Betsy Wakefield Teter – författare

New neighborhoods began emerging north of Main Street in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1870s as emancipated Black men and women spent their hard-won post-slavery wages to purchase lots and build homes. As the decades rolled by, they and their descendants established a string of neighborhoods encompassing hundreds of houses, stretching from modern-day Barnet Park to the edge of Spartanburg Medical Center.North of Main is the story of how this district rose and how it disappeared. In its pages, meet the pioneering Black men and women who lived and worked in these early neighborhoods: clergymen, educators, newsmen, artisans, attorneys, physicians, activists, musicians, caregivers, and more. In the face of frequent oppression, they laid a strong foundation for those who followed them. The history of the place they built is extraordinary in its demonstration of the heroism, courage, determination, and pride of Black citizens of Spartanburg who built dynamic and historically significant neighborhoods in treacherous times.This title is the most in-depth Spartanburg Black history book ever produced, particularly for the years post-emancipation, and a sequel to the classic 2005 Hub City Press book, South of Main. This beautiful 250-page hardcover book also includes over 150 historic photographs and maps.

Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, this historical account captures a South Carolina county’s most violent decade—a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents.llustrated with dozens of photographs, A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg delves into the exploits of a crooked local attorney who became one of the nation’s most slippery con men, the controversial hanging of a teenaged girl, and the bedlam unleashed when a governor tried to crush the moonshine trade. All this chaos and more unfolds amid Spartanburg’s first economic boom, as cotton mills multiply across the county and the community becomes one of the South’s rising industrial powers, generating many great fortunes.At once a gripping true narrative and richly researched local history, A Carnival of Crime reveals how ambition, corruption, and rapid economic change shaped the region in unexpected ways. The result is a vivid portrait of a community coming of age—where prosperity and violence often advanced side by side, leaving behind stories that still echo more than a century later.

In 1816 a pair of Rhode Island brothers stopped their wagons along the Tyger River, cleared away trees and chinquapin thickets, and began construction on a rustic spinning factory. From those humble beginnings arose one of the nation's mightiest textile communities, a place that by the end of the 19th century became known as "the Lowell of the South." Over the course of nearly two centuries more than 100,000 people labored in the red brick cotton mills and modern textile factories in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Textile Town is their story. One part historical narrative, one part scrapbook, one part encyclopedia, this illustrated volume presents the voices of scholars and blue-collar workers side by side in an exploration of this complex and compelling saga.Working in libraries and mill villages, more than 40 writers and historians-many of them sons, daughters, and grandchildren of textile workers-contributed to this engaging history. Major chapter authors include Katherine Cann, David L. Carlton, Philip Racine, Betsy Wakefield Teter, G.C. Waldrep III, and Jeffrey Willis. Each chapter is infused with factual material and excerpts from primary sources, such as letters, newspaper columns, and diaries. After each chapter, there are profiles of textile leaders and in-depth entries on a variety of subjects, such as mill village music, food, sports, and health issues. There are also plenty of oral histories, some collected with a microphone and others resurrected from long-buried documents. Each chapter ends with the lyrics of a song written about cotton mill life. At the back of the book is a glossary of textile terms and historical entries on 50 different textile businesses that have operated in Spartanburg County since 1816. More than 250 old photographs were collected for this work, representing mills and villages throughout the county.From the great migration from the mountains in the 1880s, to the labor conflict of the 1930s, to the wartime camaraderie of the 1940s and beyond, Textile Town tells a seminal Southern story, one that readers won't soon forget.

Why do writers love dogs? Not always for the same reasons all the rest of us do. Dorothea Benton Frank's dog Henry teaches her about self-righteous indignation every time she leaves on a book tour. Ron Rash learns to appreciate his misanthropic mutt Pepper after he bites his daughter's suitor. For Tommy Hays the dog is something not even a psychic can separate from the family. For some writers, such as Mary Alice Monroe, a Bernese Mountain dog arrives via Swiss Air. For George Singleton, they just wander into his Pickens County yard.The connection between dogs and humans in the geographic region known as South Carolina goes back over 10,000 years. There's even a wild dog in the Lowcountry known as the Carolina Dog, whose ancestors may have accompanied the first Americans across the Bering ice bridge.In Literary Dogs & Their South Carolina Writers twenty-five of the Palmetto State's most beloved authors introduce you to their most memorable dogs. There is Padgett Powell's "Ode to Spode," Josephine Humphreys' paean to a poodle, and Roger Pinckney’s Daufuskie Dog-ageddon. Meet Marshall Chapman's Impy, Mindy Friddle's Otto, Beth Webb Hart's Bo Peep, and more. From bird dogs to bad dogs, wild dogs to café dogs, get to know these canines and their literary companions.