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My family first moved to Aiken, SC, when I was around 12. I had lived in Germany for nine years since birth (my father was a Green Beret abroad), and then for three years in Chattanooga, TN. I hadn't known so at the time, but my extended family has inhabited the Aiken, SC, area for quite a while—albeit sometimes around Augusta, GA, and other times in Edgefield County, SC.
We first moved into a house that's over 110 years old, located at 818 Edisto Avenue. I headed over there a year ago to see if it was still the same, and to see if I could take a few pictures of the backyard that I remember so well. The current owner is cousin to the chancellor of my University, and he kindly let me poke through my old haunts.
A view of the house from the mouth of the driveway. This is where I would wait for my schoolbus every morning.
The wall running along the outside of the backyard garden.
I recall having buried an overdue library book at the base of one of the trees outside this wall, because I had checked it out long past its due date. I was a new kid in town, and I thought that I would have been severely ostracized if I was caught with the evidence of irresponsibility on my hands.
The interior of the wall surrounding the backyard garden. A large oak used to grow from the charred stump in the foreground.
My sister and I once found a crack pipe and heroin needles in the forest behind our house, right beneath where the wisteria grows in the background.
A shot along the wall, revealing the dense foliage beyond.
The backyard garden was divided into four quadrants.
One of the quadrants' primarily featured the goldfish pond featured above.
I used to sit beside the water and read Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) many times over.
"You who so plod amid serious things that you feel it shame to give yourself up even for a few short moments to mirth and in the land of Fancy; you who think that life hath nought to do with innocent laughter that can harm no one; these pages are not for you." [From the Preface]
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Another quadrant offered a view of the Master Bedroom. The house's architecture is unusual for the area, since most Southern homes utilized standard Georgian architecture rather than the remarkably German designs seen here.
Here is the view just to the right of the Master Bedroom.
The room beyond the upstairs balcony was the playroom for my sister, brother, and me. We kept our NES and sundry toys there.
I recall having believed that the house was haunted by a poltergeist. A baseball once went through the glass panes of the balcony door, and I can't remember now whether the ghost had done it, or if I had blamed it on the ghost.
This is the view a little to the left of the playroom balcony. The dining room sits beyond that wooden door.
The photo quality is a big fuzzy here, but this is the gate leading toward one of the garden quadrants.
It is consumed by moss and ivy, and rosebushes grow alongside both brick pillars.
Here is the second goldfish pond in the final quadrant. It was filled to the brim when I had lived there, and the fountain actually flowed.
Gigantic toads lived there then, but it seems to actually hold large, fleshy goldfish now.
The garden wall curves in a semicircle in the background.
A shot of the fountain with my back to the wall's curvature.
Note: All photographs displayed on this web page are copyrighted to James Clinton Howell. They may not be used for personal or professional purposes without the express consent of their owner.
Web design for Adilegian copyrighted 2006 James Clinton Howell.
