Marks Photo Travels - now at marksphototravels.blogspot.com!

Thackston Road After visiting the Travelers Rest History Museum last Sunday, I traveled the few miles south to visit the Children's Graveyard. I've hearing  some commotion about the land being cleared and wanted to see for myself what was going on. The commotion also seems to keep my visit from 2011 near the top of my page views. The land has indeed been cleared around the graveyard. This is my photo of the entrance from 2011: Using a 1921 Greenville County soil map and using the old Swamp Rabbit Railroad path as a fixed reference, the church stood by the road somewhere between the old road above and the corner convenience store. If I had to guess, I'd place it nearer to the old road. All the trees have been cut making the graves much easier to spot. From the old road, the corner convenience store is now visible. I found the fence surrounding one grave is gone now gone. 2013: 2011: I didn't spend much time there, but I did spot a toy car possibly left by some ghost...

Last Sunday, I finally had a chance to visit the Travelers Rest History Museum  run by the Travelers Rest Historical Society . The museum has been open since late August on Saturdays and Sundays, but I usually have other commitments those days. But not this day. The museum is located at 3 Edwards Street , just south of downtown Travelers Rest in the area where U.S. 276 and U.S. 25 briefly mingle. The Swamp Rabbit Trail passes by a few feet away, and their parking lot also doubles as Swamp Rabbit Trail parking. When I arrived, some kind of event was being held on the Swamp Rabbit Trail. Police were stationed at road crossings directing traffic while joggers (all women from what I could tell) were headed north up the trail. According to a historical society meeting about the building I attended and summarized on a plaque by the front door, the building was originally a grocery store on Main Street and moved to its present location in 2010. Bricks for the building came from the f...

I changed the blog back to the "simple template" for the time being. I've been having problems previewing my blog entries, and other problems viewing my blog too. While a workaround has been developed , I'd rather not muck around with deep internals like that. Therefore, I've gone back to the "simple template" for a while. Edit: Turns out the dynamic templates are always active even if they're not the default. If you'd like to keep using it, I've added a link between the blog's title and the blog entry date.

Usually about this time in October, I head up to Skytop in Zirconia to buy a nice quantity of Granny Smith apples (my favorite). This year I decided to be a little different (and also avoid the crowds) by travelling a few more miles north to Hendersonville to buy apples and take some photos. I've been to Hendersonville many times in the past, but never to their former  depot. This depot appears to be in great condition. A nicely painted old caboose resides an one end. Compare to this 2006 photo by Jon Huemmer at RR Picture Archives : The depot is currently occupied by the Apple Valley Model Railroad Club , and is open for tours a few hours on Saturdays. A neutered crossing gate by the railroad sits near the depot. The railroad between Hendersonville and Flat Rock has been dormant for a while now, and between Flat Rock and Landrum (containing the Saluda Grade ) since December 2001. A map of area apple orchards showed a cluster of them on U.S. 64 just east of Interstate 26. I headed...

Tom Taylor recently posted an excellent informative blog entry titled  Where Did the Swamp Rabbit Go? , with a link to my blog entry from last winter about tracing the path of the Swamp Rabbit Railroad . Besides resulting in a dramatic spike in page views to my blog entry, he inadvertently reminded me I had imported some of my abandoned railroad maps, including the Swamp Rabbit railroad path map, from Google's old map engine to their shiny new map engine, Google Maps Lite . Below is my map of the Swamp Rabbit railroad's path in the new engine. View a  larger version  of this map or download it in KML format . And an older version of the map using the classic engine: View Abandoned Railroad: Greenville and Northern (Swamp Rabbit) in a larger map Sometime after I imported the map into the new engine, I made a few changes based on another look at the 1920 Greenville-area Sanborn Fire Insurance maps I used as one of my references. The color used by default in the ol...