This will be tough: Here’s an old church somewhere in the Lowcountry. Where? Send your guess to feedback@statehousereport.com — and remember to include your name, home city and contact information.
Last week’s mystery, “Farm building” showed an old tobacco barn, the Dillard Barn, outside of Mullins, S.C.
Congratulations to those who identified it: George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; Charles Davis of Aiken; Jay Altman and Elizabeth Jones, both of Columbia, Jacie Godfrey of Florence; David Lupo of Mount Pleasant; Allan Peel of San Antonio, Texas; Frank Bouknight of Summerville; Henry Eldridge of Tega Cay; and Don Clark of Hartsville.
Altman, who grew up in Mullins, says the barn was “built circa 1894-1895 by John H. Dillard and his sons A.E. and Daniel Dillard, and was used for curing tobacco until 1981, when bulk tobacco barns replaced it.”
Clark, who said the barn was a national landmark, added, “I spent a number of hot summers hanging sticks of tobacco in tobacco barns just like this one. The green harvested leaves would be brought from the field, and women working under the open lean-to attached to the barn would string the tobacco on wooden sticks. Then, the hangers would climb up in the barn and starting from the top, would hang the sticks across runners across the width of the barn and work their way down until the barn was full. A furnace was then fired up, and the crop was cured. Afterwards, you could take out the sticks two at a time as the cured tobacco was lighter.”
- Send us a mystery. If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
ORDER NOW: Copies are in Lowcountry-area bookstores now, but if you can’t swing by, you can order a copy online today.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!