As you drive from here to there, how many times have you turned around to visit an abandoned store?
I do that a lot.
Being in a hurry on the back roads just doesn’t happen for me. I take back roads to save my sanity in this crazed mad rush of a world.
While returning from a book event, I passed the dignified old store you see here on Highway 25 near Ware Shoals.
The stone supports begged me to turn around, and I did. Those supports looked new and old at the same time. Stone ages well, doesn’t it?
Stacked stone. Cormac McCarthy wrote that the oldest profession in the world is not prostitution - It’s stacking stones. I believe it.
Stacked stones worked for primitive man, and for sure it worked for this old store. There it stands, abandoned yet dignified.
I had to go back and photograph the old store.
“Those stone supports look new,” I thought. Greenwood’s Norma Britt told me they’ve been there as long as she can remember.
Kudos to the men who built them. They combined beauty with function.
I resumed my drive toward Georgia, but that old store stayed on my mind. I needed to see more old places, so just before hitting the state line I detoured onto SC Highway 7, veering right at a fork a short ways past Hickory Knob State Park.
After passing a small gem of a church, I turned left onto Highway 81 and made my way to Willington and on to Mt. Carmel where I check on daffodils in front of a church this time of year.
Seems someone always mows ’em. I’ve yet to photograph that abandoned church with butter-gold daffodils in the foreground.
Driving past Willington toward Georgia yet again, I saw an old building that looks like a jail. I turned around to photograph it. Brick, iron, stone, and wood – what a splendid combination.
This old building retains its dignity, too, despite having a sheet of insulation scar its face.
Abandonment surrounds us, but it isn’t always charming. I see many a deserted strip mall. I’m sure they’re wired for the internet, but they’re ugly as Hell.
Is the rush to worship God Efficiency responsible for this blight? Builders combine brick, wood, and steel to create monotony, and like bland mushrooms they pop up everywhere. When one strip mall dies, another one shoots up nearby. God save us.
More efficient building techniques will arrive, and in some unimaginative future a fellow will pass an ill-fated Circuit City or closed Walmart clone and go, “Wow! I’ve got to go back and photograph that.”
You may be thinking, “Really, Tom?”
Well, I’m just being a smarty-pants.
But yesteryears’ classic buildings? The ones that maintain their dignity? They pull on me hard.
I’ll continue to turn around and visit old places, because seeing them and their brethren grows less likely day by day.
My advice? Slow down and visit the past before it truly is past.