Johnsonville South Carolina History

In the hollow of a Lynches River tributary just outside Johnsonville, where sandy hillsides rise to meet fertile tobacco fields, an old homestead took shape with roots that ran deep. Here, on what’s now called Arles Lane, Thomas Franklin Hanna (1873–1958) and his wife Nekoda Laharp Altman Hanna (1878–1955) built their home—a modest farmer’s cabin above that hollow which they simply called “the branch.” The couple carved their initials into one of the timber beams beneath the porch.  Some of the bricks used as the foundation were rumored to have once served as ballast for ships arriving from across the Atlantic. The land itself was part of the original grant to Hugh Hanna, Thomas’s great-grandfather and the first of the Hanna family to settle in the Johnsonville area after marching south with General Greene during the Revolution.   Prior to their arrival, this plot of land was familiar to a group of the native Catawba people. Even today, Hanna descendants still find discarded a...

Looney's Bridge as it may have looked in the 1880s.  Image created by Josh Dukes In a quiet hollow not far from Johnsonville, SC a stretch of weathered road crosses Mill Creek on a simple bridge where there once stood a rickety wooden span. Both bridges are remembered as Looney’s Bridge—a place where a ghost story tied to a teenage right-of-passage and a forgotten local tragedy mix like the dark waters of the creek. The original bridge here spanned Mill Creek just off the current footprint of Gaster Road near Johnson Cemetery.  "There is a clay hill on the back side of the old McCall property and the original roadbed is still there," remembers Benjie McCall.   The McCall family owned the surrounding farm from 1970 to 2015, with the opposite bank once part of the Ned Huggins hog farm. More than a century earlier, George Samuel Briley Huggins'  homeplace was near this place, as were those of Springs, Huggins, and Timmons families who lived within a mile of one ano...