LYDIA HAD ITS HEYDAY IN THE EARLY 1900’S

From an article in the Darlington County Tribune-Bicentennial Edition

Time was when Lydia, an eye-blink community on US 15 southwest of Hartsville, was an up-and-coming place.

“We had a nice little town,” recalls businessman Gay Bass, one of the few local boys who stayed home and made a go of it. “When I was growing up here during the 1920’s we had a bank, drugstore, three or four stores and a jail house. That was back when the railroad still came through here.”

Bass, since 1954 proprietor of Bass Furniture in Lydia, believes that the advent of the automobile and good roads—most leading elsewhere—started the town’s demise. Then the Depression came along and dealt the deathblow.

“Lydia used to be an incorporated town,” Bass says. “Well, sometime during the Depression the state said all businesses within incorporated towns would have to buy a license. “The license wasn’t too expensive, something like five dollars. But the businessmen in town didn’t want to pay it, so they went about getting the town’s charter revoked so Lydia wouldn’t be incorporated anymore.”

Bass grew up in Lydia and attended school there. He graduated from Lydia High School in 1932 in a class of about 18. The schoolhouse, which sheltered both grammar and high school students, is gone now. Bass thinks the last high school class graduated in 1952. After that, the school lived on as a grammar school, but before too long school consolidation sent Lydia students to Kellytown for their educations.

Schooling wasn’t the only thing that had to be sought elsewhere. “Even when I was growing up here, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in Lydia,” Bass recalls. “You had to go somewhere else to go to a movie, for instance.” Bass spent his boyhood doing what boys in small town everywhere do. “We fished and hunted and played baseball. Some of the boys used to go swimming over at Marco’s grist mill in the pond or the mill race,” he says.

The mill’s owner, a Jewish man who also owned a dry goods store in Lydia, has disappeared. Bass remembers that the mill wheel was the type that was submerged sideways under the water, not the picturesque upright wheel you see in nostalgic paintings.

“Probably it was run that way to take advantage of the current of the stream,” says Bass. “You seem to see those upright wheels in hilly country, and the land around here is pretty flat.”

Lydia first became known as Lydia when a post office was established in the community. According to Watson Pitts, who lives in the same house in Lydia where he was born in 1907, the town was named after the Biblical woman Lydia, a seller of purple.

“The story goes,” says Pitts, “that a man from Lamar came over there and wanted to open a post office in the community. If there was going to be a post office, the community had to have a name. “So he asked a farmer plowing his fields what he wanted to name the town. The farmer, [O.D. Lee] who was also a lay preacher of some note, stopped and thought a minute and then said he wanted the town named Lydia.”

Pitts, who is a member of the Darlington County Historical Society, says he has looked the name Lydia up in a world atlas. He’s convinced that it’s the only town called Lydia in the entire world. Pitts thinks the town of Lydia was incorporated sometime around the date that the Seaboard Railroad came through, probably prior to 1912. The railway carried passengers and freight from Hartsville to Bishopville or Sumter. The railroad established a depot, which spawned a cotton warehouse and other businesses.

During the town’s heyday crime became so rampant that Lydia had to hire a policeman. That’s right—just one. Lydia no longer needs a policeman, but the brick building that served as a jail still stands anonymously on a street near the railroad tracks.

The State of South Carolina granted a charter to the Bank of Lydia on September 12, 1912. The bank burned long ago, but its concrete vault stands a forlorn sentinel in an otherwise empty weed-choked field.

“They couldn’t destroy that vault,” says Pitts. “After the bank burned down, that vault was still there. Even a modern bulldozer couldn’t push it over.”

A blank check from the
Bank of Lydia

Pitts’ father was a doctor who moved to Lydia from Lamar in 1905. He traveled around Lydia making his sick calls in a horse-drawn buggy: that is, until he bought a car from the Lydia automobile dealership. It was a Mitchell. Unfortunately, the auto dealership has gone the way of the cars it used to sell.

The Lydia area has probably been populated and farmed since around the time of the American Revolution, but it was the establishment of an area church that first gave the people living there a sense of community.

The gully Meeting House, now surviving as Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church, was established in Lydia in 1789. The Gully church was built on the old Gully Campground, logically named because it was located in a gully. Today Wesley Chapel is the oldest Methodist church in Darlington County.

Then Mt. Elon Baptist Church was organized in 1831 and has served Lydia ever since.

Although Lydia has ceased to exist as an incorporated town, there’s still a business district. Several stores and a thriving restaurant make up the business section, which is now located on Highway 15 to take advantage of traffic driving through.

And the people of Lydia don’t seem to care that their community hasn’t grown. It’s quiet and peaceful, and Gay Bass can walk to the garage next door without worrying that an avalanche of customers will descend on his store to demand service all at the same time.

It’s a fact of life that small boys like Gay Bass and Watson Pitts grow up. It’s an equal fact of life that, sometimes, small towns don’t.

The End

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