Fourth of July visit to Frey Creek Falls and Taylors Mill

Sometimes an adventure in the warm, humid outdoors is preferable to staying inside in the comfortable yet confining indoors. Such an occasion was the Fourth of July holiday when frequent clouds made for a potentially tolerable day outdoors. I decided to visit two places close by: Frey Creek Falls near Wellford in Spartanburg County, and the Taylors Mill in Taylors, Greenville County.

Frey Creek Falls

I'm aware of only two waterfalls in Spartanburg County. Horseshoe Falls is a 10 foot waterfall on Cedar Falls Creek in the Musgrove Mill State Historic Site near Clinton, South Carolina. I visited this waterfall many years ago and remember finding the waterfall uninteresting. Frey Creek Falls is wider, more interesting waterfall on Frey Creek between Wellford and Spartanburg on Falling Creek Road near a Norfolk Southern Railroad trestle. As of the time of posting, Frey Creek Falls is clearly visible from this satellite view:

Frey Creek Falls is located on land used as a park and recreation area by the Falling Creek Homeowners Association. I didn't see any "No Tresspassing" signs so I went ahead and parked at a wide pull off area. This pull off area is long enough to allow one or possibly two cars to park safely.

I got my backpack and headed down this short trail leading toward the waterfall:

Even from the side, this small waterfall looks quite beautiful.

Clouds would cover the sun for a few minutes at a time, a few sprinkes would fall, then the sun would come back out. While the sun was covered I had time to take photos with a slow shutter. I didn't bring a tripod, so I took many photos then selected the ones that came out the least soft.

On the opposite side of Frey Creek, I noticed some rusty ruins which, of course, I had to investigate:

I took a closer look, and also found the ruins of stone walls, well covered in vegetation:

With these ruins so close to water, I figured they were probably ruins of a grist mill. After I got home, I checked some old maps and I found a 1940 South Carolina Department of Transportation map of Spartanburg County showing a grist mill indeed once operated here:

This would be a great place to check out again during the winter time when the vegetation is gone!

All of my photos from my waterfall trip are in the album Frey Creek Falls - July 2018 on Flickr, or you can click through them below:

Taylors Mill

I went home for lunch, then a little later I went over to the Taylors Mill, down Mill Street in Taylors, once known as Southern Bleachery and Print Works during its time as a working textile mill.

Recently I replaced my 11 year old custom built dual core desktop computer with a new system containing 8 CPU cores, 16GB of memory, a solid state drive, and a regular hard disk drive.. On the old desktop, Lightroom was slow at times while I waited for operations to complete. On my new desktop, Lightroom is actually usable now! On the old desktop, I had been making some use of Image Composite Editor 2.0, a Microsoft tool for creating panoramas from multiple photographs. I wanted to see if Taylors Mill, with its long buildings, could prove to be a suitable place to experiment with making panoramas.

This photo was my most successful of my vertical composites. The building does seem to lean in a bit though:

This photo below, on the other hand, was an obvious FAIL (the top level windows are all distorted):

I did better with this three photo composite of this steel building:

I turned by attention to the lower level windows. One window pane interested me because it reflected my toes back at me.

This gave me the idea to crouch down and get the rest of me in the picture:

I found Taylors Mill to be busier than I expected on a holiday. The major attraction turned about to be at 13 Stripes where an event with drinks and music was on-going:

Further toward the east end of the mill I made a composite from these two photos of these boarded up windows. I was curious to see how well the large difference would be merged:

to make this composite:

The roof line is curved not straight, but the curve along the sidewalk curve is actually correct. I took a composite of the receiving area, and cropped out the area massively distorted off the right edge to produce this crop:

While taking the photos that make up the composite above, I spotted an interesting leftover: a doorway to nowhere!

I hope they brick this over someday before somebody inside gets hurt.

My next composite was of the old granite light posts that once served as the entrance to the mill. I've been wanting to get a photo of them together in one shot for years (whether it made an interesting photo or not) and this was as good a time as any to indulge myself:

Across the street is an old Amoco service station, currently boarded up. Up close like this, a composite was the only way to capture the whole service station without a wider angle lens.

My last two composites of the day were of the old Taylors School. The first school building on this property was built in 1916 and completed in time for classes to begin in January 1917. A second building was constructed in 1936 then rebuilt in 1945 after the building caught fire. Starting in 1960, high school students started attending Wade Hampton High School. The school continued as an elementary school until 1981.

The Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary bought currently occupies the school part of the building. The Academy of the Arts occupies the former auditorium behind the building.  Both entities have done a marvelous job turning the crumbling site into welcome additions to the community.

Of the composite photos I took this day, the two sets of photos I took of the school below are my favorite. I could have done something about the curved distortion seen around the sidewalk on the composite below, but I chose to leave it alone to show what can be done without tweaking:

I took the photos for the next composite across the street. This one is looks better to me because I don't notice the distortion in this one:

This trip was more experimental than most of my others. It turned out I spent about four hours walking around the mill, far more time than I expected. Image Composite Editor on my speedy desktop made quick work of stitching my composites together. The software definitely works best though with horizontal compositions from my experience walking around this day.

My photos from this visit are in the Flickr album Taylors Mill - July 2018, or you can go through them below:

Wrapup

I had a good time despite the humidity and the occasional sprinkles. I ended up with a few poison ivy rashes (another reason I tend not go out this time year. I'm sensitive in a bad way to that plant!). Fortunately, I remembered to take a shower after getting home that made the poison ivy rashes only very minor nuisance this time.