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Uneven heat distribution caused the blue hue that imbued bricks fired in beehive kilns decades ago at Marion Ceramics. Those blue bricks gave their name to the surrounding community.
Photo provided by Marion Ceramics.
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The Lucknow Mini Mart gas station is one of few landmarks in the small Lee County community.
Photo by Josh Crotzer.
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Lone Star Barbecue and Mercantile founder Pat Williams, right, and his son Chris, pictured together in 2013, ran the restaurant before selling it in 2018. Five years later, the building was lost in a Christmas Eve fire.
Photo by Milton Morris.
A few years ago, I took an 800-plus-mile road trip around South Carolina to learn about the origins of 10 of the state’s most intriguingly named communities: Round O, North, Plum Branch, Ninety Six, Due West, Possum Kingdom, Cross Anchor, Prosperity, Coward and Ketchuptown.
Colorful town names, I knew, would lead me down colorful backroads to colorful places and colorful people. And I wasn’t wrong. However, there remained so many other towns that I did not reach but that still tantalized me and beckoned me on the South Carolina map. Blue Brick, Trio, Eureka, Lone Star, Lucknow, Stringfellow, Bucklick, Climax, Goat Alley, Giant … to name but a few.
So, in the fall of 2024, I set out again. I had one condition—I planned to wheel into each town only with wild imagination rather than actual knowledge (e.g., “Stringfellow must have been named after a skinny man.” “They must have found something pretty good in Eureka.”). That is, I would conduct real research only after my visit.
Along this second, 450-plus-mile journey, I was reminded that place names are the great passwords that unlock history and personal memory. As far as conversation starters go, to ask someone about the town’s name is as fruitful as asking them about where to find the town’s best cheeseburger. The next thing you know, you are talking about rabbit hunting or training horses or the last passenger train to come through town.
Although many of these places were long past their heyday, and some had even become ghost towns, I was reminded of an essential truth—that what lives on is the name and the voices of the people who speak that name and call it home.
Blue Brick (Marion County)
After poring over the map and discovering a locale called Blue Brick, I’m hoping for a little neighborhood of blue brick houses tucked away in the green expanse of Marion County farmland. But when the asphalt gives way to dirt, I find myself going through a set of open gates with the inscription Marion Ceramics: Founded 1885.
Bulldozers are pushing clay into big heaping mounds, and I know I’ve entered some kind of mine or quarry. With sheepish reluctance, I get out of the car and approach the trailer office. These folks are doing serious work, and here I am digging around for a few words.
The first man I meet is Wayne Kirby, the vice president of marketing and someone friendly enough to tell me to hold on a minute, that he’ll be right back with something. Sure enough, Mr. Kirby returns holding—of all things—a blue brick. It has the word PEE DEE imprinted on it in big block letters.
“This brick,” he says, “used to be fired here in beehive kilns, which are round kilns, kind of like a dome. And they’d load it up with brick, and they’d just heat it up. But it wouldn’t be even distribution—some places would get hotter than others—so you’d get blue brick, along with regular red.”
The owner of the company comes out, laughs, and says I look like a tourist lost on my way to Myrtle Beach. It’s a fair point. When I try to explain what I’m doing—looking for why there’s a Blue Brick on the map—he tells me that there once was a community here, with a post office right over there.
One hundred thirty-nine years later, Marion Ceramics is still making bricks at this site today—face bricks, thin bricks, pool coping bricks, brick tiles—but, alas, no more blue bricks.
Ruby (Chesterfield County)
If they have blue bricks in Blue Brick, then they must have rubies in Ruby. From a clay mine to a gemstone mine—that’s what I’m thinking.
It’s early morning, and the Sno-n-Go Freeze Shack on Market Street in Ruby is open for breakfast. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that your chances are always high to find a local know-it-all in a local diner.
“I’m not from here, so I don’t have the slightest clue,” my waitress, Maddie, says. “I’ve been trying to figure that out, too. I can tell you why my town is called Patrick—and that’s because it’s named after the guy who founded it. But I don’t know a thing about Ruby except how to get here.”
The friendly young couple sitting at the table beside me—they train quarter horses for rodeo riding—don’t know either. And they don’t even know anyone who might know. So, I wait for a table of old-timers to finish their last bites and rise from their seats.
The first guy I ask says, “Uh, you know, Bobby has been here longer than I have.”
Bobby says, “It was originally called Flint Hill, but why they changed it to Ruby? Ruby is the Jubilee City. That means it’s the top of the line.”
Literally, at the start of the 20th century, the Cheraw & Lancaster Railroad tracks reached Ruby, making it the “crown jewel” of the rail line.
Bobby also remembers when Ruby had a little more sparkle: “There were stores on both sides up here. I mean, it was a boom town. We had a cannery right over here where the farmers brought their tomatoes and okra and beans. … But all the farmers died.”
Lucknow (Lee County)
At the Lucknow Mini Mart, Andrew “Pop” Williams and Deborah Tisdale Gardner say the same thing: When the logging companies came here, they looked around at all the longleaf pines and said, “We’re in the luck now!”
But, they say, that also might just be a legend. If anyone knows for sure, it will be Cecil Stevens, and they give me directions to his house.
No one is home, but the license plate on the Cadillac reads LUCKNOW, and I know I’ve absolutely got to locate Cecil Stevens. And as luck would have it in Lucknow, his wife pulls into the driveway and tells me he’s down at the church.
I find Mr. Stevens, the Lee County historian, out back of the church, near the cemetery, sawing wood for a new door frame. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see me.
“That’s a myth—and it’s been written and written and written—but it’s not true,” he says, about the story I heard at the Mini Mart. “They were in luck now, but they didn’t name it Lucknow.”
According to Stevens and an old map in his office, Lucknow Village was part of the Buffalo Township in the late 1700s, and many of the first villagers had emigrated from Scotland.
“Now, this is what I think; it’s not fact, but there’s a place in Scotland called L-O-C-K-N-A-W,”
he says. “Some of them came from that little town called Locknaw. That makes more sense.”
He suggests the spelling of Lucknow is an Americanized phonetic change—like how Bardo, Kentucky, was named after Bordeaux, France.
It might be said that the town itself—which once had a movie theater, jail, turpentine mill and sugar cane mill—ran out of luck when the last train came through. But for his part, Stevens remembers that fondly.
“When my mother was about 20 or 21, she took me out to Lucknow as the train was making its last run,” he says. “The conductor took me up in his arms and rode me about a block down the track and brought me back up. Now, they always told me this. They said, ‘Cecil, you was the last one to ride the train.’”
Lone Star (Calhoun County)
I figure that someone from Texas, the Lone Star state, must have settled here in Lone Star, South Carolina. The place certainly has the look of a Western ghost town. A two-story brick building is boarded up and locked. A white clapboard shack needs a fresh coat of paint and is locked. The Lone Star S.C. Store has a barred front door with a sign telling me this is “Private Property.”
I approach one of the lone houses in Lone Star, standing there among acres of cotton fields in white bloom.
A vivacious poodle comes leaping out, followed by Martha Shirer, who has lived in Lone Star for over 60 years. She gets straight to the point. Lone Star got its name, she says, “Because one day the train came by and saw a star up in the sky.”
We flip through a thick three-ring binder full of laminated Times and Democrat newspaper articles she’s cut out over the years. When I get back home, I read the articles she selects for me, and I learn that the town was supposed to be called Auburn. It was developed by the Pee Dee Land Company back when the Atlantic Coastline Railroad laid tracks through the territory in 1893. Some legends support Shirer’s lone-star-in-the-sky story, and some say it was indeed a homesick Texan who named the town.
In 2000, four of the town’s buildings were moved to Santee, South Carolina, to become the Lonestar Barbecue & Mercantile Tavern and Grill. Unfortunately, the facility caught fire on Christmas Eve in 2023.
“One of the stores that went to Santee was the post office,” Shirer tells me. “It took me a long time to accept it. It was like they tore up Lone Star.”
According to a recent article published on the Times and Democrat website, the barbecue joint plans to rebuild in Santee but admits that, like Lone Star itself, “What was lost can’t be replaced.”
Birdtown (Lancaster County)
Birdtown is right there on the map. I touch the point and read the word: Birdtown. The name even pops up on my GPS. But at the crossroads where the map and GPS lead me, there’s only one home. I keep going, then turn around, hang a left, keep going, then turn around, go straight, keep going, then turn around. In every cardinal direction, I find no town.
Finally, I see a mail carrier coming over the hill, and I flag her down. If anyone would know, it’s got to be the mail carrier, right?
“You got an address?” she asks.
“Just says Birdtown.”
Her eyes widen with suspicion. When I try to explain what, exactly, I am doing out here in Lancaster County, she shakes her head and says sorry, she can’t help me. I thank her for her time, and I return to the crossroads. I decide that, since there isn’t a town, at least I will look for a bird.
But it’s my lucky day. I see a man standing in the doorway of the one home in “Birdtown,” so I stop the car and wave to him. When he walks out into his yard, I ask him if this is Birdtown, and he says yes, so I ask him how it got his name.
He starts talking, but he is standing too far way for me to hear him. I just keep hearing the word “bird” repeated a few times.
“So,” I yell, “there were a bunch of birds over there?”
He starts laughing. “No, man.” He walks closer, and now I can hear him. “Paul Bird used to own that store right there.” He points to a place where this is no store. “A convenience store, and everybody just called it Birdtown. It burned down a few years ago.”
I thank him for his time, and I pull over on the shoulder to jot down my notes. When I look up, I see a solitary crow perched in the topmost branch of a dead tree. The bird looks down at me with its big yellow eyes as if to ask, “What are you doing here?”
And so, I fly out of Birdtown.
Privateer (Sumter County)
Before I wheel into a spot on the map called Privateer, I picture some wounded Revolutionary War patriot staggering off after the Battle of Camden, resting here, looking around at the high hills and the pretty pine trees, liking what he sees, and building himself a sturdy pine log cabin. Then everybody for miles around says, “Oh, that’s where the old privateer lives.”
But on this Sunday in 2024, I find no “Welcome to Privateer” sign, only a bustling Bethel Baptist Church, with people exiting its tall doors after the service has ended. All sheepish in my “Sunday worst,” I approach one gentleman, who says he doesn’t know for sure—and so wouldn’t want to be quoted in any kind of article—but that there used to be a Privateer train stop over by the feed mill lot, and that voters today still vote in the Privateer Precinct. If anyone in the congregation would know, he says, it’d be Lamar Atkins, but Mr. Atkins wasn’t in church today.
I thank the man and head off down the road. Later, I fill out the Contact Us form on the Bethel Baptist Church website and ask them to kindly put me in touch with Lamar Atkins. I never have faith in “Contact Us” forms, but sure enough, the phone rings from an 803 area code a few days later.
Atkins, who has a master’s degree in history, begins by saying what every good local historian says: “I’ll give you the little bit that I know.” On his 1878 map, Privateer is listed as one of the 16 townships in Sumter County, and each township had a post office, because in the 1850s, mail switched from service by horse-and-buggy to service by train.
Is it possible, then, that Privateer—like Lone Star, Prosperity, and Ruby—was named by the railroad companies?
Atkins says he can’t say for sure. For that, I may have to call Sammy Way.
I track down Sammy Way—longtime archivist, local historian and columnist for The Sumter Item—who in turn tracks down an old article he wrote about a “brilliant, brilliant” local Sumter County historian named T.W. Stubbs, who once researched Privateer. Sammy Way reads the article aloud to me over the phone:
“There’s a part of the Pocotaglico River that runs in this area known as Nasty Branch. It was thought that pirates—privateers—came up these streams and harassed and stole from the people using pole boats to transport their goods and supplies in the 1780’s.”
So, here we arrive at last in our game of telephone: the anonymous churchgoing man gave me the name of Lamar Atkins, who gave me the name of Sammy Way, who gave me the name of T.W. Stubbs, who gave me the origins of the name Privateer, which may yet be a myth.
And that, as they say, is history.