Houck’s Gin, Cameron, S.C., dismantled February, 2018
All prima facie evidence of my family’s agriculture history is now gone.
My grandfather, Bernard “B.C.” McCollough Houck, was one of eleven children. Born in 1900, he died as a young man at the age of 52. I barely remember him; I called him “Mr. C.”; I would have been two. The impressionable occasion was when he took me to the carnival rides at the Waynesville Township High School parking lots – only a short walk from our home on Clifton Street in Waynesville, N.C. What two year-old wouldn’t remember that?!
He and his wife Vera, “Aunt Vera” to locals and kin raised two children, my mom being one and a son, Louis, who inherited most of the farm. Louis did not do well with his inheritance nor the daily business of running things. “A really nice guy” as others would tell you, from what I have learned, probably “too nice” as he forgave many debts or simply forgot about them.
Alcohol came into the picture and he was no longer able to keep his family and marriage together. Neither was he able to sustain relationships with the only family he had left – his mother and his sister. He had two children, a son and a daughter, the son passed away from natural causes. The daughter is still alive from last known information and has never married.
My mom, “Mib” was my connection to “The Houck Family”, and as my sister Philan and I unraveled her estate and connections in South Carolina, we came to understand how much she was revered by locals and kin. We could not have had a more perfect mom. The community where she was raised could not have had a more perfect daughter.
My mom would have been very much raised on the farm, a Calhoun County epicenter of commodity crop production (corn and cotton), and a “cotton gin” to refine the hundreds of acres of raw cotton which was still being grown and harvested by hand.
The cotton gin, built in the early 30’s, is now gone — having been dismantled by a not-Houck farm family to have the real estate to accommodate the wide turn a new irrigation pivot.
The only vestige now is a sign out at Old State Road which still references something that once was – Houck’s Gin.
