A Visit to My Childhood Home

The word “home” means a lot of things to us depending on the way it is used. We hear words and phrases like home-base, hometown, homey, homework, home is where the heart is….  You get the idea I’m sure.

In this blog I am reflecting on my childhood home, the first home  I remember. It was a good-sized two story brick and stucco-accented home with stately pecan trees, a large backyard, a cow pasture, a garden spot, and chicken houses.  It was located at 828 Reidville Road, Spartanburg, SC. I was born in 1950 and lived there until my parents bought a business in the nearby town of Inman and moved there in 1958.  My parents built a new house and the home I knew for the first 8 years of my life was sold to a family with young children. The sale of the home provided income to my parents for a good many years.  I recall vividly that they “self-financed” the home for twenty years and the family who owned it would regularly come to our house in Inman to make the house payment. The times have certainly changed!

You won’t find my childhood home there now. You won’t even find street number 828. The house was torn down several years ago in the name of progress.  I’ll come back to that later. 

You won’t find Reidville Road.  It was renamed the John B. White Boulevard in 1998 to honor  a very fine man and leader in the city of Spartanburg. If you’ve ever eaten or heard of The Beacon then you know about the legacy of John White. I still call John B. White Boulevard the Reidville Road and I probably always will in my mind.  It is and was a thoroughfare that I have traveled many times in my life to get to places of business and to visit relatives who lived on the Reidville Road.  I remember when sidewalks were put in and a once country road leading out of town became a busy thoroughfare into the downtown area for the new families living in Woodland Heights and points west.

It seemed to me, in my child’s way of understanding,  that our house was huge. By today’s standards, it would be considered comfortable and roomy but modest. There was a nice front porch, partly  covered and partly opened. I spent many happy hours on that porch playing with my dolls and coloring in coloring books. The house  had a living room with a beautiful fieldstone fireplace. The fireplace stones had been collected on the place, so we were told, and it was beautiful. Some of the rocks had shiny mica and quartz in them. That fireplace was my mother’s pride and joy. She loved to decorate it for Christmas and always had a vase of flowers sitting on it. I believe her love of rocks and mine, too, for that matter, had its origins in that fireplace.   The dining room had  built-in corner cabinets on which my mother proudly displayed her china and vases. When they built the new house in Inman, the corner cabinets went in the dining room in that house. The kitchen seemed large but it probably wasn’t. It had a little breakfast nook with  built-in bench seating and a large walk-in pantry. Off the kitchen was a large back porch that had windows and housed the washer and freezer. Mama kept African violets in those windows. No dryer for us!  I loved to play in the sheets and other clothes hanging on the clothesline. I remember that Mama would get a little aggravated as the neighbor kids and I ran through her freshly laundered sheets and grabbed  them with our grubby hands!

Cathy and her daddy in the kitchen

Near one side of the rear of the house was a combination root cellar and green house. I can still smell the earthy fragrance of good loomy dirt and plants. The root cellar had a door that led to a full basement. Mama had shelves on three  sides of the basement full of her canned vegetables and jams and jellies.  I was not a fan of the basement because in one corner sat a huge coal furnace that had to be fed coal and stoked in the winter. There was a hatch on the side of the house where the coal man would send the coal down into a big bin near the furnace. I can still visualize my father in the early morning, going down the steps to feed the coal furnace and get the house heated up for the day.  I was afraid of the furnace and rightly so.  If you saw Home Alone when MaCaulay Culkin’s character goes into the basement and sees the monster furnace, you know how I felt. A byproduct of the coal furnace was the coal cinders that had to be removed periodically from the furnace. They were small  rock hard and sharp shards of residue that did not burn. Daddy would spread them out in the driveway along with the gravel.  One did not dare walk barefoot over the cinders! 

There was a white clapboard garage with the huge double doors that had to be pulled open to either side to let the car go in. It was covered with an old-fashioned pinkish salmon colored rose called “Talisman” that had the most wonderful fragrance. The rose bush and many other plants went with us when we moved to Inman.  Mama rooted some of that rose for me and I planted it near one of our barns but it didn’t survive. I’ve never been able to find that rose. I wish I could.

The fireplace in the living room decorated for Christmas

We had chickens and a milk cow. My mother made butter. My father had enough chickens that he could sell the eggs in the mom & pop grocery store that he operated near the downtown of Spartanburg. I had a horse–my first horse– named Molly. She was an old, gentle plow horse and I loved her. It seems hard to believe now, especially if you were to ride down the four-lane road that is John B. White Boulevard, but I would ride my horse from our house out the Reidville Road on the shoulder of the road a distance of a mile or so to the intersection of Blackstock Road and the Reidville Road and back.  I was 6 years old! Times sure were different then. 

The bulk of my growing up was spent in our new house in Inman so that is the home I have the most memories of and it still stands today and is inhabited by family.  But the house on Reidville Road still has a large place in my memory. I had playmates and classmates surrounding me. The side streets off  Reidville Road were filled with new young baby-boomer families. We played for hours in the creeks and woods and our parents never worried about where we were or what we were doing. I had two aunts and uncles who lived on Reidville Road near us. Aunt Sybil and Uncle Mack lived down the street and as I walked to school to Park Hills Elementary School, I could count on a stop by to see Aunt Sybil  and visit for a while on my way home from school. I could always count on a treat of some sort from her. Up the street, lived my Aunt Lenora and Uncle Frank and my paternal grandmother. I was surrounded with playmates, relatives, and an idyllic life. We had good neighbors. The Tinsleys lived in the house on our right. It still stands and is an exact replica of our house only flipped so the rooms are opposite our house, much like the new construction homes that are 20 feet apart. On the other side were the Perrys. There were three Perry children, Eddie, Carol, and Linda. We played hard. The other house below us belonged to Dr. John Simmons. He was the local dentist. He was very nice and seemed somewhat old to me as a six year old. He probably wasn’t even 50! I have this memory  that his wife was not in good health so we kids avoided the Simmons’ yard when we could.

The Cromer Family at 828 Reidville Road: David, Bill, Martha Gail,Evelyn, Cathy and Daniel

We’ve heard it said that “we can’t go home again”. In most respects that is true but today, I did go home again to my childhood home. I took our  grandchildren on a visit to Hatcher Garden and Woodland Preserve on John B. White Boulevard in Spartanburg.  The address is 820 John B. White Boulevard.  The main entrance and what they call the “The Park at Hatcher Garden”  is exactly where my house at 828 Reidville Road stood. As best I can tell from researching the records, the house and my parents’ two lots were sold to the Spartanburg County Foundation in 1992.  At some point after that, our house was torn down. I remember reading that it was to be torn down and had plans to try to retrieve a brick or a rock or something from the homeplace but I did not. The huge pecan trees that I played under are still standing.  The water wise demonstration garden with drought resistant plants is exactly where my mother had her flower garden of iris, daylilies and other perennials.  When she moved to Inman, she transplanted a lot of the iris and daylilies. I have some of the same varieties in my garden.  She also had a passion for rocks and moved many of her treasured rocks to Inman. I have one very substantial rock with quartz crystals and other interesting formations. I think that it needs to return home to a special place in the Hatcher Garden somewhere my mother might have trod. 

The office and gift shop for Hatcher Garden is in the old Tinsley home. Our pasture and place where the hen houses were is now wooded and populated with beautiful plants, trees, and walkways. it would be hard to imagine that it was ever an open pasture. In the history of Hatcher Garden, we are told that Mr. Harold Hatcher purchased acres of old eroded cotton fields and gullies.  I beg to differ with that somewhat. The portion of the land that is Hatcher Garden that my parents owned was not eroded and washed out. I’m sure the history is referring to some of the property that was on the extreme backside. It is hard to believe now when traveling through Spartanburg and the west side of town, that this was at one time, mostly farms and open country. There was a World War I army camp located near the intersection of Highway 29 and Interstate 26.  But our property was well-taken care of. I don’t know how much land my parents owned at 828 but I know it was enough that we had a large garden, the pasture, and near the back of the property a house that they helped my sister and her husband build. The road down to that house is now a service road for Hatcher Garden. I am anticipating taking a walk down that road to see if  the house is still there. That is for another walk and another time. 

The Tinsley house in the background–now the Hatcher Garden offices

The grandkids and I had a very nice walk on the beautiful grounds of Hatcher. The yards that once belonged to my family, the Perrys and the Simmons are now verdant plantings of native plants and beautiful hydrangeas and other plants. The Simmons’ yard is now  a pond designed to catch storm water from the drains along the four lane road  where natural processes can purify the water and return it back to the ground. The walkways meander through “rooms” where one can sit on beautiful granite benches and enjoy the songs  of the birds and the chirping of squirrels. The sounds of the busy highway are muted by all the sounds of nature and bubbling streams that fall over man-made waterfalls. Even on a muggy June day, we were cool and never really ‘broke a sweat” as we walked the various paths and read the engravings on the many memorial stones scattered around the park. I think that placing a stone in my parents’ memory is the next project on my list. I know what the engraving will be: 

                                          A kiss from the sun for pardon

                                          A song from the birds for mirth

                                          I feel nearer God’s heart in my garden

                                          Than anywhere else on earth

The open park-like area near the front of the garden is the most meaningful part of the place to me since it is where our house stood. As we walked along the gravel path, I tried to explain to the grandkids, 6 and 9, what this place was and why it was important to our family. I think that we have to tell our children about their family, their history, their grandparents and those gone on in order  for them to have a sense of belonging and understanding of who they are. If we want our children to have a sense of worth and self- acceptance, they need to know that they are loved and came from families of people who worked and lived and worshipped and made contributions to the communities in which they lived. I try to take every opportunity I can to share some of their family history with them just as my aunts and uncles did with me. I’ll show some pictures of the house and my family–my parents, siblings, and me in happy times and routine times at 828 Reidville Road. 

Our grandchildren sitting near where the yard was.

The park at Hatcher Garden which is where our house stood.

I’m thankful to Mr. and Mrs. Hatcher for having a vision all those years ago and for those that have made the vision of an urban garden oasis along a busy street come to fruition. The alternative could be that I would ride by a falling in, decrepit, once beautiful home now overgrown with kudzu and littered with graffiti, garbage and trash. Sadly, we can ride down the roads in any community and see many such homeplaces that were once thriving and viable, now eyesores.  My heart would surely break if that is what I saw when I rode down the Reidville Road past 828. 

It’s true that I can’t go home again to that house that stood at 828 Reidville
Road, but somehow as I walked the paths with my grandchildren yesterday and walked across our “front yard” to stand under the pecan tree I played with dolls under, I knew  that I was home.  

As long as I have my memories, even though the physical place looks nothing like it did 70 years ago, I will know it as “home”.  

https://www.hatchergarden.org/