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How Chester Worked: Downtown Merchants, South Carolina

As told by Givari Barber, Keycia Fourney, Meg Garner, Alana Hawkins, Hope Thompson
Chester, South Carolina

Story Narrative:

When the mills were prosperous, downtown Chester, S.C. was alive with activity. Laura Oliphant, who grew up in Chester, recalls some of the merchants and shops that she and her parents frequented. George Caldwell worked in the Efird's Department store, a department store chain which was later bought out by Belk's. Alex Oliphant worked in his parents' cotton warehouses and he also remembers a lively downtown.

Laura Oliphant (00:24): Downtown was bustling. There were plenty of things to do. There was a belt store on the hill. My mother and I would walk up the hill past the laundry. We would go to the Belk's. There was a fabric section and patterns and I liked to sew, so we would go up there and I would get material, take it back home, buttons, zippers, so forth. Take them back home, make an outfit and wear it to school the next day. Then just on down from Belk's, where the summit is today, there was a drug store, and the drug store had the most wonderful lunch counter. And my mother and I would go and eat there. And we would walk in and it was a real drug store with an apothecary on the wall where they had all of the jars of pills and elixirs and so forth. And they had, I believe they had a counter, a lunch counter, but we always sat at the tables.

Laura Oliphant (01:29): And they would bring us a plate about this big and it would have a napkin on it, and we would get, for example, a ham or maybe a cheese sandwich, and they would be flat. They were always the same flat cut like this on the diagonal with a pickle on top. It was wonderful. Just a little bit further, my grandmother, my two aunts, and my mother went to a beauty shop called Rachel's Beauty Shop. That was wonderful, because you know how much fun it is to go to the beauty shop when you're little with your mom or your grandmother. And they had machines that you'd never seen. They were like something out of a science fiction movie. You would look at it and go, "What is that?" But it was like a big hood and it had pieces of wire coming down, and that's what they would actually do perms with.

Laura Oliphant (02:21): On down the street across the street was a place called The Hub, and it was truly a hub. It was the place for men to go to be well-dressed. And a man named Dean [Gurdin 00:02:36] owned the store. Everyone called him Brother Dean, and everybody that came in the store was brother. My daddy was Brother Dallas. And my mother was Mrs. Dallas. And I was, I guess, Little Dallas, because Dallas was my father's name. And we would go there and he would always throw in a tie or a pair of socks or something, which was excellent marketing but it wasn't marketing, it was real, it was genuine. It was because he wanted you to be a good customer and a happy customer, but he had everything downstairs. He had the overalls and the denim things for the farmers. Upstairs, he had the suits and ties and socks. People would come, men would come from Charlotte, York, Rock Hill, Greenville, everywhere to come to Brother Dean's.

George Caldwell (03:32): When I was in, I want to say up in high school, somewhere along in there, very early, in my teenage years or earlier, I worked at [inaudible 00:03:41] Department Store. It was a change store. And at the time I was there it was 55 cents an hour. Sounds sound like much, but in that era, 55 cents was probably as much the $7, whatever it is, minimum wage is now, close to it.

Alex Oliphant (04:13): My family, historically, they were cotton merchants and fertilizer dealers, and they had a fertilizer plant. They had cotton warehouses. They were brokers. They'd buy and sell cotton. And at the time, up until I was probably [inaudible 00:04:36] cotton, until the '60s, late '60s or '70s, cotton was king, and everybody, so many around here, were cotton farmers, and my family would buy the cotton from the farmer and then sell it to the mill. But I think in the '70s that changed the way that the mills were buying cotton. And so pretty much killed all the local cotton brokers and the whole business changed. And then so many people went out of farming, '60s, '70s, and farming changed. Around here, there wasn't a lot of farming for cotton. There is a little bit left, but, I mean, there might be 2000 acres or 3000 acres being grown in Chester County right now when 50 years ago there was probably 50,000 acres or something, et cetera. So all that changed.


Asset ID: 2017.01
Themes: Crossroads, small towns, agriculture, farming, downtown, industry, business, shops
Date recorded: 2017
Length of recording: 6:00 m
Related traveling exhibition: The Way We Worked
Sponsor or affiliated organization: City of Chester and Chester High School, South Carolina
More information: https://museumonmainstreet.org/content/how-chester-worked-my-first-job-south-carolinahttps://museumonmainstreet.org/content/how-chester-worked-cotton-hogs-and-dairy-south-carolina

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