For more than three decades, an old log cabin has sat in a secluded, wooded spot at the back of the Girl Scouts’ Camp Mary Elizabeth on Spartanburg’s westside. Neither the girls who visited it over the years, nor the local preservationists who arranged to have it moved there in 1992, nor the Scout leadership who accepted the gift had any idea of its real significance.
In 2022 Danice Meunier, an amateur historian in Greenville, began looking into the history of the house. Her daughter was a Girl Scout who wanted to take on the repair of the cabin as her Gold Award project. Meunier noticed something interesting in 1960s newspaper clips about the cabin’s original Magnolia Street address. They clearly identified the cabin as the 19th century childhood home of noted Spartanburg educator Mary H. Wright. Wright had grown up there in the 1870s along with her formerly enslaved parents, Lot and Adaline Farrow, and two sisters.
In 1992 the Magnolia Street house had fallen into such disrepair that it was scheduled for demolition by the city. Covered with clapboard and added onto over the years, it had been occupied by renters, then abandoned. White families had lived there much of the 20th century—Mary H. Wright had deeded it to Henry Cleveland in 1904 for cancellation of a mortgage. Without knowing its early history, the cabin’s 1992 owner brought it to the attention of the Spartanburg County Historical Association, which set out to save it, because it appeared to be one of the county’s oldest structures. Tammy Whaley, who served the Girl Scouts at the time, said she recalls hearing nothing about the house’s original owners. Newspaper articles written at the time of the relocation do not mention it.
The virgin pine logs were dismantled carefully over a series of days in June 1992. Inside, the workers found a six-pound cannonball, a 19th century women’s boot, an 1817 coin, and a marble carving of a Bible dated 1871. The logs were hauled to the back of the Girl Scout camp where a crew reconstructed an 18-foot-by-20-foot cabin that resembled the Farrow home, though its flooring, windows, chimney and roof were newly constructed. And there it remains.
This Spotlight is an excerpt from North of Main: Spartanburg's Historic Black Neighborhoods of North Dean Street, Gas Bottom, and Back of the College by Brenda Lee Pryce, Jim Neighbors, and Betsy Wakefield Teter. Copies of the book can be purchased at the Hub City Bookshop or online.
