By Tom Poland: A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
A reader and friend, Zilphy DuRant of Florence, mailed me a letter and clipping from The Post and Courier about an architectural feature I’d never heard of, rain porches. In the clipping Seth Taylor wrote about the Pee Dee being the “birthplace of a porch unlike any other.”
Driving back from Chapel Hill, I saw a road worthy of my ramblings. In one of those life coincidences I came across what appears to be a house with a rain porch on North Carolina Highway 79, which runs through Gibson, North Carolina. Zilphy, by the way, hails from Gibson.
Just a few miles across the South Carolina state line I spotted what seemed a rain porch on an old house missing its porch. Even so, it was obvious that the columns went to the ground and beyond where the porch would be. As Taylor wrote, “The columns aren’t attached to the floor; they’re freestanding.” So were these.
Now I’ll admit this so-called rain porch may simply be supports for ongoing restoration but its columns go straight to the ground and the columns themselves seem as old as the house. This rain porch will do util another one comes along, and it did. Near Cassatt, on old US Highway 1 I found a rain porch off the road a ways. Problem was it looked too modern all bricked up as it was. Cassatt does, however, have a classic rain porch house, the two-story, ca 1820 McCoy house. I aim to find it next time I’m driving old US 1 north of Camden.
Now this rain porch is known to some as a Carolina porch. They came to be in the early 1800s. and enjoyed popularity in the 1800s when such porches enjoyed a bit of fame and fashion. Taylor wrote they fell out of favor almost as quickly as they caught people’s fancy. It’s a mysterious thing, this rain porch and how it’s restricted to the Pee Dee.
Speculation holds that the porches provided a way to minimize rotting of porch timbers. Perhaps the porch kept gusts of rain from drenching porch sitters when a summer storm blew in. As I wrote several years back, it’s a vanishing art, porch sitting. There was a time when folks retired to the porch just to pass the time, and passing the time watching a storm roll in was and is relaxing for many.
The South Carolina Encyclopedia references rain porches.
“A sheltered exterior residential living area, the rain porch consists of a roof structure with freestanding supports, in an anterior arrangement to a pier-supported, balustraded deck. This vernacular form typically occurs on houses from ca. 1820 to ca. 1860 in the South Carolina counties located north of the Santee River and east of the Wateree and Catawba Rivers. Isolated examples have also been identified in Berkeley, Chester, Fairfield, Lexington, Newberry, and York Counties, as well as in central and eastern North Carolina counties along the South Carolina border.”
Whether you’ve seen a rain porch or not, my guess is you’ll be looking for one whenever you’re in the aforementioned regions. When you spot one, if you spot one, you’ll be witness to a small mystery. Exactly why were these super-sized porches built?
Many thanks to Zilphy DuRant and to The Post and Courier and Seth Taylor. Because of them I will return to Highway 79 and seek other rain porches and more, for Highway 79 seems to be one of those roads where Father Time tarried a while and left stretches untouched by modern ways.
