South Carolina - Day 3 - Clemson and Pendleton

Anderson/Lake Hartwell KOA, Anderson

Wednesday, 3 May 2023

today's route

We did a lot more driving today than it looks like on the map, and it's actually only about 12 miles or so from Clemson and Pendleton (which seem to run together) to the campground.  But we did a lot of errands, which entailed a lot of running around.  We left the campground this morning at 9:30 and didn't get back until 4:15.

We stopped at a grocery store, at a post office, at a recycling dropoff center (they took everything except my non-bottles #1 plastics - yea!), and at a tire store.  I expected the tire guys to say I needed new front tires, after that little mess on the hills of Rome where I spun them out.  But they said no, all my tires looked great and they couldn't see any problems at all.  A far less expensive outcome than I'd prepared myself for.

At the vet's office, they'd told me on the phone to bring the cats at a certain time so there'd be 2 people available to help me (one to hold the cat down, the other to do the nail clipping).  But when I got there, they said nope, only one person was available and did I want to drop them off and come back.  I explained I'd just sit in the parking lot to wait, but after all they'd promised me to do them at this time.  Then the one person said I could hold them down, but when I tried he said I wasn't doing it right.  I did warn them my kids could be terrors, they just didn't believe me.  So to keep from getting shredded himself, he managed to find someone else to help (the someone who hadn't been available I guess), and the claws all got clipped on the kittens and Lily.  They told me Lily weighed 10.6 pounds and the kittens were each 7.9 pounds.  So Jimmy has finally caught up with Bucky.  And it explains why that carrying case felt so very heavy when I tried to take them from the RV into the office - it was 16 pounds of kitten.

And we went to Clemson University, which has a lovely campus - very Southern looking with lots of magnolias and other trees everywhere.  I'd read that the most famous building on campus is a large brick building (Tillman Hall) with a clock tower and a statue of Mr. Clemson in front, so I decided to go there.  The tower has a full carillon that plays several times a day, and I was hoping to hear it.  (I didn't.)

Google gave me directions right to the front door, as it often does, and I didn't realize until I was already in the driveway that (a) it was a very narrow road and (b) it went nowhere except to make a tight turn around the Clemson statue and go back out the narrow drive and (c) there was absolutely no place even to stop, let alone park.  So I didn't get any photos of my own, but here's what I found on the internet.

Tillman Hall, with the Clemson statue barely visible
in the median

A closer view of the statue

Interesting side note on the name of that building.  Ben Tillman, the man honored by the naming, was a well-known white supremacist who led a group of Red Shirts (a white supremacist paramilitary group in the late 1800s) and who, on the floor of the US Senate (he'd been elected to the Senate after serving as SC's governor) defended lynching.  

In recent years, especially since the death of George Floyd, people have recognized that this person no longer reflects the ideals of Clemson University.  The school's Board of Regents agreed to petition the state legislature for permission to change the building's name back to its original name, Old Main.  Since that vote, the school has taken no action.  The local TV station did some investigative reporting and came up with a lot of equivocating from the Board.  Indicating South Carolina's progress toward the 21st century is even slower than mine.

I still wanted to find a place to park so Dext could have a walk, and we finally found a road leading to residential hall parking.  The lot was crowded but I didn't intend to stay very long and hoped nobody official would notice us (we stuck out like a sore thumb in the sea of students' cars).  One of the license plates there was for the Bahamas.

Dexter and I stumbled onto a really nice little trail.

This display was at the entrance to the trail.
Plaque enlarged below right.

I'd never heard of this memorial march, but it's been an annual event
in White Sands, NM, since 1989.

Altogether, I guess we spent a couple of hours around the Clemson campus, and I had ample opportunity to size up the current student population.  And the main thing I noticed was that nothing much has changed, except the styles.  All but one of the girls had long hair, and all but 2 wore short shorts and long baggy tops.  Most of the guys and about half the girls carried backpacks.  Most of the guys were clean-shaven.  Not really similar to the campus look I remember from, say, 1971.  Otherwise, they all seemed to be doing about the same things we were 50 years ago (except no anti-Vietnam war demonstrations).  Of course, it was a pretty day in early May, so the kids might well have after-the-semester plans on their minds - or just, how to enjoy the nice weather.  A much more laid-back energy level than I've seen at other campuses around the country.

I wondered if this were an expensive place to go to school and learned it's a public, land-grant college and the tuition and fees are very similar to those at the University of Texas/Austin.

On the drive to and from Anderson, we crossed Six & Twenty Creek, and Three & Twenty Creek.  That's how they write those creek names on highway signs.  And I just could not find anybody who would tell me where the names came from.  South Carolina has other similar names, such as Twelve Mile River, Mile Creek, and the town of Six Mile.  Ninety Six is the name of both an old town and a national historic site, commemorating one of the first battles in the Revolutionary War to be fought outside of New England.  The Wikipedia page for this historic site struggled to come up with explanations for the town's name, and then sounded like it threw up its hands.