Below the surface

By Charles Sowell  

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011 12:23 p.m. (0)

It’s been more than 50 years since Merrittsville was covered over by the Poinsett Reservoir, but former residents will never forget a way of life that had existed there since the late 1700s.

“My daddy and his relatives didn’t want to sell,” said Arnold Emery, 82, who was raised between Glassy Mountain (now home to The Cliffs at Glassy) and Hogback Mountain.

“The city (of Greenville) needed the water. I understand that now and have come to accept it. But back then my kin didn’t want any part of selling. I think they (the water system) paid an average of $41 per acre for the land. That was low, even for the time, when you consider Daddy made about $3,000 a year cutting timber from his property.”

Emery’s father got $8,700 for his 300 acres, about three years of income. Timber was the old man’s main source of income.

Most people today think the North Saluda Watershed, owned by the water system, as a pristine wilderness. It is anything but. Most of the timber has been cut over many times by the hearty Scots-Irish settlers who carved out a living in the valley of the North Saluda River.

The rich bottom land now locked behind the dam was similar to the fecund soil found downstream and it produced a living for generations of people right up to the time the City of Greenville bought up the land using eminent domain when necessary and started shipping bits of the region’s history back to town.

The stone water basin located next to Soby’s downtown came from the side of the old state road connecting the Saluda Gap with Charleston. Parts of the old road itself, like the low stone bridge tucked away in Cleveland Park between McDaniel Avenue and Woodland Way, were hauled to town.

“Water was the key for the earliest settlers in the Merrittsville area,” said Mann Batson, a historian who lives in Travelers Rest. “You needed a mill to grind your corn and that took water power. You also needed water to operate a tannery. If you had those things you could be pretty self-sufficient.”

White settlers started drifting into the valley in the 1750s following the old Cherokee trading paths. The first official mention of the area came in a 1785 survey for Benjamin Clark. It listed a Cherokee town house and village called Checheroa, according to documents gathered by Mary Owens and provided to the Journal by Anne Blythe, a historian and novelist who has written extensively about the region.

Merrittsville was named for Benjamin Merritt, who came to the area after the American Revolution and married Eleanor Wheaton, a local girl.

There had always been trade through the valley – even during Cherokee times – but when Joel R. Poinsett supervised the building of the last leg of the state road from Charleston to North Carolina, the village underwent a tremendous transformation, Batson said.

“Merrittsville’s economy shifted to cater to the drovers herding cattle, hogs and even turkeys and travelers taking advantage of a better way through the mountains,” he said.

Lodges sprang up in the little village and just across the border in North Carolina. The only remnant surviving of those days is the old Hagood house and store, which now serves as a visitor center on Scenic Highway 11.

Batson said Poinsett built the road to state specifications. That meant the grade could not be steeper than a team of four horses pulling a one-ton load in a wagon could handle.

On the steepest sections of the road, Poinsett used hundreds of masons to build stone retaining walls for a series of switchbacks called the Winds (pronounced like wind a clock).

“They build those walls so well that the old roadbed is still easy to find and looks as if it would still support traffic,” he said.

The Winds are lost to public view on watershed property.

So are the ruins of Wildwood Park, a recreation area built by the Woodside family, owners of Woodside Mill, in the mid 1920s so that mill hands and employees of Woodside Bank could relax on vacation.

The remains of the lodge’s massive fireplace and swimming pool are still visible in the woods just below the Winds.

Water system officials allow former residents onto watershed property once a year to tend the graves of ancestors at the old Emery and Lindsey family cemetery located in the gap between Glassy Mountain and Hogback, Emery said.

“It took years for us to get in to take care of things up there,” he said. “We meet once a year at the gates to The Cliffs at Glassy and are met at the other end by a representative of the watershed who escorts us to the graveyard.”

About 300 graves of Emerys, Lindseys and Plumleys are located in the graveyard.

The Cliffs has granted the families a permanent easement to pass through the gated community at any time, according to the Emery and Lindsey Family Cemetery Association.