Small towns lost in time (Part 3) — Fort Motte SC

 Next to Lone Star, the little ghost town of Fort Motte, located on a bluff near the Congaree River in the center of South Carolina, is probably the place that stirs the most vivid as well as some of the happiest memories of my formative years.   In the early to mid-70s  I lived in Columbia, the capital of the state,  just a 40-minute drive from Sumter to the east where my mother grew up and where I spent many happy childhood vacations.   I guess you could say there’s a circular route in the middle of the state which I can drive at any time of the year and  stir up a cascade of memories.  I think those times when you’ve just started out on your own and moved away from home are some of the richest for memories because you are liberated, totally free for the first time in your life, recently graduated from college and working your first job.   Also, your whole live is nothing but endless horizons of future hopes, dreams, experiences and accomplishments.   That’s the way it seems, of course.  But along the way we are sidetracked by unforeseen failures and personal disasters that test our mettle to the fullest but from which we emerge stronger and better people — most of the time, we hope. 

My friends Eddie and Ralph and I would travel from Columbia to towns such as Lone Star and Fort Motte in either my volkswagen convertible or Eddie’s VW van.  I will never forget that bus-like vehicle which held so much allure as part of the freedom-loving sixties, with its hippies, traveling the open road and various other scenarios.   Eddie was my first true friend after college as was Ralph, and we did a lot together over the next ten years.   But now all that has receded far into the past.  I haven’t seen Ralph in 20 years, Eddie in about 30 years or more.   I keep in touch with two friends from the 70s, but that’s it, basically. 

What I have are letters and postcards from that time period, and photos of places like Fort Motte where in my youth that seems to have disappeared so quickly, I had a good friend, a camera and the open road and offbeat places  to explore and photograph.  When I went back to Fort Motte a couple of weeks ago, I stood in front of the old post office,  the only structure left standing on what was once a little main street on the railroad tracks.  One car passed me in the time I was there, and the silence was deep and pervasive.  The vines and creepers and new growth of spring had just about covered up a few of the abandoned houses, and a dirt road seemed to wander off into nowhere. As during my first visit there 38 years ago, I marveled at the emptiness and silence and tried to imagine what the town was like in bygone days before the countryside reclaimed it.   There are a few houses in the quarter mile square town, and some people living there, but you’d hardly know it.     

Fort Motte in late April 2012

http://www.flickr.com/photos/camas/sets/72157629927733677/