Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Author Drew Hines to discuss history, customs of area

 

TRYON—The Tryon History Museum will present the latest installment in its Tales of Tryon series on Thursday, September 26, at the Holy Cross Parish Hall. The program will feature Drew Hines, a retired upstate minister, Tryon Daily Bulletin columnist, and author of 2024’s Hidden History of the Dark Corner. 

Where is the Dark Corner? How did it get its name? What is it best known for? Hines will answer these questions and many others.

The Dark Corner lies altogether in South Carolina—northeastern Greenville County, to be exact, centered around Hogback and Glassy Mountains—but Tryon Township forms part of its northern border.  

In his book, Hines relates that there was a time when few wanted to admit to being Dark Corner inhabitants, so a wary resident’s likely response to where it was located would be, “Just a little further up the road.”

The roads were few and far between until after World War I. The area was being settled by Europeans as early as the Revolutionary era, but it remained remote and sparsely populated well into the 20th Century,

The Dark Corner name has been around for a long time. Maybe 160 years, maybe 190, depending on whom you ask. A Greenville resident, lamenting the area’s lack of support for the Confederate cause, wrote in the Civil War’s early days, “Few Dark Corner men have volunteered,” but “It is to be hoped that some light will break upon their darkness.”

South Carolina governor Benjamin Perry claimed that the phrase had first been applied 30 years earlier in the wake of the Tariff of 1832. South Carolinians, largely dependent on a plantation economy that forced the importation of most manufactured goods, feared they would pay a disproportionate share of the tariffs. So, they enacted legislation, declaring the federal law null and void within their state’s sovereign boundaries.

“Not so fast,” replied the poor but fiercely independent mountaineers who proceeded to cast exactly one vote for the Nullification ticket in the 1832 legislative election and 170 for the opposing Union slate. According to Perry, this angered the Nullifiers, who termed the area a “Dark Corner” in which the light of nullification couldn’t shine.

As can be seen, these uplanders were earning a reputation for resisting outside interference. This reputation extended to being prone to violence when others didn’t mind their own business. The “others” were often federal revenue agents. Many cashed-strapped mountain farmers, realizing that a 60-cent bushel of corn could yield five to ten times that amount when converted to whiskey, considered it their God-given right to operate tax-exempt distilleries in the isolated hills and hollers, which some of them did as least as late as the 1950s.

Dark Corner’s history, customs, and traditions extend far beyond a reputation for isolation and independence, moonshine and mayhem. Hines has a broad knowledge of Dark Corner music, medicines, churches and religion, wedding and funeral customs, pottery making, and farming to share. 

Doors will open on Thursday, the 26th, at 4 p.m. for refreshments and 5 p.m. for the program, with Drew Hines taking us “further up the road.” Tales of Tryon is made possible through the generosity of the Polk County Community Foundation.

 

Submitted by Dick Callaway