Pictured is my late Grandma Fowler's house, which has been demolished.
It didn’t seem right when they tore down my late Grandma Fowler’s house.
Her one-story, white-shingled, “three small bedrooms and one bath” home stood since the early 1950s until 2009 on a corner lot at 2543 Locust Hill Road (Hwy. 290) and McElhaney Road in Taylors, S.C.
My Fowler grandparents had nine children, and I am one of 16 first cousins on “that side.” I loved family gatherings at Grandma’s. Surrounded by a Christmas crowd, Uncle Wyatt would sit in Grandma’s living room and talk politics. Uncle Jim and Uncle Ray often responded in loud voices. The house would be filled with laughter and “good to see you” conversations. The roar would cease while someone asked a blessing on the food, and then the noise would resume.
Grandma was a gentle lady who suffered with rheumatoid arthritis and rarely left her house. She limped and wore a built-up shoe for, as I remember, her right foot. When possible, her three daughters – Louise, Eva (my mother) and Edna – gathered at Grandma’s on Tuesdays. As Grandma grew older and heavier, the three daughters helped her shower during Tuesday visits. I recall seeing Grandma sitting and combing her freshly-washed, long gray-white hair after one of those baths.
My parents both worked during part of my growing up years, and my sister, Shirley, and I spent many summertime hours at Grandma’s “humble abode.” Her home was literally and soulfully a sort of halfway place between Sandy Flat (where I spent childhood years) and Greer (where my family lived while I was a teenager).
The summer after my seventh-grade year, the year I first “took band” at Davenport Junior High, I practiced playing my old trumpet at Grandma’s. She had no air conditioner, so windows were open. Inez Brookshire heard me playing one morning as she worked in her yard across the road. She phoned and asked Grandma if I would play “Amazing Grace” and a couple of other hymns. I was glad to oblige.
The Rev. Ronnie Fleming, a first cousin of mine, and some investors bought Grandma Lilly Nix Fowler’s place after her last surviving child, James A. Fowler, died at age 82 in December 2006. Uncle Jim was the seventh of the nine children born to Lillie and James August “Aug” Fowler. Jim never married, always lived “at home” with his parents and worked in textiles until he retired from Lyman Printing and Finishing mill. After Grandpa died in 1956, Jim looked after Grandma until she died at age 86 in 1978. During his last best years, Jim often parked a used car or two in his front yard and tried to make a sale. If you ever drove by Grandma’s house while he sat on the front porch and watched cars zoom by, you might have seen Jim taking a snooze – head tilted back, mouth open.
Jim stayed at that house until my cousins Raymond and Redmond Fowler (twins) helped him move to an assisted living center about a year before he passed on. He died in his sleep while living at Woodruff Manor.
The investors sold Grandma’s property, and I heard that a dentist office might be built on that site. Earlier this year, I learned from my Uncle Fred Crain that Grandma’s house was no longer “there.”
“Did they move it?” I asked, hoping that it had been located to another property and would serve as a home for someone.
A few of my cousins thought it might have been moved, but my Aunt Frances Crain attended a high school reunion and talked with Palmer Steadman who still lives next door to the property Grandma once owned. Palmer said someone brought a wrecking ball, and Grandma’s house went down. Workers hauled away the rubble.
I visited Greer in July and drove past Grandma’s old property. It had been excavated and prepared for some kind of building. As I moved past the corner lot that once hosted the house where I experienced love and laughter, I thought of the words of Hebrews 13:14: “For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”
Earthly evidences of precious memories may fade or be destroyed, but I thank God for the lasting love of family and friends and for the special eternal love he has expressed to us in Jesus Christ who said, “In my Father's house are many mansions…I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:2-3).
