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

Allen School In common with the rest of the south, the black and white children in Greenville County schools once went to separate schools under the " separate but equal " doctrine.  That changed in 1970 when Greenville County Schools began court ordered integration. The all-white schools ceased to be all-white, and the all-black schools were closed (with a few exceptions). Yesterday I visited two of these former schools inside the city of Greenville. Update 1/30/2016: Allen School has been torn down. Allen School is situated on Cemetery Street near Richland Cemetery . According to a history of the school, this school was built in 1936 with funding from the WPA. Allen School came to my attention when looking for information about Sterling High. A Google search result returned a link to a book about Greenville County from the Black America series. While reading about Sterling High from the preview, I read over the rest of the chapter and found out about Allen School. This ...

Today I took a quick tour of two historic places near each other in Greenville, Herdklotz Park off Beverly Road , and Lawkin's Sawmill off Graves Drive . Today I made a quick tour of two historic places near Greenville. First was  Herdklotz Park ,  located off of Beverly Road . I've been here before several times, but never before with my camera. I knew the place used to be the site of a tuberculosis hospital, but this helpful sign fills provides more details: In 1930, Hopewell Hospital was built to care for tuberculosis patients. The hospital closed in the early 1970s, becoming a correctional facility which also eventually closed. Most of the hospital burned down in 2001. Herdklotz Park opened on this site in 2007 with a granite memorial commemorating the site's past, and the original boiler room preserved but sealed behind the masonry. While I was there, I also walked the short loop trails. The picnic shelter was busy with a get together of some sort. I also took a few m...

I've been a user of Google's map making services from it's now retired Classic My Maps  to Google Maps Engine Lite, now renamed to My Maps . Their service is mostly fine for my meager needs, but some features seemed either incomplete or artificially crippled to get you to upgrade to their paid version. Quite by chance, I found uMap . uMap is software that lets you create a layered map, with an OpenStreetMap map as the background layer, and embed the map on your website. I had to try it! The wiki for umap lists several sites hosting the software. I picked the first one one the list,  http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/ . The home page (as of the posting date) should look something like this screenshot from Google Chrome: You can create maps without creating an account, but if you lose the special edit link you are SOL. I opted to create an account. To do this, I chose the "Log In / Sign In" button at the top of the page. A window appeared on the right hand side with a c...