CEDAR MOUNTAIN NEWS FOR THURSDAY APRIL 30, 2020

CEDAR MOUNTAIN COMMUNITY CENTER

The center is closed until further notice. We are looking at June for our first potluck.

HELP OFFERED

John Wiseman and Kim Coram have offered to make sure that if anyone in Cedar Mountain is in need food or conversation to call them at home 828-966-5367. With schools out we are concerned that some local children may be going hungry, especially on the weekends. We are concerned about those who are laid off too. We want to help those in need in our community.

FAITH CHAPEL

To Our Fellow Parishioners,

We hope all of you are healthy and safe given the recent events with COVID-19. This whole situation has caused us to prayerfully contemplate our path forward for this season. Top of mind has been the health of each of you as members of our parish balanced with the needs to join together in faithful worship. This is an evolving situation which could change over time and we met today to plot an initial path forward. Due to the uncertainty right now, we have decided to take the following steps:

1. We hope to begin services the weekend of July 5th. That gives us May and June to see what the government and other churches are recommending before we open up. We will meet the second week in June to determine if we can open up and what policies we should put in place to guard everyone’s safety.

2. We will not hold a picnic in July. We are discussing other possibilities in the late summer and we will make a determination later in the summer.

3. We plan to offer Sunday school when we open which is currently planned to start the weekend of July 5th.

4. We will not hold Children’s Church this summer. We felt that given the current circumstances, we would wait until next season to determine how we move forward with that.

5. We do not plan to offer refreshments after the services this season.

We will continue to monitor the situation and we will communicate any changes as they occur.

Our revenues will be down this year, but some of our expenses will go on. All non-profits need your support, and if your budget would allow you to help with a gift to Faith Memorial Chapel, that gift would be gratefully received and prudently used. A gift can be mailed to Faith Memorial Chapel, P. O. Box 10444, Greenville, SC 29603.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your families. Please stay safe and we hope to see you later this summer!

The Board of Trustees

CEDAR MOUNTAIN HISTORY – PATTY STAHL

The Cedar Mountain News column of February 2020 reported that several of the oldest summer homes in Cedar Mountain had suffered break-ins. Columnist Linda Young was happy to report a week later that the thieves had been caught and some of the stolen items were recovered. Unfortunately, this was not the first such occurrence for the summer colony. Below is an account from the May 14, 1912 issue of the Greenville News that describes a break-in and recovery at the summer home of Captain John G. Capers. John G. Capers, 44, was the son of Bishop Ellison Capers. Bishop Capers was a prominent member of the summer community. He built a summer home in the late 1880’s and established Capers Chapel on the old turnpike about a mile from the state line. The July 3, 1907 issue of the Sumter SC Watchman and Southron offers an account of a visit to Bishop Caper’s summer cottage after an illness and mentions the newer cottage. “At the foot of the driveway from Bishop Caper’s home there was erected last year a nice cottage with many modern conveniences, and here it is that Hon. John G. Capers, recently appointed United States Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with his family, spends many weeks.” This is the home that was robbed five years later, is today known as “Hemlocks,” and is still a summer residence. John Capers was a lawyer in Washington, DC at the time and died in 1919 at the age of 53.

Year-round residents George Bishop, John McCrary and Mr. Hunt are named as members of the “rescue party.” George Bishop lived on today’s Haskell Jones Road and later established a boarding house.

John McCrary, son of Volney McCrary, was the postmaster of Cedar Mountain at the time and later listed his occupation as “merchandizing” at the on his WWI draft card. The Cedar Mountain Post Office in 1912 was in the Bishop Store building which stood near the entrance to Haskell Jones Road until its demolition in the 1960s. Both the store and the Bishop residence were located within a mile of the scene of the crime. John Hunt, the owner of a fine Jersey cow, was a Cedar Mountain farmer. He would move to the Greenville area by 1920. This robbery did not involve a broken-down automobile, as in the reporting of the 2020 break-in, and the road taken was not Hwy. 276. The thief and rescuers would have traveled along the old turnpike road that joined the Jones Gap Turnpike across the state line. But our thief did not make it that far.

BOLD ROBBERY AT CEDAR MOUNTAIN The Greenville News May 14, 1912

Submitted by Patricia Stahl

Resident Neighbors Overtake Man Who Purloined Wagon Load of Household Goods From Capt. John Capers’ Summer Home – Man Lodged in Jail at Brevard

Advices from Cedar Mountain, NC report the most open and outrageous larceny of property that has ever occurred from any of the summer cottages at Cedar Mountain. It seems that on Monday or Tuesday of this week, a man by the name of Mitch Lee, with a one-horse wagon, on his way from Brevard, NC to Greenville County, SC, broke into the summer cottage of Captain and Mrs. John G. Capers and took from the house a full one horse wagon load of things, consisting of mattresses, pillows, bolsters, bed clothing, a large box of crockery, cooking utensils and two trunks.

The resident neighbors however, who are ever watchful of the property of their summer visitors, observed this man just as he was leaving the place and quickly organizing a posse, overtook him just before he reached the state line into Greenville County.

George Bishop, John McCrary, Mr. Hunt and others were in the rescue party. They turned him around, unloaded all the things at the store at Cedar Mountain and took Lee at once to Brevard, where he is now safely landed in jail awaiting the next term of the court on a charge of grand larceny.

The summer settlement of visitors at Cedar Mountain, composed mostly of people from Charleston, Aiken and Greenville have suffered very little from such conduct, although the settlement has existed for twenty-five years, having been started by the late T.C. Gower, Bishop Ellison Capers and Messrs. Means and Harper of Greenville.

Like the present case, when such things have occurred, but never in such a wholesale fashion, it has been the result of the work of campers or of people passing through the settlement. The native people of Cedar Mountain are not only noted for their strict honesty but are ever watchful and ready to seize and arrest anyone who attempts to break into the property of their summer neighbors.

It would seem that it is a bad business for strangers to attempt such things in Cedar Mountain.

AROUND THE HOUSE by Linda Young

MAY DAY

May Day is May 1st and is a day to celebrate spring. We’re (about) halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice! It’s one of the Celtic cross-quarter days, which celebrated the midway points between all solstices and equinoxes of the year.

May Day was always a fun day when I was a kid. My mother would spend hours making May baskets on her treadle sewing machine. Then the little baskets were filled with goodies and distributed to neighbor kids. You were supposed to sit the basket at the front door, knock on the door and run. The kids in the house would run after you and kiss you if you couldn’t run fast enough. There were a couple of older boys nearby whom we didn’t particularly like but mom made us take them baskets anyway. We always got kissed because we couldn’t out run them. Yuck.

DEAD BIRD?

I came out on my porch to see a Gold Finch lying on the floor with my cat closely watching it. It fluttered a bit but then lay still. I thought that my cat had caught it and that it was dying. It lay in my hand and twitching slightly. Its eyes were closed and it was gasping. I thought it was nearly dead. I gave it bird CPR (if there is such a thing) by rapidly tapping it on its breast. Its breathing seemed to get a little better and then I noticed its eyes were open wider and it blinked. It was watching me. So I don’t know whether I “saved” it or it was playing dead. I finally hid it in some tall grass and left it alone. When I went to check on it, the little faker was gone. I don’t know if I am a sucker or a hero. Just glad it survived.

Thank you for reading The Cedar Mountain News. Your contributions are encouraged and welcome. We’d like to hear what’s going on if you would like to share. Please email your news or any questions to cedarmountainnews@gmail.com by Monday evening.

Take care of yourselves