| Description |
: |
My grandfather was born in his grandfather's house on the Anderson Rd leading from Reidville town to Hwy 417 in 1877. (The road has only recently been renamed the Lightning Knot Road, though I don't know why, the locals always knew it as the Anderson Rd. My cousin Cary Anderson who still lives on the road said nobody consulted him or told him about the name change.) Tom's family had been given a large grant of land between the Tyger Rivers by King George in a land grant to his ancestor William Anderson in the 1760's, so...
Read More
|
My grandfather was born in his grandfather's house on the Anderson Rd leading from Reidville town to Hwy 417 in 1877. (The road has only recently been renamed the Lightning Knot Road, though I don't know why, the locals always knew it as the Anderson Rd. My cousin Cary Anderson who still lives on the road said nobody consulted him or told him about the name change.) Tom's family had been given a large grant of land between the Tyger Rivers by King George in a land grant to his ancestor William Anderson in the 1760's, so Tom was born on land that his family had already owned for over 100 yrs and in a house his grandfather had built.
William and Rebecca Denny - Anderson came here from Pennsylvania via Charleston, & before that from County Antrim, Ireland, the Denny's were said to have been wealthy in Ireland and had records they brought with them but they were burned up in a fire. William Anderson arrived with a group of other Scotch-Irish Presbyterians to America & first settled in Pennsylvania, but troubles with the Natives made it dangerous to live there so he and a group moved to Charleston, then they later moved to the Upcountry of South Carolina which was then called the Ninety Six District when this area was still unsafe to live in on the edge of pioneer territory, he was one of the first permanent white settlers living near where a line of Fort's had been built to shelter whites from marauding Natives along what is now the border between Spartanburg and Greenville counties. This was the middle hunting ground of the Cherokee on the west and the Catawba tribe on the east. William built his one room log cabin on a hill above the Tyger River & survived to be an old man till near the end of the Revolutionary War when a group of white renegades came through robbing & killed him because he wouldn't tell them where the family fortune was buried. Tom grew up with this strong sense of his pioneer family heritage. His extensive Anderson family started regularly meeting in the 1800's at their family church Nazareth Presbyterian every 10 yrs for a family reunion until the early 1900's when they decided to meet every 5 yrs; the Anderson reunion still goes on today, so far they have written two family history books, one in 1910 and one in 1956. The Nazareth churchyard is filled with Anderson's.
Tom grew up with many brothers & one surviving sister, his parents were landed gentry, his father still owned over 1000 acres in Spartanburg in 1899 and his mother Ada Eppes was from Virginia & had nobility in her ancestry dating back to William the Conqueror, she was related by blood or marriage to just about every landed family in Virginia including Thomas Jefferson and his wife Martha Wayles-Epps-Jefferson. Tom, like his brothers, attended the noteworthy school of Dr Reid in Reidville, and he was later sent to 2 different universities but he failed to graduate from either one. Tom took a job as mail carrier for the Switzer Post Office Route 1.
At some point, the Nazareth Presbyterian Church appointed Tom Anderson a Deacon. He became a Mason and evidently he later stopped attending church because his wife told me she firmly disapproved of his being a Mason, she said they were a fake religion and she had married Tom partly because he was a Deacon in the church and therefore she had believed he had to be as Christian-minded as she was. (She evidently didn't know him well. Tom and Hattie West were matched by his sister-in-law Mamie Anderson, according to mama's cousin Elizabeth Epps Anderson, she said both her own parents and my grandparents probably never would've been married except for the meddling of their sister-in-law, who believed, like Jane Austen's character Mrs Bennett, that every single man of property must be in need of a wife.)
In 1918, Tom Anderson married Hattie Weste Harris of Southern Shops, they had met when she was the acting governess to his brothers' children. His father gave them part of his own father's house as a dower gift & moved it to a plot of land on Hwy 417 near Green Pond Baptist Church. When they first started out married life, Hattie Weste was teaching six grades in the Poplar Springs one-room school on 417 and Tom worked as the Switzer mail carrier, his route ran from Moore to Greer.
Their 1st child Marguerite was born in 1918, and she was the apple of her father's eye, grandmother Hattie Weste wrote that she was pleased her husband spent a lot of time with his oldest child, he was very patient with her & would read to her at night & give her milk & bread or chocolate to get her to go to sleep. They soon had another daughter Harriet, who delighted her father with her early artistic ability, and then 2 sons in quick succession, Tom Jr & Carlos.
The family was becoming more crowded, so when Tom's brother Walter married & built a big grand new house on top of a corner hill about a mile down the road that his new wife refused to live in it because it was too big, Tom decided to buy it from him using Federal Land Grant money. (I wonder how much of the idea was Tom's, and how much was his brother Walter's. I also wonder what his father would've said if he had been still alive.) Loans were cheap & plentiful during the Roaring 20's, Tom had his dower land so he mortgaged it. But Tom wasn't doing well enough financially to pay a mortgage. His wife wrote to family in the 20's that she was worried about the debt because her husband wasn't even paying off the interest every year, not that he seemed worried about it. Mama said her father couldn't make a living at farming, when I asked her what he should've done instead of farming she thought about it & said he could've been in town working as a shoe salesman; she said her father had a natural talent at fitting shoes, was able to just look at their feet & then go to town & buy them new shoes that fit better than when they'd go in person & try them on. She said her father really tried to be a farmer because that's what all of his and his wife's family did and it's what his wife wanted to do, she didn't want to move into town. Mama said her father Tom was inventive, once he designed a new type of pig trough that was reversible, it could be used on either side, and one year they grew sorghum and made molasses using a mule to turn the wheel to mash the cane juice out of the sugar cane; grandmother wrote about growing peanuts and making peanut brittle which she sent to her sister at college, and raising chickens and turkeys and selling eggs, she also churned butter to sell. They had two black servants in the 1920's who cooked and cleaned, a mother and daughter. They were outwardly doing well, but Hattie Weste also wrote that she had not wanted to buy that big new house and go in debt, she didn't believe they needed it, it was all her husband's idea, what she really wanted was for them to be a Baptist missionary team going off to Korea to serve in the Baptist mission fields which she was donating all her money to. But Tom was not at all interested in her religious goals, mama said he was often sarcastic about her mother's ideas.
Around 1930, Tom lost their land. Tom was an automobile aficionado, every year he drove with his brother Walter to Detroit to buy a new car (there were no local car dealers), then they would drive both cars back and Walter would get his old car. Tom was persuaded by a swindler to invest in a new "Cyclone Starter" for cars, my mother said the man came & asked her father for investment money about 1929 & her mother urged him not to trust the man, but he impatiently ordered his wife to go back into the house and "tend to woman's business", this was men's business. He gave the man all his mortgage payment for that year and the man disappeared; his brother Walter showed up a few minutes later to warn Tom there was a con artist in the neighborhood, but even though they both went out looking for him they never found him or the money, and the Land Bank foreclosed on Tom the next year.
Tom then got a job managing the sewer plant south of town about 1931, but he didn't do well & lost that job, then he moved to a farm near Cross Anchor. Mama said they lived on several farms around the southern part of the county near Cross Anchor and Woodruff during the depths of the Depression, they were like many, they had almost nothing except what they were able to grow or make or were given as charity; my mother said she never got new clothes, they were all hand-me-downs unless she got a summer job picking cotton or sorting peaches. Their two oldest daughters were taken in by his wife's family, and then son Carlos left about 1936, he told me he never went back home to live again; Carlos was put in a work-study program in Berry, GA where he attended school until he graduated from Berry College. Thomas Jr. enlisted in the Navy in 1939, against his father's wishes. Mama said her father had been relying on his son Thomas to do all the heavy lifting on the farm because her father was a physically weak man, he had a heart condition that may have been atrial-fibrillation because he'd suddenly get weak and dizzy and have to lie down, he also smoked, so he refused to give his oldest son permission to join the Navy for several years; it was his wife Hattie Weste who finally relented. Her nephew told me that Hattie Weste learned Tom Jr was getting into trouble in town, he was running with a bunch of teens who were drinking & he got too drunk to get home one night & he slept it off in his aunt Emily's car in town which was parked beside the house where everyone was already asleep. Hattie Weste was firmly anti-alcohol, she belonged to the Women's Christian Temperance League like her mother & forbade any alcohol in their home. She also forbade any card-playing or gambling in her home. Her husband Tom did not share her negative feelings about these things, and according to my mother he often made disparaging comments about his wife's extreme religiosity. Mama said her mother decided maybe the military discipline would straighten out her son Thomas in a way her husband could not. Thomas wrote home from the Navy and they kept his letters, he told them of a car accident he'd been in and that he was recuperating in a hospital in California (he wasn't the driver but was with several sailors out late drinking with two women and the driver was drunk, he ran the car into a telephone pole; mama said if Thomas had been driving they probably would not have crashed because Thomas was a wonderful driver). Thomas also said that he was studying to get his high school diploma which he had been unable to get at home because his father kept pulling him out of school to work on the farm, and he said that on the ship he assisted the chaplain who told him that Tom was only one of 4 men on the ship who were truly Christians (that certainly would've pleased his mother, but I wonder if it was true). Mama said the family heard about the sinking of Tom's ship the USS Porter on the wireless before the military sent word that he was dead by telegram two weeks later. Mama also said after his death they started getting letters from men who had served with Thomas, telling them that he had rescued about two dozen men from the sinking ship before a boiler explosion burned him too badly to survive. She also said her father Tom was afraid they'd try to draft him near the end of the war, but he wasn't, and of course if they had pulled his birthdate in the draft lottery they still wouldn't have drafted him because of his age and ill health. But it was a worry for them.
About five yrs before he died, Tom developed emphysema, according to his cousin Sadie Anderson Magill, though they didn't call it that then, mama said the doctor called it "asthma of the heart", he quit smoking, but it was too late. Mama remembered her father having trouble breathing and getting gradually weaker in the old drafty house her uncle Ben Anderson's wife had given them to live in almost for free, she said one winter near the end, her mother wrapped him tight in warm blankets & sat him on their porch to get fresh air because the house was heated with fireplaces & the air inside was smoky. A neighbor came by & berated her mother for putting him outside in the cold, said she'd give him pneumonia, but his doctor praised her actions, said what she did was very practical & the fresh air was much better for him than the stale, smoky air. Grandmother nursed her husband until near the end when Tom's brother Dr. John Anderson had him moved to Greenville where he was a practicing physician; Tom died in the Greenville Hospital.
Tom was originally buried in the older part of Nazareth Cemetery, but in the 1960's his son Richard bought a new family plot in a new section & had him moved so his wife and children could be buried by him.
Tom had seven children by his wife, four boys & three girls, all except his namesake Tom Jr survived him. He also had seven grandchildren. Tom also had one daughter by another woman whose name I do not know, I was told by his wife's nephew that the girl's mother was a teenager from a respectable family who lived at the end of Tom's mail route near Greer who would sometimes put him up for the night if he finished his route too late to drive home. The teen pregnancy would've been a scandal but both families hushed it up & Tom's father paid off the family to keep it quiet; mama's cousin Marjorie said she even remembered the exact amount his father paid the girl's family, $832. My mother died not knowing she had a half-sister. My cousin told me the half-sister worked at the Belk Hudson department store downtown, but he didn't remember her name. I may have met her, I remember a woman staring at me once like she knew me, but when she waited on me she never mentioned it if she did; she looked a little like my mother, she was tall with black hair too. I wonder if my grandmother Hattie West knew of the child, she may have because she called her husband Tom "oversexed", and my mother said her father once went down to the river in the middle of winter & jumped in, broke the ice on top of the water, her mother told her father that he was a fool to do that.
--Jeni
10/2017 |
