S. O. B.
June 4, 2005
As I start to write this we are in a place called S.O.B. Seriously, we are in South Of The Border, at Dillon, South Carolina. Our actual campsite is less than a block south of the North Carolina border. The entrance to the area is just a few feet south of the border. Thus this is S.O.B., SC. There is a highway out of North Carolina that goes directly into the filling station at South Of The Border. It is necessary to turn off the road to avoid driving into the station. S.O.B. is a bit of an odd place, with a sombrero shaped viewing tower, restaurants, numerous curio shops, night club, miniature golf course, and I would have to guess what else. All the highways near here are littered with dozens of large billboards. There must be well over 200 campsites here, all nice. There must be at least five or six sites occupied. It is actually sad to see so little business in such a nice place. Many of the places we have stayed have been very busy.
THE WATER TOWER AT S O B
There is an elevator that goes to the top of the sombrero for a panoramic view of the area. While we did not go to the top I am sure that it is quite a view from the top. I have always thought about bamboo growing in some exotic place like China or India. While it does grow in those places I have found out that it grows in a lot of places in the United States. Here in Dillon, South Carolina I have come across a large grove of bamboo. I picked up a short piece of the bamboo that had been cut to see what would happen to it if I just let it dry. I don’t know how people dry it because my short piece just rotted.
SOMBRERO AND GOLF BALL AT SOUTH OF THE BORDER
I forgot to tell you that before I left Florida I had a chance to get a job in an orange juice-processing factory. I turned the job down because I was afraid that I might get canned if I couldn’t concentrate.
I like to get off the Interstate highways and drive the “blue” roads when I can. There I see so often the damage that the Interstate system did to many businesses in small towns. There was much value was created by the system, but it took people away from the towns and then small businesses did not survive. There are a lot of buildings that were obviously at one time a service station, or a motel, and are now just derelicts. There are a lot of abandoned farmhouses and barns. There is a cost to progress. There may be a thousand people that gain while a hundred people lose. As always the people that gain are happy but it is still sad for the losers.
Once in a while a person will come across something that seems to hit a chord just perfect. I discovered one of those just the other day. We had driven south on the interstate in South Carolina to an exit about twenty miles south of the camp we were staying. To go home I said, “Lets take a different route, anything besides I-95.” About a mile off the interstate I saw a marker that said, “Historical Marker 1/4 Mile.” I find a lot of these interesting, so I stop when it is convenient, and often find that a mile away some person had a farm and grew corn, or something else equally boring. This sign was in not far from an odd looking structure in the front yard of a house. The structure was not notable and the sign was so weather worn that it was almost unreadable. I almost drove on without taking the effort to read it. That would have been a BIG MISTAKE. The sign told about the structure in the front yard. It was a cotton press. built in 1798 and believed to be the oldest in existence. I have seen pictures of cotton bales setting on docks, ready to be loaded on ships for shipment to England. I have seen 500-pound cotton bales in museums that were made to look like the ones being shipped during the revolutionary war. I have often wondered how they were able to handle a bale of cotton that weighed 500 pounds. To be sure I have some idea because I have moved steel barrels that weighed 500 lbs or more with a hand truck. Not often but a few times I loaded them up a ramp into a truck but never into the hold of a ship. One thing that never came close to being a thought was, “How did they get the fluffy cotton bolls compacted into a solid enough form to form a bale. I suppose the fact that I have spent a lot of hours working around hay balers and the bales themselves had the effect of blinding me to an obvious question.
OVERALL VIEW OF THE COTTON PRESS
The press was simply a very large “bolt” and “nut” made out of wood. The builder had taken about a twelve-foot length of tree trimmed it to an even diameter and cut spiral grooves along its length. Two large square cut timbers were grooved to the same spiral and created a split “nut” to go with the “bolt” made from the tree. The very top of the bolt was mortised into a beam, which was then attached to arms reaching towards the ground. Mules or oxen would have been fastened to the end of the arms. As the team circled the press the “bolt” would be screwed downwards through the “nut” creating a tremendous pressure on the plunger pushing down on cotton filling the box located at the lower end of the “bolt.” Obviously, reversing the direction of circling beasts would then screw the plunger upwards to release the bale of cotton and allow another bale to be made. I imagine that the part that looks like a roof over the center and over the arms was not part of the original design, but was added to prevent deterioration at a later date.
THE BOLT AND THE NUT OF THE COTTON PRESS
I can envision a number of slaves working this machine. Small children were likely doing the mule skinning or ox poking. I would imagine that the most docile animals would be used for this job. I have seen pictures of slaves dragging burlap-like bags behind them through the cotton fields as they picked. It would seem logical that those bags could be emptied directly into the compaction box, or wagonloads of loose cotton might be forked directly into the box. There are dozens of questions that this machine has brought to my mind. How common were these machines? Did the average farmer have them, only large plantation owners, only cotton brokers, or a combination of all? How did the 500-pound bales get shipped to the rivers and loaded on boats? By the Civil war steamboats were common, did they exist prior to 1800? When I went to Tall Stacks 2003 all the steamboats there were built after 1900. There was ample evidence of steamboats being built long before, at least by 1850, but in 1776 at the time of the Revolutionary War I cannot recall reading of ANY steam power. (I NEED ACCESS TO THE INTERNET TO RESEARCH ALL THE TIME. Not just once in a while and sometimes not for two or three weeks at a time. Now that I have had my whine I will go on with the writing.)
For those of you in Colorado, sometime go down to Bent’s Old Fort. It was a trappers frontier fort. A lot of furs were traded and shipped through the fort. In the middle of the compound there was a fur press that was simply a long lever and fulcrum over a pressing platform. Another place I have seen a steel threaded shaft and compression wheel that served as the power for the press. These served the purpose at the time, but they are simple compared to the cotton press. The design engineering and skill of construction impressed me beyond my own belief. So often I am amazed at what people could accomplish with draft animals, determination, ingenuity, and manual labor. The cotton press has not been the only thing that has raised questions. How did people cast, finish, transport, and install rifled cannon into forts that weighed 25 tons in 1870. Or how did they transport the same type rifle across swamps at night and get them mounted without being seen by the fort they were going to attack. During the day they would have been spotted immediately.
TWENTY-FIVE TON RIFLED CANNON
Where did I see a 25 ton rifled cannon you ask? I saw several in Fort Sumter. I have visited several forts or historical sites and have seen many cannon, but they were little compared to the whoppers at Fort Sumter. The only way to get to it is by ferry from Charleston, SC. I was a bit disappointed because they did not allow enough time to thoroughly see the fort. There was so much history that happened there it would take several hours to adequately tour it, we were given about an hour. Even in that short time I learned a lot. A smooth bored artillery piece was called a cannon, and when it was rifled the name changed to rifle. The rifled cannon negated the value of forts that were built of brick or stone. It has been calculated that over seven million pounds of steel was fired into Fort Sumter during the final siege. Fort Sumter was evacuated when Sherman army advanced towards Savannah. There were several sieges of forts that were won not by military power but by the blockade of supplies that led to either surrender of the fort or starvation of the soldiers. During a five-month siege the Union gun batteries reduced the fort to primarily a pile of rubble, which was ironically more defensible than at the beginning. Offensively it had no guns still on mounts that could be fired at ships or anywhere else for that matter. It was also interesting that the Confederate army assaulted Fort Sumter at the beginning of the war for thirty-six hours before it was surrendered. A Confederate “hot shot” set fire to the wooden officers quarters within the fort. Major Anderson in Fort Sumter determined that his men could not defend the fort and fight the fire. He surrendered the fort to the Confederates and sailed to New York with his garrison.
UNEXPLODED SHELL FROM RIFLED CANNON IN FORTS WALL
I have known for years that the Federal government was ignoring the constitution and violating the rights of the southern states. This caused them to feel that the northern states had deliberately broken the compact between the states releasing the southern states from any obligation to the union, thus followed the secession of the southern states, with South Carolina being the first to sign papers of succession. While most people have been incorrectly taught that the civil war was fought to free the slaves, it was really fought to prevent the breakup of the union. The Northern States simply considered the prohibition of slavery a necessary act to go along with the preservation of the Union.
Abraham Lincoln is credited with freeing the slaves, when in fact he rescinded declarations made by Union generals freeing slaves early in the war. On April 13, 1862, under the guise of the First Confiscation Act, Union commander Major General Hunter announced, ”All persons of color lately held to involuntary service by enemies of the United States in Fort Pulaski and on Cockspur Island, Georgia, are hereby confiscated and declared free, in conformity of the law and shall here after receive the fruits of their own labor.” This order caused national debate on slavery. It was this order and another similar one that was rescinded by Abraham Lincoln early in the war. At the end of the war he did of course sign the emancipation proclamation. It is also worth noting that if Eli Whitney had not invented the cotton gin, it extremely probable that slavery would have become undesirable in any of the southern states. If slavery had become undesirable the civil war might not have happened. There were two kinds of cotton grown. One was a short fiber producer that was not desirable for the weaving of cotton cloth; therefore it only made a small profit or no profit for the grower under any condition. The other kind of cotton produced a long fiber that was highly desirable for weaving but the seeds could not be removed profitably. Slavery was declining rapidly because it was too expensive to keep slaves. Along came Eli Whitney to invent a machine to remove the seeds from the cotton. With the cotton gin huge profits could be made from slavery, and the importation of African people as slaves increased greatly.
Another fact that really surprises me was the reason for the majority of deaths of soldiers during the Civil War. We have all heard that over 620,000 Americans died during the war. This is more than any other conflict to this very date and more than the combined deaths of most (if not all) of the wars the US has been involved in. This is due in part to there only being Americans involved in this war. But, because most of the soldiers were from a rural background they had not had exposure to the so-called common diseases. Two-thirds of the deaths were from viral diseases like mumps, measles. Chronic diarrhea and continuous fevers due to poor sanitation was almost “normal” and contributed to the lack of resistance to diseases. The soldier’s exposure to the cold and a poor diet made them even more susceptible to typhoid fever and malaria. Quinine sulfate was available and is credited with saving thousands of lives in spite of the fact that the connection to the mosquito was not understood. Because the doctors saw the techniques they were using were effective to a lot injuries certain procedures were changed and exist, with modifications, to the modern time. For instance; hospital care replaced home care. The immediate removal of wounded men from the battlefield to field hospitals replaced leaving soldiers on the field of battle until the battle was finished which was often the next day. Today we think of such changes as logical and obvious, and it is difficult to think of them being innovative procedures.
As you should be able to tell I have been having a great time learning details about history that seemed boring when I was in school. I am filling in gaps of history that I didn’t know were missing. There is a great deal of difference between hands on learning and classroom learning. There are still more forts, lighthouses, beaches, and towns to visit and see and enjoy.
I have developed one unexpected malady. I have developed Zebra Feet. Many of you may recall that I have pledged for years that when I retired that I was going to buy a pair of Birkenstocks, and when it got too cold to wear then I was going to move further south to where it was warmer. Well I didn’t like any Birkenstocks I saw and bought Ecco instead, and I bought them a year and a half before I retired. The rest I have tried to do. Now I have a tan stripe across my toes, then a white stripe, then a tan stripe across my foot arch, then another white stripe, then a tan stripe that fades onto my ankle. I am striped like a zebra with tan and white instead of black and white; thus I have Zebra Feet. While it looks rather strange when I am barefoot I highly recommend that you get some sandals and see if you can develop the same malady.
I had never thought about it in quite these terms but I saw a sign that expresses a very intelligent idea, “If you don’t at first succeed, don’t try sky diving.
I tried to get my wife to go skinny-dipping in the Atlantic Ocean one night. She told me that I would have to go “CHUNKY-DUNKING.” At least I figured out why I like the ocean. It makes my butt look small.
With any luck this will be e-mailed from somewhere in North Carolina on the 7th of June. We are getting farther north slowly. As hot and humid as it is getting here I may not be moving fast enough.
Hope you are all doing well,
Till Later This Is Doug Of
PEACE ON THE ROAD
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