Ingleside: The Pre-1924 Hamlet

Lyrics

Before the slate roofs...
Before the half-timbered gables...
There was just the slope of the land.
And a name on a map.

I walk the grid you laid down, Mr. Willis.
But my feet remember the dirt paths.
That red DeKalb clay, clinging to a boot heel.
The air thick with pine resin and midday heat.
No post office.
No general store.
Just a loose scatter of farmhouses, drawn in pencil on a county ledger.
Following the springs that would one day feed your lake.

This is Ingleside.
The ghost-village under the Tudor lawns.
I am listening for the names the deed books never kept.
The faces the census taker never found.
A community of whispers, bought out and ploughed under.
Absorbed.
Renamed.

Over there, by the curve on Berkeley Road...
I can almost see the Ingleside School.
One room, woodsmoke from a tin chimney.
The sound of children reciting lessons on the wind.
I see the porch light of a farmhouse where a mansion now stands.
A life lived between the furrows.
A quiet that belonged only to the pines and the trickling water.

This is Ingleside.
The ghost-village under the Tudor lawns.
I am listening for the names the deed books never kept.
The faces the census taker never found.
A community of whispers, bought out and ploughed under.
Absorbed.
Renamed.

Then the surveyors came in 1924.
Their tripods stood in the cotton fields.
Their graphite lines erased the cow paths.
A signature on an aggregate deed.
Not a conquest, nothing so loud.
Just a quiet, administrative transaction.
The end of a world, written in cursive.

And now... the swans drift over the old springs.
The streetlights flicker on.
The ghost-village sleeps.
Ingleside.