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A few days ago, a group of us Saluda Community Land Trust volunteers spent a morning cleaning up trash that washed down the streams during Hurricane Helene. The men worked at pulling out the big, heavy debris from the big creek, stuff like washing machines and tires from the trailer park upstream, and I picked up little stuff along the small branch just below the spring. 

We were working in what was Saluda’s Black neighborhood of the past. Most of those residents had moved out by the 1950s to places where they could find work and their children could go to school (Saluda had no school for Black children until NC mandated integration in the late 1960s). By the mid-1980s, the Black community was vacant. 

When Allen and I first moved to Saluda in 1979, there were four small houses left, with old women living in two of them. Ten years later, all the houses were empty. The first piece of land purchased by SCLT was one of those lots when it was in foreclosure. A few years later, two lots were purchased out of foreclosure. Because the old houses were falling down, the City of Saluda required that we tear them down, haul off the big stuff, and bury the little debris. That was done. 

Now, one old brick two-room house is left standing, which hopefully will be stabilized and restored as a reminder of the history of this small Black community. Its residents cleaned houses, built stone walls and roads, and worked for the railroad to make Saluda a vibrant community.

While the ‘strong men’ volunteer workers were hauling heavy debris out of the large stream at the bottom of the Black neighborhood, I was picking up trash up the hill below the spring that had supplied water to the entire historic neighborhood of nine or more homes. Even though this neighborhood was within the city limits, it never was given city water and sewer services. 

I found all sorts of stuff, from plastic bottles to canning jars and a few liquor bottles. What surprised me was that I was picking up items that had been in one of the houses, stuff that had been buried when we tore the house down years ago, when we hauled off the big stuff and buried the little things. The last person who lived in the house was an old lady named Mary Gillam, a woman who had cleaned houses, cooked, and taken care of the children of a Saluda family all of her life.  I was picking up pieces of pottery, glass, and lace that had been part of her clothing. 

It hit me like a wave – this is a place where a kind old woman lived for her entire life but who has been completely forgotten. And the “trash” that we buried 40 years ago was lying there right in front of me. 

Now I will tell you a short story that brought all my thoughts together. Years ago our son John and I were at a church service at the Iona Abbey in Scotland, put on by a group of university students. The theme of the service was “The truth always comes out.” One student would stand and read a quote by some famous person like Churchill; then the next student would read a quote by Pontius Pilot; then another student would read a quote by Julius Caesar; then there would be a quote by another famous person in history. Then, a student would stand up and read a quote by someone 30 (or 300) years later that completely negated one of the quotes we had heard (and believed) earlier. It went on and on, with later quotes proving that what had been believed earlier was not true. The unforgettable lesson is that “the truth will always come out.” We can try to bury the past, but that will not work forever. The truth will come to the surface, just like that buried trash came to the surface. 

The truth is that in 1930, there were 93 Black residents in Saluda, in a town with less than 500 residents in all. SCLT’s mission is to make a historic walking park through the old Black neighborhood in honor of those hard-working residents, where today’s adults and children can stand in that two-room old house and try to imagine a family living there. It is a memory that won’t be forgotten; it is a memory on the way to wisdom. Our world needs that, for sure.