It’s entirely possible, in fact, you’ve never heard of Calhoun Falls, S.C.
But you know it.
If you or your ancestors were raised in any small mill town in the South, Calhoun Falls’ story is hauntingly familiar.
And now, its story has been told.
In his latest book, LaGrange pastor, poet and historian Harold Lawrence chronicles town life in Calhoun Falls, the tiny textile community where he grew up.
Like many mill towns, Calhoun Falls is a place whose dreams were once large. A place with prospects so promising that, early in the 20th century, community leaders dubbed it “City of Opportunity.” Lawrence borrows that phrase for the title of his book.
Anyone traveling the streets of Calhoun Falls today, the author admits, would see little opportunity in the “City of Opportunity.” Most would pass swift judgment upon “a place where town life has come … and gone.”
But Lawrence knows better.
“There once was great energy in its stores and on its streets,” he writes in the book’s introduction. And he spends the next 564pages documenting the town’s history in admirable and painstaking detail, but with an eye toward explaining, not its decline, but its persistence, its spirit, its refusal to give up and go away.
“This book seeks to highlight some of the attempts, historic and current, that have been responsible for a resilience that will not die,” Lawrence said.
And therein lies the message for anyone who ever lived in - or loved - a town with a great future, well, behind it.
Lawrence dedicates the book to the people of the town who influenced his childhood.
“Their ghosts still walk,” he said.
Anyone who ever loved a small, drying-up town understands that, too.
I sure do. My little hometown of Mayfield, Ga., was already drying up when I was born, but that never stopped Mrs. Frances Reynolds or Mrs. Virginia Kinsey or my Bigmama from trying to make it what it used to be. Or what it ought to be. Or what it might have been. Their ghosts still meander through my mind - and the minds of many others.
The people of Calhoun Falls were special - no, essential - to their time and place in the same way other splendid folks were essential to other disappearing towns.
What’s different is that Lawrence’s extraordinary effort - eight years of meticulous, often frustrating research - ensures that history will not forget the townsfolk of Calhoun Falls. There’s names will endure in the pages of “City of Opportunity.”
It is a remarkable gift - more information than most readers will want, Lawrence admits - but a splendid testament to those people whose town faded along with the textile industry, but whose lives mattered. Then and now.
“City of Opportunity” tells it all - the highs and the lows, the mundane and the magnificent, the ongoing efforts of those who, as Lawrence put it, are “doing what they can to keep identity and community cohesion from being swept away.”
Though a gifted storyteller and skillful wordsmith, Lawrence focuses this book narrowly on getting it all down - the names, dates and places, the events large and small, mostly small.
But the flavor of the times seeps through … in an account of a 1937 park dedication complete with peanut scrambles, tugs-o-war, sack races and pig races; in an election bet that required the chief backer of a losing candidate to push a supporter of the winner around town in a wheelbarrow; in a town legend that the seal of the Confederacy had been tossed into the Savannah River near Calhoun Falls, disappearing forever into a treacherous whirlpool known as “Hominy Pot.”
In a book rich in lists of names, Lawrence doesn’t stop with the dignitaries. Like the newspapers he drew from, his descriptions of events include who sang, who played the piano, who gave the blessing and who decorated the tables. A chapter on businesses gives abundant attention to the corner groceries, beauty shops and shade-tree mechanics of decades gone by.
The immense detail, Lawrence knows, means his book will not have broad appeal. That’s not the point.
His aim is revealed, appropriately, in a verse of scripture from the Book of Ezekiel, printed on an otherwise blank page at the beginning of the book. “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these fallen, that they might live,” the prophet said.
Lawrence wrote his book so the people who influenced his childhood might live.
Like the prophet of old, this modern-day preacher fulfills his calling.
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