Patterson Plant

Our church shares a parking lot with the Baptist. We also share the softball field that's renown all over Laurens County as the best field under lights. (Softball is extremely important to Southern Baptists...not as much to the Methodist). You can see the softball field from the back of the church...across the pasture. I'm not sure why they picked that spot--it's bad ground.

MaMa is 84 this year but she can still tell us the story about the "bad ground."
Patterson town in 1928 was all cotton fields and tobacco ground. There was a local schoolhouse for the community and several families that lived in the area. The Harmons lived in a big old farmhouse just up the road from the church. They had two children, just a bit older than MaMa, maybe 10 or 12 at the most. One afternoon (after chores we assume, since so many children had to pull their own weight in those trying times) the siblings set out on an adventure in the back pasture. The back pasture is far left field of our softball field now. The two had gone out to find a place to play down in the gulley which was at the very back of the pasture.
There was a small cave in the side of the gulley that a lot of the neighborhood kids knew about and the Harmon's decided they'd stop off there first.
They found the cave late that afternoon and by this time, the folks were getting a little worried. No wait, let me change that, parents back then didn't get "worried" when the kids weren't home in time for supper, they were MAD. These kids had a large belt waiting on them when they strolled into the yard past curfew.
After dark the kids still hadn't returned and the parents began to call on their neighbors. They searched the entire area. The community helped the family search all of the surrounding pastures and barns without a trace. The day passed on and soon a week had gone by with no sign. MaMa recalls her Daddy going up to the Harmon house that last week to check on the family. She said when he came home he didn't talk much, he was real quiet and told Marie (pronounced Ma-Ree) to come into the kitchen. MaMa says that when they finally found out what their Mama and Daddy were talking about, they were too scared to sleep that night.
The Harmons had the sheriff come out to help look for their children and they found some of their toys in the bottom of the gulley. The kids were never found.

Fast forward to 1968...a group of men were clearing land for a new softball field and used the gulley to push off excess dirt. One man standing on the edge of the gulley noticed the way the kudzu had grown up around a small hole in the side of the embankment. Looking a little closer, beneath the kudzu, he could make out a toy in the dirt...an old cast iron car. The other guys came over to investigate and they began to dig into the hole buried under a mountain of kudzu. The Harmon kids had been buried alive when the hole they had found, caved in. They got a proper burial at the Baptist church later that month.

MaMa used to tell us that story before we went down to watch the softball games in the summer. It kept the kids from playing near the gulley on the back side of the field...which always seemed to lear us closer to the edge...we wanted to see the cave...the Harmon kids...something. Most of the time we'd walk out there telling the story and scaring ourselves half to death and then running back to the bleachers under the bright lights where it was safe.

One day I feel so happy, next day I feel so sad
I guess I'll learn to take the good with the bad