Mark's Photo Travels

Last Sunday a few local musicians came together with their instruments to the Glendale Shoals Bridge over Lawson's Fork Creek in Glendale, SC to play at the musical get-together named "Dam Jam". This was a perfect chance for me to listen to some acoustic music and also explore more of Glendale. The jam started at 4pm, but I arrived about an hour early to explore the area where Glendale Park once beckoned mill village residents and visitors. I headed down a path, which very well may have been the same path mill residents used to get to the park. This path provides a good view of the mill pond, the bridge, and even the people setting up for the jam. Glendale Park was built at the same time as the trolley line from Spartanburg to Clifton being built through the area in 1900. The first mentions of the park I can find in newspaper archives are from 1901. Postcards from the era depict the park quite differently than it looks today: from the Spartanburg County Pub...

Back in May of last year, I followed an old trolley right-of-way from Spartanburg, South Carolina to Glendale, a small mill town near Lawson's Ford Creek in eastern Spartanburg County. I didn't have much time to explore the mill town during that trip, so I that adventure had to wait for another time. Before coming back, I wanted to do some research to locate all the major the points of interest in Glendale typical to the insular mill towns of this area such as the company store, the office, schools, churches, businesses, and recreation areas. My "go to" resource for this information was glendalesc.com , a website of information collected by a former Glendale Mill worker, Mary McKinney Teaster. I also recently paid a visit to the  Cyrill-Westside library  near Spartanburg to read through Glendale: A Pictorial History  which filled in a few more details. Also helpful was a post to the Glendale Shoals Facebook group  showing an interesting LIDAR satellite im...