Dearly Departed scheduled for March 31 appearance at Lakeside

CONWAY -- The Horry County Historical Society has been planning and negotiating for a year and has arranged for 10 of Conway’s Dearly Departed to materialize March 31 at Lakeside Cemetery.

Still in negotiation is what, if anything, the Historical Society will allow the ghosts to say during their appearances at the Stories in Stone tours that will take place hourly from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. that day. But those who buy tickets can be assured that they will be guided by knowledgeable docents who won’t resort to any other-worldly tricks of disinformation.

“Anything that will be said on this tour you can take to the bank,” said Shirley Johnson of the Historical Society. “We want future generations to have as accurate information as we can get them.”

Cephas Perry Quattlebaum, Conway’s first mayor, will be among the Dearly Departed on the tours, as will Franklin Gorham Burroughs, founder of Burroughs and Chapin, and his wife, Adeline Cooper Burroughs, who gave Myrtle Beach its name and donated the family’s cemetery land to become the city-owned Lakeside.

It is not known if any of the Dearly Departed will, or even can, wander over to the Society’s historic Bryan House where the other two parts of the organization’s March 31 tripleheader are to be staged.

The early 1900s house is open for tours that day – at $5 per person – and the Society will sell back copies of its Independent Republic Quarterly and other items on the wraparound porch. Refreshments will be served in the Carriage House on the grounds.

There is no charge for those, including Dearly Departed, who just want to hang out on the porch or in the Carriage House, although the refreshments will carry a nominal charge, Johnson said. The Society hopes to clear a few thousand from the day’s activities, she said.

“As many people as can stand in the yard,” she said, “we’ll take them. Oh yeah, come on.”

The Lakeside Cemetery tours cost $20 a head and will start and end in the Kingston Street parking lot by the Ocean Fish Market. Johnson said drivers of the vans transporting people to and from the cemetery will entertain passengers with general historic information about Conway during the short drive.

Historical Society officials decided which of the cemetery’s Dearly Departed it would let appear after plotting the gravesites of the 10 founding members of the Peter Horry Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and 19 Confederate veterans buried in the cemetery, Johnson said. All will be marked with flags for the tour.

With that information, the Society could then space the Dearly Departed at appropriate intervals.

The Historical Society got the city’s permission to conduct the tours last year, but held off as it concentrated its efforts on the Bryan House, which first opened for tours about a year ago.

If this initial event is successful, Johnson said, the tours could become an annual event. She said Society members are already thinking of including a second historic Horry County graveyard on subsequent Dearly Departed jaunts.

Tickets for the cemetery tours will be available beginning Feb. 1 and are limited. They can be purchased at the Conway Visitors Center on Third Avenue or by mail. Order forms can be downloaded from the Society’s website, www.hchsonline.org.

Christmas is over

Conway city crews removed the last of the city’s Christmas lights late last week, marking the start of those dreary months when residents and visitors have to traverse city streets sans sparkling lights.

The last to come down were the wreath-shaped light frames on the U.S. 501 bridge over the Waccamaw River, and their removal marked the end of an effort that began the Tuesday after New Year’s, said Foster Hughes, Conway’s director of parks, recreation and tourism.

“I think they’re going out there at 3 o’clock in the morning to take those down,” Hughes said of the bridge light frames.

The bridge is heavily-traveled, and crews had to schedule a time when they and drivers would be least at risk from the work.

Hughes said Conway has more than 160 light frames – snowflakes, reindeer, angels and wreaths – that it puts on lampposts throughout town to mark the Christmas holidays. In addition, there are strings of lights that drape shrubs at City Hall, hang on fences at city parks and wrap around historic oaks and palm trees.

Hughes estimated there are at least 10s of thousands of individual lights in the collection.

Crews work for five weeks putting the lights up each year and two weeks taking them down, he said.

Planning for each year’s display begins in August, he said, and each frame and strand is tested before it is put up for public viewing. As many as 4,000 light bulbs get replaced annually during the testing phase.

The city doesn’t buy something new for each year’s display, Hughes said, but its inventory is so extensive that features can be rotated from year to year.

Now, though, they’re down and the city is a darker place than it was before.

Merry dreary.