Charlotte Artist Recreates A Classic Carolinas Town

Charlotte Artist Recreates A Classic Carolinas Town

By Dot Jackson
The Charlotte Observer, March 10, 1982

A lot of us pass by Cliffside fairly often, as we head west through Rutherford County to other destinations. If you come on it head-on, on the Cliffside Road from Boiling Springs, the sight is still impressive. There is indeed a cliff, of sorts, looking down on the Second Broad River.

The ancient brick expanse of the Cone Textile mill still looms immense and humming, crouched over the river that first gave it power.

But the town of Cliffside, as it used to be, is gone. The white, red-roofed mill houses, with their competitive greenery and gardens, are erased from the slopes above the horseshoe bend of the river. The town well, with its white gazebo, is gone, along with the Cliffside Railroad’s puffing locomotive, which used to drink from it. The downtown that was everything — as a resident now remembers, “from the beauty parlor to the funeral parlor” — is gone; the R. R. Haynes Memorial Building that housed the auditorium and gymnasium has long passed, and the Cliffside Band that used to play its concerts there is silent.

Except for the mill, you could pass by Cliffside and not be sure you’d been there. I would not have though much about it, except for Jim Scancarelli.

Jim Scancarelli, 40 is a fine old-time fiddler and a nut about railroads and old radio programs. To make a living, he’s an artist. Some of his work appears as illustrations on our pages. We have long been friends, and given to strange obsessions; once we followed an old steam engine all night, in the rain, sometimes getting far enough ahead of it to stand shivering at weedy crossings, just to see and hear and feel and smell the wondrous thing go by.

It was about New Year’s Day when Jim got going on Cliffside. That’s when he started to build a town on a tabletop in his Charlotte home.

Of course, the seeds of this new fixation go a long way back. In 1957, when he was 15, Jim went to Cliffside once. He went with Lee Kolbe, now of Greenville, S.C., who was older and already a working artist, to try to ride the steam engine on the 3.68 miles of the Cliffside Railroad.

They didn’t get to ride, but they walked the length of the track, from the Seaboard Railroad into town. And it was a classic little town that etched itself deeper and deeper into memory, over the years.

So Jim gathered him some materials and went to work. The weather and rust-stained bricks of the mill took shape in plastic, in his hands. Some of the makings came in a kit, he says. But a lot grew out of ingenuity.

The World War II-time posters in the windows of the stores he found full-size in flea markets, and used a reducing copier to get them down to scale, and painted them. Other signs, like the storeside Coca-Cola ad with its frosty sprite, he had to paint from scratch.

To authenticate the feed store, he went to Query, Spivey and McGee, a Charlotte feed and hardware store, and asked them if they had any old flyers or pamphlets lying around.

“First the man said no, he didn’t think so,” Jim says. “Then he showed me a rack at the back of the store and it had all these great old leaflets…he told me to take what I wanted. I guess he thought I was crazy…” From that gift came, among other things, the authenticity of the Purina checkerboard decor of the Cliffside feed-store.

The cars and trucks parked in front of the barber shop proclaim that era, right down to the license plates. Posters push war bonds, “You buy ’em, we fly ’em,” a handsome pilot model challenges. A man-in-service star dignifies an upstairs window; the waving stars and stripes shows 48.

Very lifelike pigeons roost upon a window ledge. And, “See?” Jim says, “Where there are pigeons, there are droppings…”

It is not necessarily Cliffside, to the letter, the artist explains. Art and imagination have taken liberties. Cliffside was the model, for a mostly long-gone Smalltown, U.S.A.

But the more of Cliffside, the better. So Jim got help from Buddy Weathers, the personnel manager at what is now the Cliffside office of Cone Mills, who hunted up a wealth of old books and articles and pictures.

And Buddy Weathers sent him over to Cliffside School principal Phil White, who, though young and raised in Forest City, has an incredible biography of old-time Cliffside both in film and in memory.

Phil White and his archives are both unforgettable life and art. We’ll come back to them on Friday.

Reprinted with permission from The Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by The Charlotte Observer.

View photo galleries of this remarkable model.