Photo by Nathan Gray

Tommie Morrison, daughter of E.C. White, stands where White City Park was before Hartwell Lake was created.

Pastor E.C. White started White City Park, which now is submerged in Hartwell Lake outside Anderson.

A couple walks around White City Park, which offered biblical scenes through out the park. The park now is submerged in Hartwell Lake outside Anderson.

White City Park, where the gathering pictured here was taken, now is submerged in Hartwell Lake outside Anderson. Pastor E.C. White established the park.

A park for the people: One man’s gift to a community now under water

The sight of the sun’s rays hitting the painted form of Jesus as he kneeled at a rock and prayed – like many envisioned him in the garden of Gesthemane – is captured in Tommie Morrison’s mind like a movie picture.

When she talks of the crisp water of the Six and Twenty Creek that she and her family waded through every Fourth of July, you can see the movie in her eyes.

And Aubrey Pickens can’t remember as much these days, he admits with a little laugh, but he can feel the happiness still of wandering across the little bridge that stretched over the creek, taking the explorer to another place in the wooded wonderland.

“I know I remember going up there many times,” Pickens said. “And that walk bridge crossed over to a gathering place. The whole place was really something.”

The place in their memory – White City Park.

Many may not even know that name, let alone what White City Park is. The reason for that is Hartwell Lake.

But for some, the presence of that park lingers. Just ask someone with tenure in your church.

For White City Park was a place unlike any other in the community, and maybe even in the state, where people could go and wade through creeks, have large gatherings under the cool night air and eat Sunday supper on the grounds. And for newlyweds, there was a small, one-bedroom cabin – aptly named the Honeymoon Cottage – perched near the edge of one of the three creeks running through the park.

And it was all free thanks to one man: Tommie Morrison’s daddy, the Rev. E.C. White.

The Rev. White was a mill boy who felt the call to go into ministry. He taught Sunday school, and when at work, he kept a small Bible under his seat so he could read during breaks, said Morrison, White’s youngest daughter. In 1917, he left the pew for the pulpit. He would go on to either start or preach at several area churches while he was the pastor at Oakwood Baptist Church.

In his 45 years as Oakwood’s leader, the church grew from 250 members to 1,700.

Morrison can remember her daddy walking from Oakwood, which at the time was on Simmons Street in Anderson, all the way to the Long Creek community near Walhalla in order to preach.

The kind reverend married more than 3,200 people in his life – including one ceremony that required stopping traffic on U.S. 29 South at the Georgia-South Carolina border.

And he was the marshal for many Anderson Christmas Parades.

So it likely did not come as a surprise to many when, in 1945, White bought a 63-acre tract of land in the Centerville community and turned it into a park for everyone.

The land was abandoned. In Anderson’s earliest days, the land was the site of the Centerville township and was home to a store, a post office, a grist mill, several homes and other buildings. But by the mid-‘40s, there were only the ghosts of that once-promising town remaining.

White bought the land. He cleared it, with his family’s help of course, and they built everything at the park. Everything included 17 picnic tables, the Honeymoon Cottage, a bigger house on a hill called “The White House,” a water wheel next to the cottage, a 2,000-person outdoor amphitheater and several covered picnic shelters.

And there were several large paintings – some like statues – of religious scenes. One was of the Last Supper. Another one was Jesus kneeling in the Garden of Gesthemane, praying.

“Daddy just wanted to develop something where families could go and enjoy being together,” Morrison said.

It was also a place for the White family, which had 10 children in all, would gather. The Six and Twenty Creek is where Morrison learned to swim. It is where she busied herself raking leaves in the fall. And it is where she and her brothers and sisters would sometimes wake in the middle of the night on a screened-in porch and eat freshly caught fish that their mother had cooked.

There she heard crickets singing in the night summer air.

“It was a joy to go to White City Park,” Morrison said, that movie coming to a slow stop in her mind. “It just breaks my heart to know that it is no more.”

No more because it rests just under the rippling waters of Hartwell Lake. There this man’s passion was buried, years ago. But his kindness and the spirit that he put into the park linger still.