Feature Articles


August Issue 2000

The Turner Family Show to Open at the Pickens County Museum

The Pickens County Cultural Commission invites one and all to the opening of a very special exhibition at the Pickens County Museum of Art & History in Pickens, SC. Please join us on August 12 as we host a reception to present the exhibition The Turner Family Show. The exhibition will continue through September 29.

Folk art and heritage is expressed in a three-generation, one-hundred-year slice of mountain family pie in this exhibition covering three generations of woodcarvers and musicians. The Turner Family Show will highlight the talent, the joy and the sorrow that was the way of life for this rural family and will showcase the products of their hard-working hands.

Utilizing research by Mary English Wright for her paper The Turner Family and the Transformation of Upstate South Carolina, this show is a story of the Turner family. It is a story about a family, like many families, that, at the turn of the century helped push the South into becoming an industrialized region. They moved out of the mountains, quit the farms and left behind the relatives to find employment in the factories.

Starting with Grandfather William Turner who, born in 1874, made fiddles, coffins, furniture and whatever anyone needed, the show will follow the family line through a progression of occupations that are typical of our area... lumbermen, farmers and textile workers. William's son, Jim, born in 1925, will be the most represented of the three in the exhibit, having carved pieces for most of his seventy-some years. His pieces range from carvings of local buildings to local people to "Last Suppers" in area churches. Jim's son, Harold Wayne, born in 1950, is a musician and luthier who has made over a hundred instruments the last thirty years.

The Turners' transition from the mountain farms to the mill towns demonstrated the trend that affected many southern regions after the turn of century. The Turners are a typical example of a people who were not satisfied with the conditions in which they were raised, abandoned farm life and the lack of a steady income, and made themselves part of a new culture. A culture that combined mountain habits with a new lifestyle in the mill villages. This new culture was the blending of the old and the new. That combination of the old and the new created a modern and industrialized South, much more economically diverse and fully integrated into the national economy. The dependency on agriculture decreased, as did the rural population. Mill towns sprang up creating an urban population, yet these new urban areas were mostly small towns, such as Pickens. The population shift allowed the South to industrialize as they had never before, and mobilize a solid workforce to work in the new mills. Those new townspeople brought with them their old traditions, such as whittling and playing music as in the case of the Turners'. The Turner Family moved from the mountains to find work, and brought with them the desire for some things to change, and for some things to remain the same.

The Pickens County Museum is extremely grateful to Mary English Wright for the use of her research in assembling this exhibition. The Turner Family Show is made possible through sponsorship from Claude W. Reece and a grant from The Max & Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, Inc.

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 864/898-5963 or by e-mail at (picmus@innova.net).

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