MEMORIES OF
HOLT LAKE, Part 8

February 20, 2020

Rose Brown remembers "horrible" dressing rooms
and a young man's drowning when the ice broke

Gary Ridout has been compiling personal memories for a number of years for a newsletter he produces for present-day Holt Lake residents. Here are excerpts from Gary's recent interview with Rose Brown:


I learned to swim at Holt Lake in 1936 when my father took me there. It cost 25 cents to get the safety-pin key to put on your bathing suit so you could reclaim your clothes. The dressing rooms were horrible. As time went on, they became even more horrible....

 

As I learned to swim, I got stronger and really wanted to make it to the big platform, which is the one nearest the Highway 301 bridge. There was nothing on the big platform when I was a young child. A diving board and slide were installed in the early 1940s. The big objective my friends and I had then was to swim across the lake to the other side. I don’t know why that was so great because there was nothing on the other side of the lake. We felt like it was a huge distance and a great accomplishment. When Brannan Court was built and we would eat at the restaurant, we looked back across the lake and realized how narrow that section really was.

 

As teenagers, once we became proficient swimming across the lake, we began to jump off the Highway 301 bridge into the lake. To our surprise, we later saw what we were jumping into. The lake was drained when I was an older teenager. We noticed many stumps on the bottom of the lake near the bridge where we jumped in.

 

Holt Lake was so popular that it was like all of Smithfield School was there. The sandy beach would be covered with beach towels and blankets every afternoon. The picture (on the right) was taken in the late 1940s. This picture shows me and John Whitehead enjoying the beach. John Whitehead’s father was a dentist in Smithfield. John now lives in Canada.

In the mid-to-late '40s, a very high diving board was installed on the outer platform. Some of the men perfected their swan dives on that diving board....

The thing that killed the popularity of swimming was the polio epidemic. According to Wikipedia’s history of polio, from 1916 onward, a polio epidemic appeared each summer in at least one part of the United States, with the most serious occurring in the 1940s and 1950s. In the epidemic of 1949, 2,720 deaths from the disease occurred in the United States. Our parents were sure that we would get polio from swimming in the lake water.

 

When the dance hall was built, my junior high-school friends and I spent all our time there. There was no jukebox. We danced to a record player. We knew we couldn’t get polio in the dance hall! 

 

When I was nine years old, the lake froze over and a terrible thing happened. This was reported in The Smithfield Herald on January 30, 1940. The headline stated “Young Smithfield Man Dies At Lake When Ice Breaks.” The article went on to report that Sam Honeycutt Jr. drowned at noon when the ice gave way as he and two friends walked on frozen Holt Lake. The article stated that 26-year-old Sam Honeycutt was a member of a prominent Smtihfield family. He was accompanied on the lake by Ruth Rose and Elmer Wellons Jr.


The three young people were walking toward the Skinner home to warm up. The ice gave way about 150 feet from shore. There were tremendous efforts to save him. Mrs. Skinner attached a rope to a sled, but was unsuccessful. Ransom and Earl Massengill, who were state employees, and Fred Wood, an employee at John Dail’s service station, took a boat onto the lake. It was reported that Sam Honeycutt struggled for about 10 minutes but finally drowned.


His funeral was held the following week. The Rev. J.J. Boone from Centenary Methodist Church officiated. A sextet comprised of Mrs. John White Ives, Mrs. A.G. Glenn, Mrs. F. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wallace, and Luby Royall sang "Rock of Ages," "Abide With Me," and other appropriate hymns. Pallbearers were Elmer Wellons Jr., James A. Wellons Jr., Newitt Edgerton, Henry Johnston, Robert Cotter, William Norman Holt, Don Ward, and Ernest Aycock.

 

My aunt, Peggy Jones, was walking on the ice at the lake with her friends when the drowning occurred... She came home and tearfully told me about it. His death was very traumatic for all of us.

 

In the early 1950’s, the dance hall was already gone and the bath house was in very bad condition. We began to water-ski around that time. Melvin Edwards and George Brannan pulled us around the lake. Melvin’s boat and George Brannan’s boat both sank while they were pulling us. The drivers would make turns so sharp that the boats sank.

 

I don’t have any memories of soldiers being at Holt Lake, but I do remember that soldiers from Fort Bragg would go to a dance hall in Selma run by Red Shirley. At that bar, they would drink, dance, and gamble. There were many tales of fights between patrons at the bar.

 

Holt Lake and the surrounding area were big parts of my generation’s growing up. We swam there, socialized there, and danced there. When Brannan Court was built, we ate in the restaurant and we bowled in the bowling alley next to Brannan Court.


Previous installments in this series may be viewed with these links:
2-28-19 / 3-28-19 / 4-25-19 / 7-11-19 / 8-8-19 / 9-12-19 / 1-2-20