Mr. Charlie, my granddaddy, and his family lived on the quiet and fertile
banks of the Savannah River in Ellenton, South Carolina.
In November, 1950 the federal government decided to build the Savannah River Plant to make tritium and plutonium for H-bombs. The town of Ellenton was comprised of thirty businesses, two schools and one railway. The population had declined after the first World War and the Great Depression to 760. The towns of Dunbarton and Meyers Hill and other unincorporated areas would all be relocated. The sidewalks of Ellenton still exist but are strictly off limits to visit. In total 6000 people and 6000 graves were moved. Grandaddy had six of our family members moved to a new family plot in the Jackson city cemetery. He would build his house there on the perimeter of that cemetery with the help of his four sons. Grandaddy had a third grade education but was well read, self taught and managed to support his family. He was a strict disciplinarian to the point that his discipline crossed the line, smashed the line. I have been told, in my adult years, that he tied my daddy in the barn for hours at a time. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this. I thought grandaddy to be harsh with my grandmother. He was impatient with her and she was frequently sick. My daddy would cringe every time mama would use corporal punishment. That I remember clearly.
Daddy never once spanked or hit us.
My daddy was the eldest son and joined the army and went to Texas.
He returned to Jackson with a wife and two small children. Grandaddy, by all accounts, ran the wife off, and daddy divorced her. Shots may or may not have been fired and some one went to jail briefly. The boy and girl stayed with my grandmother. Was my grandaddy so intimidating that he could make this young mother leave her children? I cannot ask my brother and will not ask my sister. Daddy did not speak of that time in his history. It was all hushed. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for that young woman to leave her children.
This would effect my big sister for the rest of her life.
Grandmother Lois passed away when I was eleven. She was diabetic and just plain wore out. Grandaddy, alone and with no one to dominate, seemed to soften a bit and I spent many a day at his house and attended church with him at Green Pond Baptist Church at the edge of the nuclear plant. Grandaddy died in 1990. I was at his bedside, a grown woman, a registered nurse, and yet the Baptist preacher would not speak to me when grandaddy died that day.
I had left Green Pond Baptist church as an older teen and married young.
In the preacher's mind I had joined a cult and renounced my faith, all fiction of course.
If one can be shunned from a particular Baptist church, I am your girl.
But that is jumping ahead of the story.
"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open."
---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983
For part one go
here.
Facts concerning Ellenton from Wikipedia.
Olive
