Dennis Crocker Memories - Part 11 (July 6, 2016) - The Pacolet River in the 50's
I didn’t live on the Mill Hill, so I am sure I don’t remember as much as some of you might about the river, as I didn’t get to “play” on the river as much as some of you may have , consequently don’t know as much to remember as you do. But I will share some of my memories with you.
A small creek crossed the Hammett’s Grove Road, which turned left off the Cowpens Road between PaPa Loftis’ and Uncle Talmadge’s house. That creek meandered along the back of PaPa’s land, and then across land owned by Wofford Burgess. Bob (Shackelford) and I in our exploring followed it down to the Pacolet River. (we’d have gotten a good spanking if our parents had known we were at the river-as they were quite fearful of one of us falling in an drowning) and truth to tell, that was before I learned to swim.
The creek’s confluence with the river was above the upper mill and on up past the Sandbar. Surely if you were raised around Pacolet you have attended a wiener roast on the Sandbar. The Sandbar was accessible by car . If you crossed the river bridge to the Cowpens side of the Mill Hill, and took the second road to the left, right up the middle of the Mill Hill on that side of the river, and stayed on it, you’d come to a pasture gate. The road beyond crossed some pasture , and if my memory serves me ,the road forked and the left fork led to the village dump, and the right fork led to the sandbar. I haven’t been back there in more than 55 years but I’d imagine it might still be there.
In those days , the river was heavily polluted. Pacolet’s upper and lower mills , while not textile finishing plants, dumped their sanitary wastes and their slasher room wastes straight to the river without any treatment. While these mills were below the Sandbar, on upstream, located on the Lawson’s Fork stream was Clifton mills, and on the Pacolet were two or three mills. Thankfully, none of them were finishing plants which put out about 50 to 100 times more waste than did the greige goods mills on the Lawson Fork and on the upper Pacolet.
Due to the pollution, there were almost no game fish in the river then-mostly catfish,carp,with the occasional sunfish. Fishing above the sandbar off some rock formations edging the river could usually provide a few flathead catfish, and/or some notty heads if you were baited with worms. If you used a mixture of dough and cotton flavored with vanilla extract you let your bait settle to the bottom and you might catch a carp or two.
For fishing gear we used cane poles, or just light tree saplings. Anything to make a pole out of. Our line was mostly black stretchy nylon, which was really strong, but had too much stretch in it to serve on our home made bow’n’arrers . If we were not lucky enough to have some real fishing line, we’d use the white string obtained from feed sacks . This was not preferred, as we felt the fish could see the white string.
Some where along about ‘51 or’52 my Mother gave me a copy of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Oh boy, I enjoyed that book and Huck’s and Jim’s adventures as they floated down the river on a raft. I immediately started selling Bob and Jr on the idea of us building a raft.
It wasn’t a terribly hard sell as we were always up for something to do. Just across the road from Nut Brown’s house, right off the sharp curve where Uncle Cap was held up and robbed back in the ‘30s ,was a good sized gully that we called the “big Gully”. It ran down toward a spring that had one hole that had been cleaned out and served as a source of drinking water for whoever might be renting the little, paintless, brown
house located about 65 yds above the spring.
The big Gully was mostly located on Dad’s land, and on the side toward the house was a stand of pine trees that we decided to use for our raft. We got busy with our boy scout hatchets, and soon, in spite of our accumulated blisters, we’d cut down and delimbed about 15 or so pine trees.
We found some long nails in Bob’s stepfather’s work shop,which we appropriated for our project. Dad’s old barn was full of waste lumber to serve as cross pieces. Amid much hammering and chopping we soon had a “raft” about 6 feet wide and maybe about 10 feet long. Well, our raft was so heavy that we could scarcely pick up one corner.
We recruited some help, probably Ansel Brown, Don Teaster, Bob, Jr and me. Still too heavy. Tried to talk my Dad into giving us a hand-no dice ,so our wonderful raft never made it down to the river.
On time two of our Mill Hill Buddies ,who for apparent reasons shall remain unnamed (maybe) were up the river on the upper Mill side-close to Otter Ray’s . There was a tree with limbs that extended out over the river, and the tree was in heavy foliage. Our two nimrods were “hunting” or at least they were totin shotguns. For whatever reason, they decided to climb the tree, and scoot out along the limb over the river. They were sitting there, discussing the mystery’s of life and smoking purloined cigarettes when they heard voices.
Coming downriver in an old wooden boat were two younger boys, and our heroes waited until the boat was under their limb, when with a yell of “Sink the Bismarck” both of them shot into the bottom of that old boat-and it immediately started taking on water and sank. Fortunately neither of the two youngsters were hurt-just frightened out of their wits! I didn’t see this happen, but one of the shooters was Nick Jones and he swears it is the truth.
Two years ago, my wife and I, and a visiting couple from Illinois , put a couple of canoes into the Pacolet River, where 105 crosses the river in Union (?) County and floated it down to the Broad River and on down to Lockhart. That stretch of the Pacolet is delightful. The water is clean and the game fish have returned.
A young friend of mine from Lockhart fly fishes for small mouth bass in the Pacolet and the Broad. He is a catch and release man, and doesn’t like to see people kill their catch. Small Mouth bass are good indicators of clean water. It is amazing how clean the waters are since the mills closed, and all the mill villages have had to install a sewage plant. We hope to float the Lawson Fork down to the upper mill dam at Pacolet mills soon.
That’s all until next time. Tell the one’s you love that you do!
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