All-inclusive Exclusive Memorial

Before I get to the usual suspects, I wanted to post one more out of the ordinary icons in the Confederate Memorial Park in downtown Fort Mill, South Carolina.

It's really strange and somehow curious how the city fathers went out of their ways to be all-inclusive in this park. Not every southern community was full of hood-wearing, lynching and murdering degenerates, I reckon.

This monument was erected to the Women of the Confederacy. Now, I've seen monuments to this outfit before. In fact, these ladies were sometimes completely and totally instrumental in having these monuments and parks created in the first place. Back in the day, I guess, someone had to organize these things, and if they were the ones organizing them, then by God they were sometimes going to get their own due.

So far in this Confederate Memorial Park, we have monuments for Indians, black slaves, and now the wimmenfolk.

And here she is: Monument to the Women of the Confederacy.

Closeup image of the pedestal for puttin' the women on.

I thought I'd put this here because they seemed to be VERY proud of the fact that this here band shell was built without one thin dime of stinking gummint money.

On a Lonely Road

I went down to Fort Mill to be interviewed for an article in a local magazine. I ended up arriving there about an hour and a half earlier than I was supposed to, so I went for a drive in the rural areas around the town. I had my GPS device hooked up on the dash, but I just cleared it and drove aimlessly.

Somehow, I ended up on a very lonely stretch of a (to me) nameless road that went through forest and farmland. It stretched between a weird little industrial/warehouse district and the downtown of Fort Mill. I encountered not one single other vehicle while I was driving on it.

As I drove leisurely along I noticed an historical marker on the opposite side of the road so I turned around and went back to it. Sometimes I like to stop and read these markers and find out what they are and why they are there. In this case, it was to mark again and honor the Catawba Indian Nation. I've read that there are something around 2500 self-identified Catawba natives remaining on Earth, and that less than 200 of them actually live on the Catawba Indian Reservation in South Carolina. The plaque there claims that in return for the friendship and loyalty of the Catawbas, the whites would give them a 15-square-mile reservation. I don't bloody think so.


The lonely stretch of country road where I found the little monument.

For some reason the locals felt the need to erect two monuments. One is the classic cast iron sign and then there was this little carved granite stone.

Yep. The road was so lonely that I could walk out into the middle of it and take photos. I kept thinking about Wile E. Coyote doing this kind of thing and getting run down by suddenly appearing Mack trucks.

This sign looks to have seen better days. I think it's been hit a few times.

Catawba Indian Memorial

It took a few days to get back to this subject. I have even more to say about it in future and I'll try to finish posting some photos and comments tomorrow. For now, I have to rewrite a short story for an anthology. The editor asked for some logical changes and I need to finish that project.

As I said earlier, this is one of the more unusual Confederate Memorial parks that I have ever seen. One of the monuments there is dedicated to the local Catawba Indian nation. Like all of the nations that were here before the Europeans, the Catawbas have suffered terribly. One thing that they did--probably in an effort to ultimately survive--was to bend before the white man. That is, they largely sided with whites against other Indian nations and did their utmost to keep from being wiped out by the flood of Europeans. This they have (barely) managed to do. Of course there hasn't even been a fluent speaker of their native tongue since some time in the 1950s, and most of the Catawbas I've met look whiter than I do. But they still have a dab of a reservation and there is something remaining of their culture. So in that respect I reckon that their ploy to survive worked.

To this end, the local folk who created the park to honor the Confederacy erected a monument there for the local Indian tribe. To pat them on their collective head for being good neighbors, I suppose. Still, it's an unusual marker to see in what in most southern cities is a uniquely white-boys-only club.

Robert Garrett Marks informed me that the statue (unfortunately cast from concrete rather than carved of marble) was vandalized by local kids when he was in high school. It has since remained ruined. I guess there's no money in the box to fix Indian monuments.

The Catawba Indian monument in the Confederate park.

Details on the marble support column.

Closeup of the statue itself. Garrett told me that the arms were hacked off by teens some years back and that repairs have never been deemed important enough to tackle. I wonder if those cast concrete limbs are still in the possession of some dim-bulb asswipe.

Most Liberal Confederate Memorial Park on Earth

I went to Fort Mill in South Carolina today to be interviewed for a local publication there. I arrived with time to spare and decided to explore the small town for a bit. I strolled into the Confederate Memorial Park in downtown Fort Mill.

Now, it's pretty much average here in the South for just about every town to have a Confederate memorial of some type. Most have a simple statue or an obelisk or at least a plaque honoring the Confederate soldiers and states. It's almost a given. So I wasn't surprised to see this park. What did surprise me was the nature of the memorials there.

I'll post details tomorrow, but there was the expected memorial to the Confederate soldiers, and one in honor of the very concept of the Confederacy (which was a little more unique than most that you see). However, the strangest thing were the memorials to the non-whites that are in the park. Yeah, that's right--Confederate memorials for non-white people.

One was to the local Catawba Indians. I'll post details of that one tomorrow. The one that surprised me the most, because in all of my travels I have never encountered one, is the Confederate Memorial for African slaves.

In total, this particular Confederate park has icons set up for soldiers, for women, for slaves, and for Catawba Indians. This is a first. And keep in mind that I live here in the South and have seen a buttload of Confederate Memorials. This one was out of the ordinary, for sure.

This is the memorial obelisk dedicated to the slaves.

And the artist devoted relief sculptures to the slaves. One for male slaves (this one) and one for female slaves. So even here the patrons were trying to be all-inclusive.

Carved in marble, the reason for this honor.

Weather seems to have eroded the faces of the woman and the child.