Fort Mill hasn’t seen the likes of this since James Withers’ beard

We’re all trained in urgency. Car dealership commercials. Interest rates. Marriage. Every deal a life-altering one, just one chance to get it.

Only if we act now.

So of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone by the fifth or 15th time I heard about this Once in a Lifetime event. Is it? Is it?

We’ve all heard plenty about this solar eclipse coming up Monday. The path of totality. Degrees of coverage. Approved glasses to watch it. Evidently it’s a big deal in South Carolina. Major cities will go utterly light-less. People will flock. Hotels are booked, traffic ensured.

It’s certainly a Once in a Lifetime buildup. But I need data.

NASA, which carries an interest in such matters, tracks every total solar eclipse to darken American soil dating back to 1851. And forward to at least 2100. In that span, only six were or will be visible from South Carolina.

One swept across the Carolinas border in August 1869. Back when the good people of Fort Mill were more likely to see the shaded sunbeams coming than to know which state they were in — the line has been clarified since — or even that they were good people of Fort Mill.

The town wasn't incorporated until 1873.

It would be almost a dozen years after that first eclipse before Fort Mill showed up on a federal census. And there weren’t 300 people here, then. That early eclipse happened so far back, about half of the 13 Fort Mill homes and structures now listed on the National Register of Historic Places did not yet exist.

In May 1900 the Fort Mill area got its most direct hit by the solar screening. A total eclipse foreshadowed I-77, running roughly from Columbia up through York County. Anyone likening it to the interstate might’ve been deemed a test case for Prohibition, still 20 years coming. Ford Motor Company wouldn’t produce its Model T until eight years after the eclipse. Interstates wouldn’t exist for another half century.

Not that Fort Mill would’ve needed a second lane. The town had 1,394 residents in 1900. About the same number of people who live here now — under the age of 5.

It’s not even clear who the mayor was back in 1900, though it may have been James A. Withers. Inarguably the most prodigious beard in Fort Mill’s political past (how the South Carolina Strawberry Festival goes off each spring without a James A. Withers Memorial Beard Growing Bonanza is beyond me) took office in 1887. A great, ominous en dash proceeds the date.

Leaving one to shutter at what may have befallen the man or mayoral run at a time when flu, diptheria, tuberculosis and, well, more than one form of passenger travel were wiping people out at far since declined rates.

Maybe it was enough even to scare off the sun, which wouldn’t get in line for another in-state total eclipse until the vastly more modern year of 1970. Nixon. Vietnam. Apollo 13 and postal strikes, the Chevy Vega and Ford Pinto. Bell-bottoms. When the television channels were few and the price of gas was, for the first time on our little stroll down memory lane here, relevant.

Mayor Lunsford McFadden began his third of what would be nine years leading the town. Heritage USA wouldn’t show up for eight more years. Anyone wanting to join the 4,505 town residents could buy a home for...you may want to sit down. The median home price was $10,500. Or for the temporally inclined, the average rent was $47 a month.

Now we’re getting at the Once in a Lifetime question. I take a quick peek around the office. Without risking my Southern gentleman status and actually asking, I’m ballparking that a half dozen or more of us here weren’t alive in 1970. So if nothing else we’re looking at Once in a Lifetime, so far.

Then, like a total eclipse itself, the question of whether Monday’s event truly is Once in a Lifetime goes dark. In March 2052 another will glance the southernmost tip of South Carolina. In May 2078 one will cover just about the whole state.

I may be able to squeeze out another 35 years, but the odds of me eying the sky from some beachfront retirement vista aren’t great. So unless my septuagenarian self is up for a road trip, I’ll have to wait until 2078. There aren’t enough holistic gurus and organic leaf smoothies on the planet to get me to 2078.

Once in a Lifetime, it is.

Two minutes we’ll either bask in or let slip idly by. Two minutes we won’t get back either way. Same as any other two trips around the clock but, maybe, with a little better idea just how rare they all are.

This story was originally published August 15, 2017 at 12:20 PM with the headline "Fort Mill hasn’t seen the likes of this since James Withers’ beard."