When I ask the clerk at the Fishing Village Corner Store in Plum Branch where the town got its name, she stares wide-eyed at me and just says, “Something to do with plums?”
She points me down the street—to the old mayor, E.M. Winn. He should know. In his office, “Mac” Winn picks up his landline and dials by heart the number of town councilman and local historian, Marion Sturkey: “Hey, Stinger, what’s up? You real busy?”
Sturkey, fortunately, is not too busy, and he hefts over a five-pound, leather-bound tome he authored--Plum Branch: Heaven in South Carolina. As Sturkey and Winn supply me with fascinating historical tidbits about Plum Branch (a railroad town with one of the oldest Baptist churches, a fancy French-Cajun restaurant called The Plum in the 1980s with clientele pulling up in limousines from Atlanta), I only have to open the book to Chapter One to get my answer.
“In western South Carolina,” Sturkey writes, “several springs and ground-water seeps combine with rainfall drainage and create a small rivulet two miles west of Stevens Creek and five miles east of the Savannah River. The stream would become known as ‘Plum Branch’ because of flowering plum bushes that line its banks.”
She points me down the street—to the old mayor, E.M. Winn. He should know. In his office, “Mac” Winn picks up his landline and dials by heart the number of town councilman and local historian, Marion Sturkey: “Hey, Stinger, what’s up? You real busy?”
Sturkey, fortunately, is not too busy, and he hefts over a five-pound, leather-bound tome he authored--Plum Branch: Heaven in South Carolina. As Sturkey and Winn supply me with fascinating historical tidbits about Plum Branch (a railroad town with one of the oldest Baptist churches, a fancy French-Cajun restaurant called The Plum in the 1980s with clientele pulling up in limousines from Atlanta), I only have to open the book to Chapter One to get my answer.
“In western South Carolina,” Sturkey writes, “several springs and ground-water seeps combine with rainfall drainage and create a small rivulet two miles west of Stevens Creek and five miles east of the Savannah River. The stream would become known as ‘Plum Branch’ because of flowering plum bushes that line its banks.”
