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

It's become a yearly tradition to visit Henderson County, North Carolina to explore the area and return with some apples. This year is no different (duh, or I wouldn't be writing this!). This area is currently in a drought, and recent photos I've seen of low water flow at area waterfalls were discouraging, so this year I chose to visit a few historical sites in the area. I picked some sites from a multi-county historic schools survey report I found during the summer, and some grist mills I found on Panoramio (RIP). I went last Sunday, and considering some of my stops were active schools that day worked out much better than a weekday would have. The first place I visited was the site of Flat Rock High School in Flat Rock, located off highway N.C. 225 and now the mixed use complex recently renamed to  Flat Rock Square . Flat Rock High School was built in 1925 and remained a high school until 1960 when the school became a junior high. On August 18, 1971 a fire set by an arson

Back in August I read about a new website,  open parks network , providing searchable access to digitized records of a number of parks, historic sites, and other areas. This website contains records of a number of South Carolina parks, but the one park I was most interested in was Wildcat Wayside near Cleveland, SC in northern Greenville County. I've been here many times, but I've never seen the original structures when they more than ruins. I came up last Sunday to take another look at the park to find the ruins I already knew about and some I didn't. This infoboard, installed sometime in 2013 or 2014, summarized the history of the park, a 1970s photo of the picnic shelter, and the revised 1940 plan of the park . This infoboard confirmed the information I had found in this 1940 book in PDF format about South Carolina State Parks, produced the Works Progress Administration. Only one page is devoted to the wayside parks (page 42 in the book, page 44 in the PDF) with this su