About

I grew up in a little mill town that was once known as Tucapau... a textile mill town on the banks of the Middle Tyger River. Local folks often referred to it as Turkeypaw. Tucapau was said to have an Indian connection of some sort...  but hard to find consent on that. At some point the textile mill was known as Star Textiles and they changed the name of the town to Startex... sometimes confused with StarTrek by friends who had never heard of it... when you told them where you were from.

The mill is gone along with a number of cool places that once existed there. The elementary school closed many years ago in 1997. I can still remember my first day at school there which would have been in 1957.  I think my sister Lola graduated from Byrnes that same year and it was virtually brand new. And although the town is a shadow of its former self it has a great following of folks I'm calling the Turkeypaw Tribe. It was a great place to grow up in the 50's and 60's for me and for a great number of other folks over a greater period of time.

This is the old power plant that's at Berry's pond. It was built in the early 1900's and helped provide power to the mill at Startex... aka Turkeypaw. It is about a 1/2 mile below the dam there at Berry's Pond and was fed by a raceway which fed two different water wheels inside the plant. There was a substantial drop right before the plant that I am sure helped the water power delivered to the turbines there.