COLUMNIST: Woman wrote of very early days of Florence

In early 1939 the Morning News published some articles written by older Florentines looking back on the early days of the town. It was in connection with the 50th anniversary of creation of Florence County.

One of the pieces was written by Mrs. C.D. Bristow in 1904 for the old Florence Daily Times but printed in 1939 by the Morning News.

She wrote that her father, J.H. Husbands, had been the second man with a family to settle in Florence, and she recalled moving here in 1860 as a very young girl.

“I was quite young at the time, but I remember that there were very few houses; in fact, the town was little more than a railroad crossing. There stood in the garden where the ACL Restaurant now (1904) is, a two-story, unpainted wooden building which was called the hotel and was kept by a Mr. Freeman. Here passengers could get meals and lodging — for there was only one train a day from either direction, and passengers had to lie over for a whole day and night.”

(The ACL station in 1904 was at the corner of Church and Front (now Baroody) streets. Now one could look down on the site from the east side of the Church Street bridge, about where Old 1031, the neglected steam engine the ACL gave the city, was located before it was donated to a museum that would take care of it.)

The ACL station at the time was beside the restaurant, and Mrs. Bristow recalled as a young girl being among children who played hide and seek around the station.

She recalled that the old Gamble Hotel which was at the corner of Coit and Front streets was under construction when the Bristows moved to Florence. When completed, it was by far the most impressive building in town. Trains stopped where only a shed or that hotel sheltered passengers who got off the trains. “My father took many friends and often strangers to his home and entertained them,” she wrote.

She recalled the original First Presbyterian Church being under construction. It faced Church Street just south of the tracks where trains from Charleston curve eastward approaching the Amtrak station.

A pond was about where Poynor School is now and extended from the Baptist Church, a small wooden structure where the church still is located, to about where Pine Street crosses the railroad. It was handy for baptisms in the early days of the church, she said.

She was there when the Skrimish at Gamble’s Hotel occurred. A detachment of Sherman’s Army that was passing through Cheraw came to Florence to destroy the railroad junction, but a larger unit of Confederates happened to be here. The Union group was turned back.

Mrs. Bristow said she and her sister each had two new dresses, and when the Union troops appeared, they put both on for fear Sherman’s troops would steal one. It must have been some experience for a young girl. She wrote that “there was some firing, and we could see the glistening of their guns in the sunlight.”

During and after the Civil War, times were tough. She wrote, “The barest of necessities were hard to get at this time. We made various substitutes for coffee. We moulded our own candles, spun and dyed thread and made cloth for our dresses and were proud of them. We stripped and soaked palmetto leaves and made our own hats and trimmed them with plumes, rosettes and cockades made from the palmetto.”

Mrs. Bristow recalled the Florence Stockade holding thousands of Union prisoners during the last year of the war. She recalled that thousands of prisoners died in the Stockade and were hauled away on wagons, and those wagons, she wrote, were “piled high with bodies, like so much wood.”

She was proud of the water system the city had recently completed as she wrote. Disastrous fires had convinced the population that whatever a water system cost, it was necessary.

She told of Florence being an important tobacco market, something that did not last and of “hundreds of men” working in the railroad shops which also no longer is the case.

Too bad more first hand recollections of the town’s early days are not available.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .