I am so often reminded that old roads lead to interesting places and stories. They are like a rambling essay on dirt and are profoundly unique! Walking them, you may find abandoned buildings, bridges, cemeteries, and, if you are truly lucky, a granite mile marker.
Trespassing is not encouraged but traveling these old roads is normally OK, but all too often they are plowed over or planted to discourage usage. I love taking the old SC DOT maps found on RootandRecall.com and exploring how, after WWII, roads dramatically shifted and in some cases, just as Interstates did, cut off entire towns. Mountville is one of those which has retained its charm and in some respects profited from re-routing the old road.
Longtime historian J.L. West recently provided me with a few old pictures, some of which were simply views of old road beds and open fields. In most cases these have now become overgrown and not easily recognizable. But to view them as they existed four decades ago is very different. One piece of information he had kindly shared was the location of Beauty Spot just off Howell Road in Western York County. To most of us this was nothing more than a dot of land in someone’s distant memory. How wrong I was when I posted it to the website and about a month later get an email from a researcher who was elated at finding the family site, not in Union but in York County. I was telling a N.C. researcher about how thrilled this individual was and low and behold, he says he too has a client in Arkansas looking for the same site. So thanks to local historian Mr. West, at least two individuals in America are now recipients of information as a result of his sharing with R&R.
Talking about old roads, there is one that was traveled by even Jefferson Davis — was the old road leading to Pinckneyville in Union County. Part of this road is now Thomson Quarters Road. I would love to travel this route from east to west and see exactly what Davis and his party witnessed as they traveled south. In doing so, I bet we could discover a few new crossroads of history worthy of being recorded — such as Beauty Spot.