USA > South Carolina > Spartanburg County > A history of Spartanburg county > Part 22
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Craftsmanship Music has been of more importance in the life of in Spartanburg Spartanburg than any other of the fine arts. While there are examples of good architecture and of artistic landscape gardening, there has not been the community concentration of interest in either which has been so marked a characteristic of the town's musical history. Probably the iron products of the old iron works were utilitarian and conventional, although a wrought-iron gate made in the district was awarded a silver cup at the District Fair in 1856. No potteries or groups of weavers within the county have commanded attention. Weaving was, however, practiced as a household art from the pioneer days, and treasured hand-woven coverlets and counter- panes are to be found in the possession of old families. The designing and weaving of these necessities provided workers a means of artistic self-expression. Hill's factory sold in the fifties seamless pictorial counterpanes that were probably the work of artistic weavers.
The carved wood-work and panelings and frescoed plaster ceilings in many of the ante-bellum homes which still stand show artistry in the
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house-building crafts. Examples of the art of skilled cabinetmakers are to be found in many private homes in the county. But no sys- tematic account can be given today of any of these earlier craftsmen. The fact that Spartanburg early became a leading manufacturing section possibly checked tendencies toward individual self-expression through the arts.
Portrait Portrait painters found patronage in Spartanburg as early
Painters as 1842, when W. K. Barclay of Charleston, a student of Sulley's, spent three seasons here previous to his early death. He painted Benjamin Wofford and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. James Ed- ward Henry, two children of Simpson Bobo, and possibly other por- traits of the same period. An especially interesting example of Bar- clay's work is his portrait of Simpson Bobo. This picture, owned by H. B. Carlisle, hangs in his library, as does another portrait of the same subject done nearly forty years later by Albert Capers Guerry.
Guerry's earliest connection with Spartanburg was as a student at St. John's College. He began to paint very early, for the Preston Literary Society owns a portrait of William C. Preston painted by him at the age of fourteen. He resided in Spartanburg at intervals only, but had a large following here. His works hang in the Wofford College Chapel and literary society halls, in the Kennedy Library, and in many private homes. Among his most successful efforts are his portraits of Robert E. Lee, Lionel C. Kennedy, John G. Landrum, James H. Carlisle. The first two hang in the Kennedy Library ; the Landrum portrait is in Mount Zion Church, a copy hanging in the First Baptist Church of Spartanburg; and the Carlisle portrait has the place of honor in the Wofford College Chapel. Other portraits by Guerry include those of Joseph Walker, J. S. R. Thompson, Robert E. Cleveland, and Donald Fleming. His Calhoun, in the State House, has been pronounced "a magnificent portrait."
In more recent years Mrs. B. King Couper, Margaret Law, Grace DuPre, Irma Cook, and August Cook have done portraits of interest and merit. All these artists are still alive and at work.
Art Teaching and Margaret M. Law, after extensive study in Amer- Production Today ica and abroad, and a number of years of teaching experience in the Bryn Mawr School of Baltimore, Maryland, re- turned to her home town in 1936 as supervisor of art in the city schools. She is a disciple of the modern school of Cizek, which
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stresses spontaneity in self-expression as the foundation of art-train- ing, and her work has had a marked influence on the art development of the community.
Grace DuPre, who maintains a private studio in Spartanburg, has the unique distinction of being equally at home with the brush or the violin, and equally alert as a teacher or a creative artist. August Cook is head of the art department of Converse College; and his wife, Irma Howard Cook, besides conducting a private class, executes com- missions in oil portraits and water color landscapes. All of these artists exhibit frequently, and specimens of the work of all three, and of Mrs. B. King Couper, are to be found in museums, and in public and private collections. Mrs. Couper has in recent years lived in Charleston.
Spartanburg In 1923 Mrs. B. King Couper organized in Spartanburg Art Club an Arts and Crafts Club which later became the Spar- tanburg Art Club. This group, from its formation, became active in stimulating popular interest in art by securing public lecturers and exhibitions, by arranging study courses, and by maintaining a club room. An especially valuable activity has been a survey and listing of works of art privately owned in the city, and in some cases securing the loan of these for exhibits. The Art Club was instrumental in bringing to Spartanburg, in April 1931, the convention of the South- eastern Arts Association, which held its sessions at Converse College and in the Educational building of the First Baptist Church. The Art Club has acquired several valuable paintings, etchings, pieces of pottery, prints, and busts ; and it owns a small reference library. This club often holds exhibitions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Preparations for War
A Strange Interlude The years 1917, 1918, and 1919, formed a strange in- terlude in the history of Spartanburg. These years broke into the steady slow progress of an Up Country town with a dynamic energy which startled and transformed the tempo of life in that town, and expanded its horizon to the uttermost parts of the earth. Within the first months of those years, Spartanburg saw a city rise on its borders with a population larger than its own-all of them engaged in learning how to meet and inflict death in battle- and three years later saw it disappear like a mirage. Always people carried about in their hearts a consciousness that their own boys were in other training camps or facing death on European battle- fields; yet twenty years afterwards, the memory of these things had become to most Spartans as fantastic and unreal as a dream, and only a few memorials remained to preserve in memory the strenuous activities of those years.
Early in March 1917 Spartanburg began preparations for war service. When, on April 6, 1917, war with Germany was officially declared, Spartanburg was already mobilizing her forces; and on April 11, when the War Department called into service regiments of National Guard from Maine to Florida, Spartan soldiers were ready for the call. The Red Cross Society was alert; Wofford Col- lege announced plans to begin military training; Converse set up training classes for its students in Red Cross nursing and hospital service.
Company Two Coast Artillery In January the Spartanburg company of the Coast Artillery received an official visit from Major Phillip R. Ward, Federal Inspector. From the date of his visit this company met regularly in the armory in Ravadson Hall and drilled on Morgan Square. In July they entered the Federal service and were ordered to make an encampment. They secured the use of part of Fairfield Park for their camp, which they named Camp Hearon in honor of Charles O. Hearon, editor of the Spar- tanburg Herald. This company left on less than a day's notice, on the morning of August 9, 1917. Members of the Women's Auxil- iary of the Young Men's Christian Association were on hand with lunches and goodies when the soldiers boarded a special train and
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set out for Fort Moultrie. The company numbered 116: 101 privates, five commissioned officers, two non-commissioned officers, and eight members of the sanitary detachment. The officers were Captain James M. Wallace, First Lieutenants J. Hertz Brown and Dr. J. O. Wrightson, Second Lieutenants John N. Wright and Jackson S. Burnett of the Battalion staff, and Battalion Adjutant Charles Lindsay. Leaving Spartanburg as Company Two, Coast Artillery, South Carolina National Guard, these men were soon reorganized as Company Seven, Coast Defense of Charleston. One after another, most of its original members left the company to enter officers' training camps at Fort Oglethorpe and Fort Monroe, and other places. In June 1918, many of them went overseas with Battery B or the Headquarters Company of the Sixty-first Regi- ment, Coast Artillery Corps, A. E. F. The company was recruited from drafted men and remained on the South Carolina coast through- out the war.
The Hampton The Hampton Guards-officially Company F,
Guards Company F First South Carolina Infantry-had seen active service on the Mexican border. They had left Spartanburg for Camp Styx, Columbia, in June 1916, and had gone from there to Fort Bliss at El Paso, Texas, remaining in service until the following December. On April 11, they were called out to do guard duty on the railroads and bridges, and departed with even less warning than the Coast Artillery Company. Three months later, Company F was one of four companies assigned to guard duty at Camp Jackson, Columbia, then under construction.
At midnight, August 5, 1917, in accordance with a proclamation by President Wilson, all the State Guards became Federal Troops. In October Company F went to Camp Sevier at Greenville, where men from the two Carolinas and Tennessee were to be fused into the Thirtieth Division. The Hampton Guards became Company F, 118th Infantry, Thirtieth Division, United States Army, and left Camp Sevier for France May 4, 1918.
The Hampton Guards left Spartanburg with ninety men and three officers: Captain B. T. Justice, First Lieutenant James A. Schwing, and Second Lieutenant Grantland C. Green. As was true throughout the army, replacements and reorganizations resulted in frequent changes of officers and men. Lieutenant James A. Schwing was the only Spartanburg officer to serve with the company overseas.
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Company C Early in the spring Governor Manning author-
117th Engineers ized J. Monroe Johnson of Marion to organize a battalion of engineers. Johnson in turn asked B. M. English, an employee of the Southern Railway in Spartanburg, to recruit a com- pany here. English was made first lieutenant of the company, which was organized May 5, 1917. This, the last of Spartanburg's volun- teer companies to be organized, was the first to go overseas, spend- ing a brief training period at Camp Jackson, Columbia. Then, as Company C, 117th Engineers, it was incorporated in the Forty-second Division-the Rainbow Division-and went across in October 1917.
Other Thirty-seven Spartans, graduated from the first Offi-
Volunteers cers' Training Class at Fort Oglethorpe, were hon- ored, August 23, 1917, with a public banquet at the Hotel Cleveland, before reporting to camp. When Thanksgiving drew near, the cit- izens of Spartanburg sent to Company Seven Coast Artillery, sta- tioned at Fort Moultrie, and the Hampton Guards at Camp Sevier, checks, each for $100, for the purchase of turkeys. The Engineers were already in France and had to do without American turkey dinners.
Besides three volunteer companies, Spartanburg had numbers of young men who had volunteered individually to fight with the Allies, or who belonged to the Marines or to units of the Regular Army that had gone to France in May. Letters from some of these boys appeared in local papers.
The Draft Meanwhile Congress had passed May 19, 1917, a se- lective service law, which, as subsequently amended, mobilized all the manpower of the Nation from the ages of 18 to 45 inclusive. The first registration, June 5, 1917, covered the ages from 21 to 31. A second registration was to be made June 5 and August 24, 1918, of those who had reached the age of 21 since the first registration. On September 12, 1918, those under 21 or over 31 years old were to be registered.
Spartanburg's first enrollment, of June 5, 1917, included 7,346 names. From these, local registration boards drew 882 names. The men selected were examined, and as soon as the quota of 441 men had been secured from among them, the draft was stopped until further calls were received for replacements of men rejected at the camps. Of the 441 drafted men, the western part of the county was required to supply 176, the eastern part 160, and the city 105.
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On September 5, 1917, this first body of drafted men from Spartan- burg went to Camp Jackson.
Establishment of When, in the spring, it was announced that a Training Camp American soldiers were to be sent to France and that training camps would be established to get them ready to go, Spartanburg requested that a camp be located on its outskirts. John F. Floyd, Mayor; Ben Hill Brown, President, and Paul V. Moore, Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce; John B. Cleveland, Chairman of the Cantonment Committee; Sam J. Nicholls, Member of Congress and resident of Spartanburg ; Charles O. Hearon, editor of the Herald-all of these and other interested citizens cooperated in gathering data concerning available camp sites to be presented for the consideration of the War Department. They also raised a guarantor's fund of $200,000. On May 29 news leaked out that the inspectors sent here by General Leonard Wood had made a fa- vorable report. Spartanburg was intensely excited, but not until June 21 did her citizens receive definite assurance of success. Then General Wood made a visit of personal inspection, which was im- mediately followed by an official announcement from the War De- partment that Spartanburg had been selected as one of the sixteen sites for camps.
On July 6, 1917, Mayor Floyd affixed his official signature to the document putting the United States Government in possession of a tract of approximately two thousand acres, described as "be- tween three and four miles west of the city." The site selected for the camp was skirted on its western side by the historic old Blackstock Road, between Disputanta (since renamed Westview) and Fairforest, and this road was almost impassable. From Wof- ford Street, the Snake Road led to the campground. This dirt road was utterly unfit for the transportation of soldiers and military sup- plies, and one of the first official acts of General O'Ryan was to have it straightened and paved. The other road leading to the camp was a national highway, which twenty years later when Highway 29 was built, became known as "the old Greenville road."
A shorter, more direct road into the camp was a necessity, and eventually the road so made became a part of the National Highway No. 29. The Southern and the Piedmont & Northern Railway Com- panies both began at once to lay sidetracks and spur tracks to the camp. A track parallel to the Southern's main line was laid between
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Fairforest station and the creek of the same name for entraining and detraining soldiers. Spur tracks were laid from Fairforest station to the store house and quartermasters' depots.
Two weeks after the signing of the lease, the Spartanburg Water Works Commission had laid nine miles of twelve-inch main from its pumping station on Chinquapin Creek to the camp, em- ploying more than eight hundred men on the job. The contract for putting up the necessary buildings was awarded by the government to the Fiske-Carter Construction Company, and by the middle of July four hundred carpenters were at work on twelve mess halls.
Name of The board of officers from the War College Division the Camp charged with the selection of a name announced in July that the camp at Spartanburg was to be called "Camp Wads- worth" in honor of Brigadier General James S. Wadsworth, U.S.V., a native of New York who had served with distinction in the War of Secession, and whose grandson represented New York State in the United States Senate. The name of a New Yorker was chosen because the New York men were to be sent to this camp for training. New York had enough men in its National Guard to form a di- vision-as did Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.
The Camp Commander and His Staff Major General John F. O'Ryan commanded the New York National Guard, and on July 21 the announcement was made that he would be in command of the Twenty-seventh Division at Camp Wadsworth. In private life O'Ryan was a lawyer, and he had from youth been an enthusiastic National Guard man, having joined the Seventh Regiment Infantry as a private before he was of age. He was one of the few officers of high rank who had risen step by step from the ranks, and was the only National Guard man who had gradu- ated from the War College at Washington. He had commanded the Sixth Division along the Mexican border. At the time of his appointment to Camp Wadsworth he was the youngest major general in the United States Army, and he was to win distinction as the only general from the National Guard who retained his rank and commanded throughout the World War. On Major General O'Ryan's staff were Colonel H. H. Bandholtz, Chief of Staff ; Brig- adier Generals R. W. Michie, Fifty-third Infantry Brigade; Henry D. W. Hamilton, Fifty-fourth Infantry Brigade; James W. Lester,
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Fifty-second Depot Brigade, and C. L. Phillips, Fifty-second Field Artillery Brigade.
Arrival of the On July 17 Lieutenant Colonel John D. Kil-
Quartermaster's patrick of the Quartermaster's Corps, New York Staff National Guard, and his staff arrived to super- vise and assist in the construction. He stated that six hundred buildings and warehouses of wood must be provided as soon as pos- sible; the soldiers might begin to arrive within two weeks. The speed with which the work went forward, the enormous quantities of materials needed, the number of laborers required, and the as- tonishing weekly pay rolls were beyond any local anticipation. Col- onel Kilpatrick's plans provided for the ultimate care of forty thou- sand soldiers. The contractor had to erect 779 buildings of wood- warehouses, mess halls, and bath houses. The excellence of his work at Camp Wadsworth led, within a year, to Kilpatrick's appointment as a major in the Regular Army. The citizens of Spartanburg, with whom he became very popular, presented him, on his departure, with a silver loving cup.
The North Carolina On July 27, 1917, the First Battalion of Engi-
and New York neers, Second Regiment North Carolina National Engineers Guard, arrived from Goldsboro. This was the first body of soldiers to be quartered at Camp Wadsworth. They pitched their tents between the old and the new Greenville roads, and set to work on street and water lines. By the end of July, 700 men were at work on the camp and 64 buildings were under construction.
Company D, of Colonel Cornelius Vanderbilt's Twenty-second Regiment New York Engineers, with 162 officers and men, arrived on the afternoon of August 3rd. The North Carolina Engineers had detrained at the camp; but Company D got off the train at the Caro- lina & Western passenger station in Spartanburg, and were marched, in the midst of a cheering throng, up Main Street to the Young Men's Christian Association Building, for swims, showers, and cold drinks. Until their quarters at camp could be made ready they had a temporary camp-which they named, in honor of the mayor, Camp Floyd-on the "circus grounds," between Union Street and Marion Avenue.
Spartans began better to realize the magnitude of the camp or- ganization when they saw that this body of only 162 officers and men required, for transportation of its men and equipment, two flatcars,
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three boxcars, one stock car, one baggage car, and four tourist sleepers.
When Colonel Vanderbilt's men moved to Camp Wadsworth, they found more than eight hundred buildings under way. Their first job after establishing their own camp was road construction. Army men and county forces were at work hard-surfacing roads from the camp and its warehouses to the railroad terminals. Buildings were going up at a rate of twenty a day. The only soldiers in camp August 15 were the battalion of North Carolina boys, and this company of New York Engineers, all laying water lines and building roads. Most of the other work going forward was done by the 3,000 civilians em- ployed. The pay roll for the week ending August 11 was more than $75,000.
Scope of Some idea of the magnitude of the job may be gathered
the Work from the contract, which provided for a camp to take care of thirteen infantry regiments, three artillery regiments, five brigade headquarters, one ammunition train, one regiment of engineers train, one sanitary train, one supply train, one signal battalion, one aero squad, one headquarters train. To meet these requirements 915 buildings were necessary, besides ten large storehouses, the hospital unit-which alone required sixty-five buildings, provided with twelve hundred beds, and costing $400,000-the remount station, and six large Young Men's Christian Association buildings. The Postal De- partment demanded a fireproof structure-and so the post office had a concrete floor and was built of cement block. The other buildings were of lumber. None of them were intended for sleeping quarters, tents being provided for that purpose. The camp was laid off in rectangles, each containing 416 tents. Each regiment required a plot 1,000x750 feet in dimension, and each tent accommodated eight men.
By the third week of August, 1,000 buildings had been completed, thirty-seven miles of waterpipe laid, 18,000 electric lights installed, and many miles of well-made roads built of crushed rock with tar surfacing. The number of men at work was 4,500. Pay day pre- sented a spectacle; the laborers formed eight long lines before as many windows. Four guarded automobiles from a Spartanburg bank were used to convey the money for paying off.
Nature of Men began to inquire of each other just what was im- a "Division" plied in the statement that a Division could be trained at Camp Wadsworth. A "Division" in the United States Army in
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time of war, they found, consisted of a grand total of 1,000 officers and 26,000 enlisted men divided into various units, each fully equipped with shops, supply depots, and so forth. It had a monthly pay roll of about one million dollars. Its men were distributed into the fol- lowing units: nine regiments of infantry ; one brigade, consisting of two regiments of field artillery ; one regiment of cavalry ; one field battalion of three companies of signal corps; one bakery company ; one battalion of engineers with three companies ; one aero squadron ; four field hospital companies ; one ammunition train ; one division field train, motorized, with two motor truck companies of thirty-three trucks each ; a depot quartermaster's department. Each of the nine infantry regiments included about two thousand men and had twenty- seven four-mule wagons and from 150 to 175 horses. Each cavalry regiment would have thirty-five four-mule wagons and from thirteen to fourteen hundred horses. A field battalion would have four bat- teries of six guns each. It was found that the hospital at Camp Wads- worth was to have a staff of forty doctors and eighty nurses, the most modern equipment, and one thousand beds. New York's Twenty- second Regiment of Engineers, recognized as "a picked regiment in every way," was to bring two or three airplanes, armored motor cars, and two or three large "tanks"-all equipment it had used on the Mexican border. By August 23, nearly one thousand soldiers were at Camp Wadsworth.
102 M. P. A special body of soldiers, sent on in advance, was the Military Police, 102 M. P., three hundred strong, commanded by Major Kincaid. This selected group of men included many gradu- ates of Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard. These men were assigned headquarters in the Magnolia Street school building, which was also used for Red Cross rooms, and made a grand lark of their duties. One of them, Kai Swensen, wrote, after the war was over, a delightfully humorous account of their double life; so described because they alternated between service at Camp Wadsworth and in town. They also had the duty of policing the artillery range area in the fabulous "Dark Corner," noted for "moonshine" whiskey, illicit cock fighting, and related activities. Swensen wrote almost lyrically of their camp near Campobello. The Military Police, as part of their training, made the most detailed and objective survey of Spar- tanburg ever undertaken.
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Transfer of the In New York and Spartanburg alike popular clamor Twenty-Seventh arose for the spectacle of 26,000 men swinging down Fifth Avenue to martial music and then, in a body, boarding a succession of trains which would swiftly bear them to Camp Wads- worth; where they would leave their trains and again parade before gaping multitudes to their new quarters. That such a scheme was utterly impractical-however strong its dramatic and sentimental ap- peal-was soon clear. Difficulties notwithstanding, General O'Ryan promised a farewell parade, stating, "I can assure the friends of the National Guardsmen, as well as the people of the State generally, that the demonstration will be a picture that will never fade from their memories."
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