Mable Owens Clarke hops onto the soapstone outcropping and laughs.
“I’m a country girl,” she says. “I’ve been walking here all my life.”
The 80-year-old matriarch and deacon of Soapstone Church in Pickens gestures toward her family farm tucked in the rolling foothills, and to Caesars Head and Table Rock looming above the low-lying clouds of the Blue Ridge. “This is nothing but God’s holy ground.”
“My great-grandfather, Joseph McJunkin, was among the 600 free slaves who moved here in 1865,” says Clarke. “This was the first free Black community in Pickens Country. And he came to the notion that the community needed a church. They needed somewhere to worship.”
McJunkin built a brush arbor chapel and served as the first pastor. Members of the community sold cotton and other crops to buy lumber for a more permanent structure. They called it Soapstone Church, after the giant soapstone boulder beneath the foundation.
“Soapstone is such a soft rock,” says Clarke. “It decays very easily. And when you carve a name in it, it just doesn’t last. They used soapstone rocks for headstones in the slave cemetery. “
Individual names may fade, but something more endures — a shared history, a community.
“In 1967, Klansmen burned the church,” Clarke says. She points at a patch of bare earth, “Here in the sand. They wrote, ‘The KKK paid you a visit.”
Amid the anger, fear, and grief, Clarke’s mother, Lula McJunkin Owens, refused to give up.
“That Sunday we gathered here in the yard,” says Clarke, “and someone said, ‘There’s no way we can build our church back.’ But my mother jumped up and she said, ‘This church will be built back!’ She pointed to our farm. ‘We’ll sell vegetables. Sell milk, butter and eggs.’”
And they did exactly that.
Every Saturday, Clarke and her parents “peddled” their crops in Greenville. On Monday, they bought cinder blocks and on Tuesday they added those blocks to the new building.
“A year later, on the same spot and on the same day,” Clarke says. “We opened the doors of the new church. This church.”
Time, the elements, and the trials of history wear the dates from gravestones, but the stone beneath Clarke’s feet, the promontory that offers such a spectacular view, the community gathered around her and Soapstone Church, these remain.
When Clarke’s mother died in 1999, she left her daughter with a final request: “Don’t let the doors close.”
That meant renovating the aging structure and paying off debt. Once again, Clarke turned to feeding people. Instead of peddling vegetables, she started a monthly fish fry.
For 22 years, Clarke and her team of “food dippers” served up flounder, chicken, and pork with seasonal vegetables heaped on the side. When a national magazine wrote about the fish fry, readers from around the world sent checks and letters of encouragement.
Finances improved. But money was only part of the challenge. Keeping the doors open also meant preserving the history and the land. Clarke worked with the South Carolina Conservation Bank, Upstate Forever, the Upstate Land Conservation Fund and other conservation organizations to protect Soapstone from developers. Today, Soapstone Church, Soapstone Schoolhouse, and the Slave Cemetery are permanently protected through a conservation easement.
Clarke pauses amid gravestones and small American flags in the Slave Cemetery. From arsonists to timber companies and tax liens, she has fought one battle after another.
“I had to work with a lot of pain over the years,” she says. “But now? Now I have no hatred in my heart. Now it is a joy to be able to share our history.”
Soapstone Church Endowment Fund
PO Box 454
Marietta, SC 29661
