, he and his hands would begin the yearly task of removing those that surfaced during the freeze/thaw cycle of winter. They loaded them on wide, heavy, low sleds and used the ice-slick ground to transport them with a minimum of friction and effort to the borders of those fields.

It was a hell of a lot easier to drag those sleds to the edge of the field than to a single point elsewhere, so the borders of those fields were demarcated with runs of stone, killing two birds with one stone (well, lots of them, actually). Unknown to most alive today, those fences were often topped with split wood rails to keep anything from jumping them. All wood has since rotted away, but the stones remain as a testament to past farmers' efforts to keep their fields clear.

Some are haphazard, laid with the clearing of the field in mind. Some are carefully constructed from selected sizes and contours to create an artistic, efficient design to please the eye.

 

And if you look carefully, you'll sometimes find fine veins of large crystals running through them. Known as 'pegmatite,' this is where gas bubbles in the molten granite allowed for larger crystal growth into the voids created by the gas. It cooled quicker, causing the crystals to grow in size.

 

Occasionally, road work or neglect or erosion brings these walls down.

Then professional fence builders (masons to you and me, but a special breed of them) are called in.

No stone sleds are needed today; track hoes outfitted with lobster claws make the job much easier.

                 David Higginbotham and his excellent helper rebuilding an ancient stone fence

 

 It is a matter of both physics and personal choice as to how to rebuild them, and common knowledge has the largest on the bottom, the medium sizes getting smaller towards the top, and the longest used as capstones to prevent as much erosion as possible. Then smaller pieces are used as chinking in the voids between the larger stones.

 

ALTERED PORCH OF THE JAMES PHELPS HOUSE IN ESSEX CONNECTICUT, 1845

This fine example of Greek Revival architecture is one of the many well-kept historic homes in Essex, Connecticut, a river town steeped in oceangoing history.

Though it is a beautiful home, I am curious about the siding on the first floor. The photograph, unfortunately, makes it look like a solid wall of concrete or stucco. It is not. It is wood.

The siding on the second floor is clapboard, an overlapping beveled six inch board well-known from Colonial to modern times. It is inexpensive and does a great job of keeping out the rain. The fact that it stops at the top of the first floor is what piques my curiosity.

The first floor siding is not overlapping, but tongue-in-groove planking. This makes it extremely susceptible to water infiltration, and therefore is seldom (never) used as an exposed siding.

Unless it was never meant to be exposed.

Examination of the portico to the left shows it to be of very new construction. The foundation and paving is of new slate flagstone, which is not native (granite is the local rock), and the trim does not match anything else on the house.

My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the original porch spanned the entire length of the house. The tongue-in-groove siding was likely protected by the long-gone porch roof above. Porches are the most susceptible part of the house to water infiltration, and so are the most likely part of any home to be damaged and then removed.

Only closer examination of the siding would prove if my guess is correct; there would be filled holes and possibly paint lines showing since-removed structural members or brackets.

I did not open the gate and get close enough to see.