Back in high school in Harnett County, I would sometimes here my classmates talk about going to Lake Artesia. For whatever reason -- maybe I wasn't invited (thanks, guys!)? -- I never made it to Lake Artesia. I think, in my mind, I imagined it being a smaller White Lake.
Earlier this week, my mother -- a proud Sampson County native -- talked about
Williams Lake and the great musical acts that would play there in the 1950s and '60s. "We would say we were going to a friend's house for the night, but we'd instead go to Williams Lake."
I just had to look up the history of these places -- hot spots that were quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
Like my mother, Michael Parker is a Clinton native. Parker
has written about Williams Lake and Lake Artesia. It's pretty remarkable the acts that made the trek down these back roads to play for sometimes up to 700 rural North Carolinians back in the day. (But, to be fair, every North Carolinian was a rural North Carolinian back then.)
Williams Lake was located near Mingo Township, in the northeastern
corner of Sampson County, closer to Newton Grove and Dunn than it was to
Clinton ... The club had been drawing teenagers from all
over eastern North Carolina since the 1930s, when a pavilion was built
on the lake and the swimmers asked the owner, Clayton Williams, to put
in a jukebox for jitterbugging. After a hard day in the tobacco and
produce fields, which were the primary summer jobs for teenagers back
then, a night at Williams Lake was a just reward. But its heyday was in
the ’60s, when the shoulders of the country roads leading to the lake
were clogged with the cars of kids looking to shag to the music of The
Tams, The Drifters, and Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs. ...
Lake Artesia -- or "Amnesia" -- was similar, but different.
The
club itself — an A-frame flanked by two wide wings that resembled,
inside and out, a rustic lodge — was a good ways off the highway, down a
sandy lane dead-ending in a huge field converted into a parking lot. A
booth was set up at the highway. They charged by the head. ... During the three or four summers I spent going there, the bigger-name
bands — The Tams, The Drifters, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs —
seemed to regularly change members. But no one cared if this was the
“original” Drifters. We just wanted to get up on the roof or under the boardwalk. We wanted to be young, be foolish, be happy. We wanted to say to the security guards who accused us of climbing into and out of someone’s dank trunk, What kind of fool do you think I am?
Of course, Parker asks the legitimate question -- the same question any logical person would ask: Why? And how? What was it that led to these small "bodies" of water to attract national touring acts?
It’s a mystery to me now how these two lakes — one of them not much
more than a pond — in the middle of the middle of nowhere, both within a
half hour of my hometown, drew national talent night after summer
night. There must have been money in it, despite the revenue lost to
trunk and wood, but surely these bands could have made more in
conventional dance clubs in Raleigh or Wilmington, Charlotte or
Greensboro, places we small-town, rural kids thought of as big cities.
I’m just happy these places existed, for even though I know one of
them only by the aura it left in the memories of its patrons, if it was
anything like the one I knew in my teens, it was magical. A sweet drive
down back roads, past tobacco barns and head-high corn in field after
field as the brutal summer sun finally cast shadows and brought shade.
The thrill of entry, legitimate or not. The chance of meeting someone
you did not know whom you’d like to get to know better. Most of all, the
music, which — after a long day cropping tobacco or packing produce or,
if you were lucky enough, basking in a plastic chair overlooking
squealing kids splashing about in some swimming pool — took you to the
place where music takes you, which has nothing to do with parking lots
or ponds. Lovelorn lyrics, tight horn sections, thumpy bass, and
chugging rhythm guitar — these sounds are what turn my time there into a
field of dreams.
Any first-hand stories from Williams Lake or Lake Artesia you care to share?
