Wall memorializes east Florence community's history (2024)

FLORENCE, S.C. — Justice Graham and Stephanie Hawkins got together one day, years ago, and started to talk about the people in their neighborhood, swap some old stories. Ten years on, the two maintain a memorial wall that goes up for every Juneteenth celebration at Levy Park.

Though the idea started with Graham and Hawkins, the late Robert “Tweetie” Lund was the impetus to start the wall. From there it grew.

Saturday at Florence’s annual Juneteenth celebration, the wall started on the third-base line on the ball field fence and ran to the outfield and around the corner and more than halfway to center field.

The wall, a mixture of cardboard and printer paper, marks about 10 years of time, Graham said.

“We were just talking about how many people passed that nobody talks about anymore. We talked about things that happened when I first came, old stories. We just wanted to pay homage. This is just our way of paying homage,” Graham said.

Graham said the area of east Florence he calls home was called Mayberry at the time since it was full of “old people and kids.”

The two of them also included the other side of east Florence.

“After we went through everybody who passed away in Mayberry I thought about it and I said I stayed on the other side of the east, too, and a lot of good people I met. We started gathering up pictures and this is what I came up with,” Graham said as he went along the wall with tape and a gentle touch to fix pictures in need of a hand.

“This is through the years. Just this year, the last three sections of pictures, I think it’s like 41 people,” Graham said of three panels out toward centerfield. “We may have missed a couple of them. Some of these people I’ve never met, people’s grandparents. Most of the people on this wall I’ve met.”

“We were sitting around, in fact this gentleman right here (Lund), he’s one of the first people I met when I came here. His second-oldest sister was my first girlfriend. That’s his mother right there and there’s his aunt,” Graham said as he pointed to photos along the wall.

“He passed away and we were talking about how many people we’ve lost from the neighborhood because most of this first sections (of fence) are mostly people from Mayberry. It all started with him,” Graham said of Lund. “Then I lost my mother and brother right after that and that solidified it for me.”

Though not originally from Florence, Graham got his first taste of the city early on in his life.

“I had a teacher who was from Florence. My first time coming here, I think I was like 12,” he said.

When he came at 16 to spend the summer, he stayed with Lucile Brown Davis and her sons — Walt, Clarence and Buster.

“She didn’t even know me and I stayed in her house the entire summer. She loved me to death, it was like she was my grandmother. God bless her,” Graham said. “My father died the following year and two years later my mother moved here. I’ve been here over 30 years now.”

Time passed and, “she had that mamma look in her eye like ‘he’s leaving again.’ I told her, ‘I’m going to move back down here and spend some time with you.’ I’m glad I did. I had her for some years but I lost her. That’s mother right here. Elnetha Graham and first baby brother, Kelvin,” he said.

“The woman who helps me with that, this is her family,” he said as he motioned to a group of pictures of people whose surnames were Hawkins.

Initially there were efforts to organize the memorial.

“As we got pictures, we didn’t want to jump them around, it was too much work, so we just went ahead and started. We tried to group things together but after a while we just had to ...,” Hawkins said as a friend arrived for a hand shake and quick catchup.

“Every year as somebody passes and we get the word, we’ll get the picture and put it in the archives until we get ready to work on it. We’ll do it all at the same time and laminate it,” he said.

The wall started out as a collection of copy paper prints but has since moved onto cardboard to keep it together in the wind.

Graham said he once intended to move it all onto wood and make it permanent, but that would require talking with Florence’s parks and recreation folks, he said.