Small towns lost in time (Part 2) — Lone Star, SC

"…I don’t know why I’m so drawn to this particular place. Why I keep coming back every few years. Soon, I expect that the brick mercantile building will be all that’s left. Another 10, 15 years left for the rest of it. Maybe less, maybe more…."

From a diary entry I wrote about Lone Star, posted on Aug. 24, 2000.

 "…I know this is cheeky of me, but as a believer in reincarnation, I would venture to guess you may have once lived there. One of the things I believe is that we are inexplicably drawn to scenes of past lives…."

Note from a fellow diarist at OD speculating on why I am so drawn to visit the town of Lone Star.

I  just did a search of the more than 800 entries in my OD, and discovered to my amazement that I have written about Lone Star five times over the years since 1999, in intervals of two to five years.   The last time was in 2008.   A little over a week ago I went back there again. It’s an hour and a half drive from Charleston through very rural South Carolina farming country.    I seem to have this strong need  to visit that little ghost town in the middle of nowhere near the banks of Lake Marion.   It also gives me a chance to drive down backroads that I first traveled in 1973 when I  moved to the state to begin my life after college and growing up in New Orleans.   There is nothing more relaxing to me than driving those roads with the window down and fresh air flowing in.

I wrote this about Lone Star in that 1999 entry:

 About 25 years ago, in the spring of 1974 — actually, just about this time of year — a friend and I were exploring the countryside and backroads in the middle of the state when we came across a small community surrounded by cornfields that seemed lost in time. Its little main street of about eight frame and brick false-front buildings stood to our left as we stopped the car and got out to look around. Immediately to our right, was a railroad track that ran through the area, the iron rails rusted. We wondered if trains ever came through there anymore. Looking up, we noticed a wooden sign, about to fall down, with large white letters proclaiming the name of the town. It said, "Lone Star."

Now I thought then, and I do today, that this was a curiously beautiful name for a community. I tried to figure out how it could have come to be named that. In the late 1800s was it perhaps the surest beacon in the dark country night, an outpost of civilization, a "lone star?" I will have to look into the origin of that name at the library, for I think about that place, even today. When I was traveling across the country a few years later, I passed through the communities of Morning Star and Evening Star in the Ozarks of Arkansas. I was struck again by the names.

My friend and I had recently completed a photojournalism course together, and we had our cameras that day. Black and white only, of course. We were into the art of photography, and we were exploring documentary themes. Our subjects were along those roads in that part of the South.

 I took one photograph of the street and railroad scene at Lone Star that came out just the way I wanted. The general store, the post office, the gas station, the abandoned brick mercantile building — all were captured in a freeze-frame of history that spring day in 1974. The perspective is slightly looking up, which gives it a bit of a wide-angle feel (I didn’t own one of those lenses at the time). In the center, slightly to the left, is the Lone Star sign adjacent to the railroad tracks. It is a picture lost in time. I have an enlarged, framed print hanging on my dining room wall now. The early morning sun lights up the scene and takes me back to those more innocent days of my early adulthood. It seems like I was a mere youth then, when I look back now, and in a sense I was. But what exciting adventures we two young photographers had. I would later go on to have more of them, taking photographs for stories I wrote while working for weekly newpapers during that decade of the 70s.

 A year ago, in June of 1998, I made the third of my return pilgrimmages to that town, the most recent one until then having been made in 1991. The first thing I saw when I arrived in the community, well off even the slightly trafficked state road that passes through the area, was an intriguing old abanonded house, tilted at about a 30-degree angle on its foundation, just waiting to crumble into a heap of boards and twisted tin. I photographed the house first from a distance, with a newly emerging corn crop coming up in the foreground. Spring planting had occurred a few weeks earlier, and everything was still green from earlier rains.

 Next, I took a number of pictures of the house from close-up. Nothing was boarded up. You could have walked inside and risked your life, for the whole structure could have come crashing down on you with the merest movement of footprints, it seemed just by looking at it. The house’s distinguishing features are two twin, square cupolas that form a kind of second story. I’ve never seen a house that looked quite like that one. Each of those cupolas could have been a snall room. They really didn’t seem to have any purpose other than as decorative detail. Each had four broken-out windows.

 Next, I went into town and took pictures of the stores and boarded up buildings, focusing on doorways, perhaps never to open again, and vine-covered sides of buildings, their entryways also boarded up. So perfect an artifact of a little lost town is Lone Star that a movie company came through years ago to film there, and even painted a Coca Cola mural on the side of one of the general stores, the one next to the Lone Star Exchange. It’s there today for all to see and admire.

 The first few pages of a big photo album of pictures I took last year contain these images of Lone Star. I’m looking at them now, remembering that trip during my vacation, and how green and lush the fields and woods were. A month or two later, the terrible drought of last summer had set in, and the crops literally dried up. The corn hardly had a chance to pollinate. Crops across the state were a disaster. The small main street of Lone Star baked and dried out some more in that hot sun, too.

 I’m amazed that the place has changed so little over the years. The sign next to the railroad tracks is gone, but everything else looks pretty much as I photographed it in 1974. [By 2012, the scene had changed markedly] There’s still one general store open for the community. It isn’t all dead. There’s some life in that place. There was even talk that a new highway and bridge across the big lake nearby would revitalize the area. I haven’t heard or seen anymore about that.

 I just like to look at those pictures occasionally and think about the sunny times of youth, when I was starting out in the world, had one of my few real friends along with me, and a camera to record and document what I was seeing out in that larger world I was entering for the first time.

Here are some pictures I took of Lone Star ten years ago including the first photo I ever took of Lone Star, a black and white view of the small main street:

outdoors.webshots.com/album/58860538UelyAR

And, finally, here are the pictures I took recently:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/camas/sets/72157629927747893/