The Last of the Earles

This past Saturday my brother and I attended a reunion of the descendants of our paternal grandmother's parents--Whitmires who lived near Travelers Rest, SC. The Whitmire family home, built in 1883, served as a post office for the Whitehorse community. The tenants who now live in the house and farm the adjacent acreage, have done a great job preserving the old homeplace, and allow the family to celebrate our heritage on the wide front porch and in the tree-shaded front yard. Until this year, our cousin James Whitmire, paid for the whole gathering. Now, at age 92, his health is failing and he must spend his resources on personal care. Others in the family have taken the challenge and plan to continue the tradition of Whitmire reunions.

Our grandmother, Frances "Fannie" Whitmire, married a highly intelligent, creative ne'er-do-well, Elias Preston Earle, for whom our father and my brother were named. His family was socially prominent in Greenville, but poor financially. There is even a historical marker in Greenville erected to an early Elias Earle.

Fannie and Elias had seven children before she died at in 1925 at age 45 (of "acute indigestion" which was probably a heart attack). Their youngest child, Jimmy, was only 5 years old.

As a single father Elias, by then a travelling salesman, had great difficulty providing for his family. Had it not been for help from his late wife's more affluent brother Jim Whitmire, and the willingness of the older children to care for the younger ones, the children might have had to be dispersed among relatives, as was often the case with other families of that time. The family home, beside the campus of Clemson College, was saved and maintained until after Elias' death in 1935.

My father, nicknamed Buck, was the oldest of the 3 Earle boys. The second son, Sam, died at age 21 before his wife knew she was pregnant. She remarried and their son Timothy was adopted by her new husband, taking his last name of Bleck. The second oldest of the 7 Earle children, Antoinette ("Tony"), did not marry. Unlike some modern-day women she did not choose to become a single mother (which, of course, would have been unthinkable in her day, anyway).

Neither my brother Preston nor our cousin Jim Earle, have sired children, so the Earle family surname, as handed down from Elias Earle, will die out after this generation.

Of the twelve grandchildren of Elias and Fannie, eleven survive. Sam Earle's son, Tim Bleck, died at age 29. The rest of us range in age from late 50's to mid 70's. Though we got together in different groupings as we were growing up, we have all been together only once, thanks to each receiving an inheritance from Aunt Tony in 1997. Now that the Whitmire reunions are scheduled only once every two years, we are going to start to have our own Earle Cousins reunion. We want our children to know their heritage and know and enjoy their cousins as we enjoyed knowing each other when we were young.

Next year we'll meet in Clemson--75 years after our parents left there. It's still the Earle family home.