Winnie Davis, the daughter of Jeff, prominent at Limestone

      Friends I'll be out front with this one, it will be submitted to the Cherokee History and Preservation Society in Gaffney SC where I graduated Elementary School in 1965 and will soon have a brick in my honor on the Commons trail of honorees and patrons.

    I am dedicating this to Becky Spencer Wolfe, Miss Gaffney of 1961 who is stuck in her ways and a true daughter of the Confederacy whether a card carrying member or not. A product of the Redemption of Reconstruction, her views currently on American politics in the correspondence she has had with me the last couple of years is beyong redemption, and her conversations with Sidney Norton and other Gaffney luminaries will not save her.

    I say that in jest but with some sincerity. If the most intellectual of the Class of 1971 of Gaffney High School didnt know who Winnie Davis of the Winnie Davis Hall of History built in 1907 on the campus of Limestone College was named for, the I doubt 95 percent of the natives and current residents of Cherokee County know either. Would be interesting to see how many current trustees of Limestone know.

    That building is part of my dream world, my personal archaeology as I saw it as early as my ninth year, in 1962 when we moved there. As markers go it is there with the historical marker in Hayesville for George W. Truett, the greatest Baptist of the first half of the 20th Century.

   I was Baptized in Hayesville in 1959.

   Winnie Davis is the daughter of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy. I just read the Virginia encyclopedia entry on Winnie and her Mother Varina. It is fascinating.

   Four years ago I read the historical fiction Varina by E L Doctorow. Ive been a fan of Doctorow for some time and loved his The March, about Sherman from Atlanta to NC. Would be a grand three hour movie but would likely cost 100 million, but a scence of the fifty mile long avalanche of people going through South Georgia to freedom through the swamps of low country SC and Columbia and a river of mule carcasses in the Fayetteville NC River would be something.

    But I wonder if Winnie ever came to Gaffney promoting the Lost Cause with her Father. She became the namesake for the Daughters of the Confederacy and Gaffney was chocked full of that mentality in the sixties.

     Great line in the novel Varina. Varina has fled Richmond in a different Party from Jeff Davis and they had agreed to meet again in Florida and possibly flee to the Caribbean. But they were caught in  Georgia. But a few days out by train Varina's party gets to Charlotte. From there in wagons and on horseback they go into the Carolinas heading for Abbeville. About the second day a scouting party from the group go out.

   Reporting back Varina asks to their situation, whereabouts, the lay of the land.

    Fellow Says, : "We're in South Carolina, who knows their standards."

    Here some 170 years later with the likes of Becky Wolfe, I'm still trying to figure it out. Has been a mystery to the likes of Marshall Frady, Joe Crespino, Vernon Burton and many others.