| Description |
: |
Weste Harris was a son of David Golightly Harris & Emily Jane Lyles Harris of Golightly, SC a few miles south of Spartanburg, he was born and raised on land his great-grandfather Christopher Golightly had settled before the Revolutionary War. Weste was a man of few words who read a lot. He was homeschooled by his mother Emily Jane Liles Harris, who was the product of a highly-rated finishing school & an excellent writer, Weste was known as a progressive farmer.
Weste married the oldest daughter of the county sheriff, Harriet Caroline "Hattie" Gentry, whom he met when...
Read More
|
Weste Harris was a son of David Golightly Harris & Emily Jane Lyles Harris of Golightly, SC a few miles south of Spartanburg, he was born and raised on land his great-grandfather Christopher Golightly had settled before the Revolutionary War. Weste was a man of few words who read a lot. He was homeschooled by his mother Emily Jane Liles Harris, who was the product of a highly-rated finishing school & an excellent writer, Weste was known as a progressive farmer.
Weste married the oldest daughter of the county sheriff, Harriet Caroline "Hattie" Gentry, whom he met when they were both baptized on the same day at the First Baptist Church of Spartanburg. Hattie's rich father Sheriff Landon Miles Gentry was said to have disapproved of his oldest daughter marrying a country farmer's son, but he eventually gave them land next to the Southern Railway's Shops north of Spartanburg, where they raised 9 out of 10 children, all but one of whom graduated from college & all but one of whom became teachers.
Weste was said by his daughter Hattie Weste to be an emotionally low-key man who never raised his voice or got angry when his children made mistakes in contrast to his wife who often whipped the children for minor infractions, he was a practical and well-rounded man and somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades. Weste once set the compound-fractured arm of his daughter, who was playing on the roof & fell off, and he had basic brickmasonry and carpentry skills. When recounting her father to me, Hattie Weste said that when she would do something wrong, her mother would whip her with a hickory switch which would hurt, but the physical pain would not last & would have no positive impact on her behavior. But if her father would take her on his knee & start explaining what she did wrong, by the time he finished she would be crying & would understand why what she had done was wrong, & thus she would never want to do it again. Hattie Weste, needless to say, adored her father.
Weste was known as an accomplished farmer, teaching himself advanced farming methods by reading and experimenting, he was a Mason & also a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan when it was at it's height in the 1920's according to his granddaughter Marjorie Foster Jameson, who said she recognized him during a Klan meeting by a crooked little finger which was broke and never healed straight. He raised his family on land given to them by his father-in-law and he built his own home which he added to as his family grew. At one point Weste removed the roof of the house & built a 2nd floor, and later he built himself a study off to the side where he kept his library and fiddled on his violin away from his wife. Weste learned farming from both his parents and improved on his knowledge, reading up on the modern techniques and becoming known as a very progressive farmer. His mother had a fruit orchard & vegetable garden, and his father raised large cash crops like oats and wheat before & during the Civil War on a small plantation south of Spartanburg at Golightly, SC, about halfway between Spartanburg & Pauline. Weste did not receive a school education, very few people did then, and his father wrote they lived too far away from the town to attend city schools, and before the Civil War there were no public schools so his father was trying to hire a schoolteacher for the school he built just before the Civil War, but his only schoolteacher did not stay but a few months and his wife Emily was highly educated and he praised her homeschooling for all her children. Weste's father David was a prodigious writer & also became a preacher near the end of his life and was the pastor of Philadelphia Baptist in Pauline before he died; both his parents highly valued education.
In 1908, Weste Harris was honored with the appointment as Spartanburg County's very first County Demonstration Agent, he was put in charge of showing farmers how to better their crop yields using modern scientific methods. It was a prestigious job which he had earned by cross-pollinating & grafting a new type of apple which he named the Harris apple; Weste had taken a bushel of the Harris apples to the state agricultural convention in 1907 & gained himself an article in The State newspaper, which was reprinted in the Spartanburg Herald & the Spartanburg Journal. (Unfortunately, his apple orchard later burned to the ground during a brush fire according to his grandson John Edwin Foster, so his hybrid apple did not survive.) During this job, which lasted four yrs, Weste emphasized positive environmental practices, encouraging people to love the land. One of the innovations he started was the county fair contests which were extremely popular during the 1900's into the 1960's, when people would come from all over the county in October to enter their best homemade jams & quilts & farm livestock for a ribbon & hopefully a cash prize & get their names printed in the newspaper; it greatly increased the respectability of the fair which until then had been known mostly for drunkenness & gambling.
Weste felt strongly about respecting the land & taking care of it & using it wisely, he urged the planting of trees in the town as a way of cooling off the hot summer days, personally planting a row of oak trees along Reidville Rd, some of which are still there today, 100 years later. Weste was said to have had a personal motto that before he would decide to cut down any tree, he would watch that tree grow for 10 yrs; he emphasized respect for nature, trees were so valuable to society & took so many years to mature, he wanted people to realize they had a life span as long as a human being's; Once cut, a tree would take decades to replace. Weste surrounded his own home with large oak trees which lined the long driveway to his house, his daughter Emily said the shade underneath the trees would be 10-15 degrees cooler in the summertime.
In his free time, Weste was an avid fiddler, often attending fiddler's conventions, his interest in fiddling had begun when an old Negro man who played at his wedding offered him his fiddle as a wedding present, a great honor as it was his most valuable possession. Weste carved a solid case for that fiddle out of the stump of a walnut tree, & the fit was so snug the fiddle would not shake about. (The fiddle is now in the possession of his grandson John Edwin Foster.) When at home, Weste would fiddle off in a study he had built for himself off the main house, he would close the door, so as not to irritate his wife. Weste would often buy & sell fiddles, one story goes that he was at a fiddler's convention when a man approached him at the break with an offer to buy his fiddle. Since this was the fiddle the old Negro man had given him at his wedding, Weste refused. The well-dressed man was insistent, saying he'd heard that fiddle over all the other fiddlers playing & he wanted that mellow-sounding fiddle. Weste refused to sell again. At this point, the would-be buyer brought out his checkbook & offered Weste a blank check for the fiddle, saying he could write his own price, but he again refused. When Weste returned home & told his family of the encounter, his frugal wife, disgusted, is said to have responded, "Today, two fools met."
In later years, Weste was getting dementia which several of his children also suffered from, he was described as "eccentric" to me by two of his grandchildren who knew him. He died at home, two years before his son Gentry committed suicide. (Weste's mother Emily Lyles Harris had often complained of emotional problems, possibly bipolar disorder, several of her descendants have been diagnosed with bipolar & depression.) Weste was described by my grandmother as a very even-tempered man, she said he never lost his temper or raised his voice to anyone, and when he spoke, he was careful with words, succinct. He evidently succumbed to a heart condition when he died in the home he had built.
Children of Weste Harris
Lyles, the oldest of Weste Harris's surviving sons, became a missionary to Africa in 1912 after graduating from Clemson Univ in 1909 with degrees in Agriculture & Chemistry, he became a farmer like his father, growing cotton in the British Colony of Kenya in the early 1920's after the 'Great War' in Europe where he fought on the English side. He traveled widely before he returned to America in 1925 and then he managed several farms in NC in the 1930's to 1950's; he also edited a newspaper in Franklin, NC & managed a hotel in Blowing Rock, NC with his English wife Jan who was a British nurse; my mother said Jan nursed him back to health during a terrible sickness when he almost died. They had 2 sons.
Weste Harris's son John Weste Harris, Jr, who had worked in military intelligence during WWI according to his sister Mella, was a graduate of Wofford College & also taught there after making straight A's, he became a lawyer, teacher & businessman, but his most public contribution to society was the National Beta Club. The National Beta Club recognizes high school children for their ability to maintain a B average in school. John was said to have gotten the idea from a friend who died, a Mr Green, according to his sister Mella, she said John never gave his friend credit for the very worthy organization, one of many complaints she had about John's behavior.
F Gentry Harris graduated from Wofford, then graduated from Columbia University law school, he became a very famous local lawyer and was head of the Federal Land Bank and Principal of West End School. The year before Gentry committed suicide in 1935 in his law office on Morgan Square, he was listed in the 1934 edition of "Who's Who In SC". He left behind a wife & 3 children and a mother & siblings who deeply mourned his loss. My mother told me his long suicide note began: "I'm tired, tired, tired, and I want to rest." Gentry had always been his mother's right hand, she often sent him when young to collect rent from the many rental properties she had inherited from her father, whom she took care of at the end of his life. His sister Hattie Weste said she believed her mother put too much responsibility on his young shoulders. Gentry was blind in one eye from amblyopia, an hereditary condition in which a child is born with one eye either very nearsighted or farsighted, his sister Mella said it kept him from being drafted in the Great War, which angered him. Gentry was so eager to serve that eventually the commandant of Camp Wadsworth gave him the job of water boy which Mella said pleased him greatly.
Son Carlos died in 1926 from wounds suffered in France in The Great War in 1918. Carlos was a 1st Lieutenant and commanded a black fighting unit which was highly commended during the war for bravery. Carlos graduated from Clemson Mechanical and Agricultural College, he was the editor for the Clemson school newspaper in his senior year & I'm recently told by a Clemson graduate doing a book on Clemson veterans that he organized the senior dance that year as well as being the captain of the basketball team. Carlos graduated from Columbia Univ's law program in 1925 & passed the bar in NY, but he never practiced law, he joined McClellan's Dept. store & managed their store in Iowa during the last year of his life until infection from his injuries caused septicemia; he died in the New York Veteran's Hospital with his brother John by his side. John accompanied his body home to Spartanburg on the train, the funeral was so large that his grandson Edwin said the police had to cordon off Main Street around the First Baptist Church for several blocks to accommodate all the attendees. Carlos is buried in the Oakwood family plot with his parents.
Daughters Hattie, Julia, Emily & Mella all became teachers in the Spartanburg school system; Hattie was first a private family governess, then taught grades 1-6 at Poplar Springs Elementary before she retired to raise 7 children; Julia became a Spartanburg public school history teacher & the family genealogist & raised 4 children; Emily taught 1st & 2nd grade & raised 3 children; Mella first taught physical education, and then switched to English, she retired from Cleveland Junior High School in 1969; her students remembered her as a tough and effective teacher; she never had any children but she took over the care of two nieces during the Depression and sent them to Converse College. All the children but Mella and Carlos married & all but Carlos, Mella & Joe had families. Mella told me once that nursing & teaching were considered the only 'respectable' jobs open to women at that time, she made it clear that she would've loved to have had a different career, particularly as a novelist.
Weste's youngest child Joe graduated from Clemson's world-famous agricultural program, then went to work for the Southern Railroad near his family home; he married twice but my mother said he had a physical defect and could not have children. Both his wives were named Lyda Mae. I remember Joe near the end of his life as a big jolly man with a very deep powerful voice that quite literally shook the house when he laughed, he reminded me of Santa. He died of a strange ailment that the many doctors he consulted could not diagnose, my mother said she believed he had lead poisoning from painting boxcars.
NOTE:
The marker on the Harris plot is the main grist mill stone that came from Weste Harris's father David Golightly Harris's grist mill in Golightly, which was chronicled in his journal, transcribed & printed under the name "A Piedmont Farmer" by Wofford College professor Dr. Philip Racine. Weste's daughter Mella Harris had the grist mill stone placed for the grave site in the late 1960's. She also possessed 2 other smaller stones from the grist mill. Mella told me the local stonemasons refused at first to use the big stone because they believed it was too heavy to move. They finally agreed, but only if they could drill a large hole into the middle to hoist it up by crane. Mella thought this quite ironic since men had cut & moved this same stone several times in the 1800's-1900's with much more primitive technology. The monument is very distinctive & unique. The plot is in West Oakwood, next to the present-day Converse College playing field. Hattie Gentry Harris's parents are buried nearby, as are several of Weste & Hattie's children. Mella told me that West Oakwood was reserved for members of the elite of Spartanburg, she was quite proud her family was buried there.
--Jeni |
