"The Upper Shoals," a chapter of CIRCLING HOME (UGA Press, November 2007)

Any path can become the path if attended to with care, without preconceptions, informed by knowledge, and open to surprise.

—Chet Raymo, The Path

The upper shoals have a wildness about them—big trees, exposed rock, and falling water. I like to walk down there with the dogs and pretend we live far from town surrounded by nothing but forest. The path along the creek through the floodplain is not ours. It's owned by one of the wealthiest families in the United States. We find what refuge we can among their abundant acres.

One spring Saturday I walked down from our house, and I could hear the upper shoals before I could see them. Two ridges pinch in tight there a quarter mile above Glendale, and most of the creek rushes through a narrow, fifty-yard-long channel blasted in the gray bedrock for an undershot water wheel when the shoals were what was called "a mill seat," a place where falling water was captured for power. The old man-made channel is a great kayaking spot, and our boys, when younger, loved to float down a half-mile below our house and "run the chute."
The dogs knew exactly where we were going. Ellie Mae was off-leash, and Toby trailed his in the mud. They waited at the shoals while I recovered a big plank I'd stashed in the woods. We use it to bridge some open water flowing on the north side of the rocky expanse. Toby went across easily. Ellie Mae always has to be coaxed across the narrow board.

Soon as I walked Toby across I snapped off his leash and turned him loose to run with Ellie Mae on the island of dark gray rock. They ran noses down from edge to edge, plotting their quarter acre of freedom. On the island's downstream point of sand and rock they waded out belly deep and tested the current pouring through the cut. There the dogs always think about swimming to the other side, but never do. I think they would if I wasn't present to call them back. They'd be gone to Glendale.

Standing on the shoals my focus often shifts quickly from the dogs testing their freedom to the past, to how much local history happened here fifty years before Glendale was founded. The village life that was established downstream by James Bivings in 1835 seems a little human and predictable when I'm standing at the place one early historian called the most important spot in Spartanburg County.

How is a place lost in time, its importance forgotten by almost everyone around it? How does it become simply a piece of property, an entry on a tax roll? Maybe the chaos of water falling over rocks hides it. Maybe the way the trees above my head knit the sky and land together makes it difficult to see why this place might matter or why we as a community might want to save it for the future. Something keeps the upper shoals out of the public consciousness of my community, but I'm not sure just what.

I know from Manning that the ridge on the west side of the creek above the upper shoals is a subdivision waiting to happen—high, flat land adjacent to the Calhoun Lakes development. I've been told local developers have coveted the property for fifty years. The Milliken family has been a good steward, but how many years will it be before they sell it? If it's valuable as real estate today, then how much more valuable will it be in fifty years when this end of Spartanburg County "builds out," as most of the land upstream nearer the city already has?
When I stand on the old, worn rocks I don't want to think much about the time to come out here. It's too painful. I think instead about history, and it's easy to imagine when the country around me was still raw, a frontier, not yet settled by anyone.

In the late eighteenth century the early colonial settlers traveled south down the Old Georgia Road and crossed the creek. They were looking for land, not "real estate." They wanted land for growing crops and grazing livestock, and the big floodplain stretching upstream on Lawson's Fork was prime. They also needed tools, and so when an early ironworks was established on the creek, it was a source of such essentials.
The ironworks was on the south side of the creek, 125 yards downstream from a cut stone abutment of the old trolley crossing, close to where I was standing. Several old maps place it there, and a hundred years ago one old-time historian described its site precisely saying, "Until a few years ago, when the pond was raised, a part of the old mill was visible, but since that time it is wholly submerged beneath the waters."

This area of South Carolina early on was even called "The Old Iron District." The industry had begun in New England in the 1640s, but Joseph Buffington established what was probably one of the first ironworks in the state at the upper shoals in 1773. Later it became known as Wofford's Iron Works.

A successful iron operation needed a number of things that this raw territory near Lawson's Fork had in abundance—crystalline rock for building furnaces, forges, and factory buildings; abundant hardwood forests to make charcoal for smelting iron ore; marble to melt with the ore and help purify it; and a shoals for power.
An iron plantation often controlled ten thousand acres that the owners clear-cut to make charcoal out of the hardwoods. On the high, dry ridges they'd harvest oak, pine, hickory, and some chestnut. Down in the wet bottoms, they would cut mulberry, swamp oak, walnut, and sycamore. Looking around I can still see the remnant of the native forest grown impressive, isolated fifty years at the shoals.

The charcoal production needed for an iron operation was an environmental disaster for the hilly piedmont. Several feet of topsoil that had built up over thousands of years was washed down the slopes in a short time and into the stream, leaving an eroded landscape of nutrient-poor red clay for farming.

An acre of mature woodlands produced on average thirty-five cords of wood, and a cord of wood produced forty bushels of charcoal. An iron furnace often needed 5 acres of timber a week just to keep it operating, or 125 acres of hardwoods every six months. To make charcoal, hardwood was stacked, covered with soil, and burned very slowly. It took the colliers (what the men who made charcoal were called) up to three weeks to make the charcoal, and the process required around-the-clock attention.

An archaeologist like Terry Ferguson could take a series of core samples of the sediments in the floodplain I'd walked through and calculate how much rich topsoil was actually washed down Lawson's Fork in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Terry could get a pretty good picture of how quickly the uplands of Spartanburg County were cleared of trees.

And what of the iron goods like skillets, kettles, chimney backs, cranks? They were smelted from local ore and stamped out with water-driven trip-hammers at Wofford's Iron Works and used locally by farmers like the Bagwells. If there was a surplus, they probably shipped it down to the coast along the Pacolet and Broad rivers. If it was shipped it was called pig iron and was shaped elsewhere into hammers for other forges, castings for machines.

The ironworks at the upper shoals probably also produced horseshoes, wagon wheels, knives, and swords and other raw materials during the American Revolution, so the spot was considered a key resource by both sides. Eighteenth-century maps pinpoint the old battle sites and lay out roads meeting at this very spot. Colonial roads came in from every point of the compass. Down at the upper shoals I was standing at the colonial Spaghetti Junction for the upstate.

Before I walked back to the house I hooked Toby back up and coaxed Ellie Mae across the plank, which I then hid in the woods again. Rather than returning on the trail I walked into the woods a few yards, and around me I could see what are said to be the graves of British soldiers killed in Revolutionary War. I stood among a series of six or seven sunken holes. A few pieces of broken rock were littered about, and with just a little imagination they could look like crude fallen grave markers.

When the Revolution broke out in the backcountry, the area along Lawson's Fork proved to be one of the most contested places in the colonies. These graves in the woods always served witness to the gravity of the local struggles. There was something peaceful about the Bagwell cemetery high on the ridge across the creek, but this lost burial ground left me unsettled. My discomfort standing there could be something as simple as the lack of closure and certainty about the origin of the holes. My feelings though are probably as messy as the struggle that surged through these woods for six years between 1775 and 1781.

"No great battles were ever fought, or victories won about Wofford's Iron Works," local historian Reverend J. D. Bailey said in a speech he delivered downstream at Glendale in May of 1901, "but a galaxy of thrilling incidents clustered around them, which are worthy to be perpetuated in the annuals of our country."

Bailey cites a number of these "thrilling incidents." He tells of how South Carolina's Council of Safety dispatched Henry Drayton to the Carolina backcountry in August of 1775 to convince the locals to support the cause against Great Britain. Drayton gave a speech at Wofford's Iron Works inspiring enough to prompt the creation of the Spartan Regiment, for which Spartanburg and the Spartan District were named. Those who attended barbecued a beef nearby in Drayton's honor, and the day ended with a "united love-feast on the roasted carcass" as Drayton describes it in his report to the Council.

In a second incident, a notorious Tory named Patrick Moore was surprised by Patriots near the ironworks in July of 1780. A "lively skirmish" took place, during which Moore and William Johnson, one of the Patriots, had a personal encounter: "Moore was overpowered and captured but in the desperate struggle with Johnson received several sword cuts on his head." While taking Moore back to his own lines Johnson was himself overpowered by the Tories. Moore escaped, and Johnson had to hide in a "friendly thicket" near the creek to keep from being captured.

Bailey and others have chronicled the battle that ranged up and down the Old Georgia Road a month after Johnson's wounding and escape. Parts of the battle took place only a few steps from where I stood watching the dogs.

Though not Yorktown or Valley Forge, the ground the dogs now explored had played its part in the Revolution. In 1780 Major Patrick Ferguson was marching through what are now these piedmont counties, terrorizing any and all who would not cooperate with the British. What happened at Wofford's Iron Works and along the road that passed it was the first in a series of challenges that would culminate in Ferguson's defeat at the Battle of King's Mountain in early October.

Colonels Isaac Shelby and Elijah Clarke were commanding the local Patriot troops. Two weeks earlier, in late July, they had captured the Tory garrison at Fort Thicketty, just north of the Pacolet River. In early August they were camped five miles away from the Lawson's Fork crossing. On the night of August 7, the Patriots, led by Shelby and Clarke, rested near Cedar Springs, south of Lawson's Fork.

I've thought a great deal about Elijah Clarke since I moved out here. He's the closest thing the circle has to an old-time hero—frontier settler, scout, and soldier. He'd been the first white settler in the area and became a major character in President Jimmy Carter's 2003 historical novel about the Revolutionary War, The Hornet's Nest. Clarke is said to have built a cabin in the territory in 1755 at Grindal Shoals on the Pacolet River, a few miles downstream from Glendale. Historian Christine Swager claims Clarke was "Spartanburg's Daniel Boone" and says that if his exploits in the Revolution were more widely known he would be as famous as Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox.

Elijah Clarke stayed in the Pacolet area for nine years until 1764, then moved further south to the Long Cane area for a few years. When the South Carolina piedmont became too populated, he migrated down the Old Georgia Road to settle on the frontier there around 1773. He returned to Spartanburg County to fight in various Revolutionary battles during the 1780s, including the Battle of Wofford's Iron Works. Clarke was quite helpful to the Patriots because he knew the South Carolina backcountry so well.

One of the reasons Clarke is not better known is that the story of what happened during the Revolution in the South Carolina up-country is too complex to shape into one neat narrative like Bunker Hill or the Boston Tea Party. The fighting along Lawson's Fork was like a civil war within a revolution, with the populace divided in their sympathies between the two warring sides.

That day in August 1780, Patriot scouts for Shelby and Clarke returned to their camp to report that British Major Dunlap's colonial dragoons and mounted militia were approaching, and so Shelby and Clark retreated toward the Lawson's Fork ford at Wofford's Iron Works.

Several miles before they could make the ford, 600 Patriots stood and fought on the Old Georgia Road near a crossroads now called Cedar Springs. The 650 British troops commanded by Dunlap were beaten back with considerable losses, and Patriots pursued for a mile or so. The Patriots captured about 50 of the British, including two officers. Major Patrick Ferguson then advanced to join the fight with a larger force, and the Patriots retreated up the Old Georgia Road, herding their prisoners with them.

Shelby and Clarke continued up the road to Wofford's Iron Works in a running battle with Ferguson's pursuit not far behind. The Patriots passed the ironworks and crossed the creek near where I was standing as they "formed and retreated" all the way from Cedar Springs to the Georgia Road's Pacolet River ford three miles north of Lawson's Fork.

When Shelby and Clarke finally reached the safety of the Pacolet's rocky bluff on the north side of the river, they lined up their troops and ridiculed Ferguson and their other British pursuers from their advantage above.
Clarke was wounded at least twice during this running fight along the road, and his bravery was noted by a historian in 1861, almost a hundred years after the battle; in fierce hand-to-hand fighting Clarke suffered at least two saber wounds and was captured momentarily, but he was able to escape through "the confidence in his own strength." Clarke went on to distinguish himself at the battles of Musgrove's Mill, Augusta, Fishdam Ford, Long Cane, and Blackstocks. Though he was not present at King's Mountain and Cowpens, it's said his "frontier guerillas" played a role in these victories.

During the Battle of Wofford's Iron Works there were at least four Patriots killed and twenty-three wounded. British casualties were thirty-five killed and a large number wounded. Local legend places the small cemetery encircled with a fieldstone wall not far from where the old road crosses Lawson's Fork. It was supposed to contain the remains of a dozen British troops killed in the Battle of Wofford's Iron Works.

The significance of this site continued through the war. A year later, Patriot Colonel William Washington stopped at the ironworks to have his horses shod before the battle of Cowpens, won by the Patriots in 1781. That same year local Tory villain "Bloody Bill" Cunningham burned the ironworks, and it never reopened.

There was nothing left to suggest all this history in the wild, forested landscape that surrounded me and the dogs. It was almost as if the hardwood cover had somehow erased the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. I had to look closely to see or hear any sign of nearby civilization. If I listened I could hear twenty-first-century cars passing on Country Club Road. When I got back to the trail I noticed that at my feet there was an empty six-pack of beer cans left from some foray into the property by another recent visitor.

Walking home I left all that place's history behind me. In the chronicles of the Revolution the upper shoals is hallowed ground where Patriots fought and died, and yet few know of its importance. I had no permission to look for the graves of the lost soldiers, and this interpretation happens from a distance. Does private property hold our heritage in trust or keep it hostage as surely as Clarke's prisoners were held after the Battle of Wofford's Iron Works.