City Directories and History: This is a compilation of images taken in 1992 by a team hired to survey historic sites in York County, S.C. The group photographed the Whiteside’s Complex in downtown Smyrna, S.C. knowing it would be a fading memory of the rural community in a short time. This was the Whiteside’s business complex owned and operated by Les and Gladys Whitesides for decades.
GRIST VISITS WESTERN YORK COUNTY (Editor A. M. Grist of the Yorkville Enquirer wrote a weekly column, “Just A-Rolling Along the Way.” This article appeared on October 20,1933.) …. Tuesday afternoon, accompanied by Dr. W. W. Harrison I traveled out No. 5, bound for Smyrna, to join up with my friend, Robert T. Castles to go places and see things ___ A mile or so east of Sharon the highway we passed by a young man, a young woman and three small children, the youngest of the trio being carried by the young man. First impulse was to travel right on; but after fifty yards of that I had to stop. There was a full length seat in the back of the Green Chevrolet that would just accommodate that party. The car would take no more gas to carry them a part of the way than it would to carry Dr. Harrison and myself. I stopped and waited for the little party to come up. Asked them where they were going. The man said, “Hickory Grove.” I told them to get in and off we went. They were not walking for exercise. That was their only mode of locomotion and it was a hard way for the mother and father with the three small children. Reaching Hickory Grove’s main square I stopped; they got out, and said, “We are very much obliged for the ride,” and we went on. There are occasions when it is difficult to pass the walker on the highways. This was one of them to me. I never saw the man nor his wife before; may never see them again, but I am glad I picked them up for that five or six mile ride. Presently we arrived at the home of Mr. Castles. He was waiting for us and we moved on. Stopped for a little while at the ginnery of Whitesides Bros. You know, perhaps, that this is the most modern ginning plant in the county. It is new and the machinery is all but automatic in every detail. The plant is equipped with three 80-saw gins, and the gins are automatically fed. The cotton is taken from the wagons outside by the commonly used type of suction elevator, and passes to a big machine up in the top of the gin house where the cotton is passed through what I would call a “cleaning machine.” That is a good part of the dirt, sand, trash, cracked bolls and so forth are separated from the seed cotton, and from this is passes on to the three gins, and after the seed and lint has been separated, the lint is passed by means of large pipes to the press and the seed go out through another pipe to the seed house some distance away or to the waiting wagon, if the seed is to be carried away. The press is automatic in its operation. The lint is fed into the press and a self- acting “tamper” forces the lint down into the box which forms the bale. When the last of the cotton comes from the wagon by way of the elevator, thence through the cleaning machine and to the gins and then to the press, the bale is ready to be packed for the market. It is turned around and packed by an air compressor having a pressure of 2,200 pounds to the square inch. It takes the machine just a minute and 40 seconds to compress the bale so that the bagging and ties can be folded around it and then out it comes to be weighed and loaded on a wagon, while the press is made ready for the next bale.
The outfit can turn out three completed bales per hour. When I was a boy and the mode of ginning was by horsepower, the rate of ginning was just about five to six bales per day—from daylight to dark. Dover Quinn is in charge of the Whitesides gin and incidentally knows how to operate the plant to get the best results. Then we went off to visit an old burial ground that Mr. Castles had been telling me about for the past year or more, and known as the “Whitesides” graveyard, a couple of miles southwest of Smyrna. But first we stopped to give the Smyrna cemetery a look over…. Mr. Castles wanted to show me the improvements made in the burial ground this past summer by the use of RFC money. The entire cemetery has been enclosed with a rock fence, a part of it cemented, and a neat iron gate gives entrance on the front side. The graveyard has been considerably enlarged, and the whole so improved that one not familiar with it would hardly recognize it as the same I visited a year ago. … Mr. Castles, now nearly 75, is especially happy at the improvements made in the Smyrna cemetery. His relatives, including his father and mother, are buried there, and it has been his hopes for many years that the ground would be enclosed with a rock fence as it now is…. Presently we drove on out to the Whitesides burial ground. There are evidences of some 25 or more graves there on a knoll, with lines of the old graveyard well defined. There are perhaps a dozen old soapstone markers still standing intact, with perhaps as many more broken down. But not an inscription could I decipher on any of the stones. Time has erased all possibility of making out any of the epitaphs. Not a name could be deciphered and who is buried here or when, is a sealed book. On one stone I found found figures that indicated a burial in the late 1700s, but even this one I am not sure of. Mr. Castles recalled one grave there, but its marker is gone. This was the grave of one J. J. Scoggins, whom Mr. Castles says, was killed by being dashed against a tree while riding a wild horse that he owned, but the date of his death he could not tell me. That is the first graveyard I have yet visited where there are markers and found it impossible to learn anything about who is buried there or when. Imperishable stone? Here’s some stones that have perished. At least the records they may have once carried have perished. … (Information courtesy of and from: YCGHS – The Quarterly Magazine)
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