A quaint little Southern town
Life in Boykin moves slowly, content to build on its past
By Karen Bair The Herald
(Published September 5‚ 2003)
BOYKIN -- In this little village caught in a time warp, the structures and the people are a touch eccentric. Nicely so.
Take Susie Simpson. People from all over the world venture to the circa 1740 former slave quarters where she keeps her shop, The Broom Place. She handmakes brooms on equipment that's more than 100 years old, trying to catch up on her year-and-a-half order backlog while country music meanders from her radio and the company "vice president," Penny the dachshund, snores by the door.
"I been here 20 years and I don't even have a lease," she said. "I guess they're not going to kick me out."
Alice Boykin, town matriarch, pretty much owns Boykin, or at least keeps it all in trust for her children. With a slow drawl and ingrained hospitality, she moved old, abandoned plantation buildings to form a community and created a historic landmark.
She's an ageless belle in a beehive, bustling about the town proper's approximate dozen historic buildings, leading tours, showing folks how Boykin's old water-powered corn and grits mill operates, grinding whole-grain meal as it has been done for 200 years.
Her late husband, Lemuel Whitaker Boykin II, was descended from William Boykin II, who settled here in 1755 and became a wealthy plantation owner. About 200 people live in Boykin, which sits on several thousand of the original Boykin acres. They drop into the town proper occasionally for fried catfish at the turn-of-the-century Boykin Company Grill, housed in a rustic building featuring carved wood posts and old advertising signs. On the weekend they have a fancy dinner at Alice's Mill Pond Restaurant overlooking the pond where mist rose when South Carolina's last Civil War battle was fought there. A rickety wooden bridge that was the original U.S. 521 winds through the panorama of egrets and other wading birds.
Alice's daughter, Alice Belger, runs the Boykin Company Store, located in a turn-of-the-century building filled with Boykin grits and cornmeal, floor to ceiling country merchandise, old storecases and even a late 19th-century post office. Accustomed to curious visitors, she naturally falls into a pose with a sack of Boykin cornmeal when someone produces a camera.
Within a five-minute jaunt of the "downtown" is the community church, Swift Creek Baptist, founded in 1783 by Richard Furman. The current 1827 building, a two-story Greek Revival structure, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It was restored with help from the S.C. Department of History and Archives.
Jimmie Moore, a Boykin farm hand for about 50 years, helps keep things in running order.
Then there's the Boykin spaniel, an equally eccentric but sturdy little dog. It sprang from a stray that reportedly trailed a banker home from a Spartanburg church about 100 years ago. The banker sent the dog to his longtime hunting partner, Whit Boykin, who converted the mutt known as "Dumpy" into a prize turkey dog and waterfowl retriever.
Dumpy became the foundation for the famed Boykin spaniel, the curly brown-coated official state canine called "the dog that doesn't rock the boat." It's small, compact and rugged, built for boat travel and able to retrieve on land and in water. It's also a loyal family dog that likes to live in the house and sleep with its master.
Boykin's leading ladies
Alice Boykin, called Miss Alice by folks here, emphasizes history on her tours, pointing to a monument near the grist mill. It was erected in 1995 by the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, originally a black regiment. It commemorates all who died in the Battle of Boykin Mill in 1865, when 2,500 Union troops outnumbered the Confederates five to one. The last Federal officer killed in the Civil War died here. Among slain Confederates was Burwell Boykin, a 15-year-old volunteer with the S.C. Home Guard who fought in defense of his home.
Combining the original post office and the old store to form the Mill Pond Restaurant, Miss Alice then used material blown asunder during Hurricane Hugo to construct the dining room. It's casually chic with open beams and a glass wall overlooking the pond. Shrimp and grits is the signature dish, but the chef also prepares loftier cuisine.
She beams with special pride when showing off the church and Rosalie's Cottage, a restored former tenant's house with a wrap-around porch.
"They stopped having services in 1930," she said of the simple, elegant church. "We have lots of weddings here now. Rosalie's Cottage is a reception hall."
But she seems most proud of the Christmas parade. It begins with a "road-kill barbecue" and ends with a gospel sing in the church. She swears thousands of people arrive for it.
"Just about anybody can be in the parade," she boasts. "You just have to say you want to be in it."
She relies on Simpson to hold her own with visitors at The Broom Place. Simpson arrived from Asheville, N.C., where she graduated from college and "didn't like being stuck to a desk." She found a newspaper ad placed by an elderly woman who wanted to rid herself of antique broom-making equipment. The woman promised to teach the new owner to make brooms with it.
"I fell for it," Simpson said with a chuckle. "I set everything up, and when I went to get her, she admitted she didn't know how to use it. She was the bookkeeper for the broom factory at the Biltmore Estate in the '20s. They closed up and paid her with the equipment."
It was made before electricity was invented, with a kick wheel that the resourceful Simpson replaced with a small motor. Then she taught herself.
"I learned by taking brooms apart," she said.
She began going to craft shows, bought a list of gift shops and sold the brooms wholesale while discovering what people wanted to buy.
"Everywhere I go, I'm looking at brooms," she explained. "I have to say, I've never seen a broom besides mine that was all number one grade hurl. I still use a broom I made 15 years ago. That top-grade stuff makes all the difference."
She buys processed Mexican straw imported by a Texas supplier. Once a farm in Asheville tried producing broom straw for her.
"I didn't have the heart to tell them it doesn't grow well here," she said. "I had 2,000 toothpicks."
It takes about an hour-and-a-half to concoct one broom. She boils the dye for colored brooms in a kettle behind the store and handcarves handles for her hearth brooms. "I pretty much do everything but grow the broom corn," she said.
Her brooms are now in 50 states and 24 countries. Colonial Williamsburg bought her brooms by the bundle early on and helped build the business. The living history museum recommended her brooms to the national bicentennial committee, which selected them for an Americana exhibit and sent them on an international tour.
Movie companies have bought her brooms. A Washington dignitary also purchased them in lots as gifts and told her she'd "be surprised where they are now."
But the most fun of all? "I like to cut up with people who come in," she said. "These people came in from Scotland. He had a little plaid hat. I like their sense of humor. A couple of women from England came in here and said I was on their 'tellie.' It was an ETV show."
Her favorite story concerns three Japanese women, all less than 5 feet tall in comparison to her strapping frame; the grandmother wore a kimono.
"Every time I said something she would bow," she marveled. "Pretty soon, I was doing it, too. I felt after awhile like I was in a Chevy Chase movie. I thought, 'When does this stop?' Finally they left."
Those who find their way to Boykin are apt to come across farmers, hunters, the horsey set off on a fox hunt, Camden antique shoppers, folks from the British Isles and visitors from Japan. Miss Alice, Simpson and the others will be there.
They know what others stumbling upon this little stop discover. The town, the people, even the dog, have something in common: character.
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