“Out There…Somewhere”: Barnwell Sundial Celebration

By George Eskola
WJBF News Channel 6 Senior Reporter
Published: October 10, 2008

In Barnwell they know these are tough times.

“I heard it on the View,” I think I heard it on the View,” said Plexico Williams of Barnwell.

“You were watching the view,” I asked?

“Yeah,” he said “Is that bad?”

But through the good times, the bad times, war time, peace time, does anybody really know what time it is there’s been one constant in Barnwell for 150 years, the town sundial.

It got set up at the courthouse way back in the fall of 1858.

Myranda Boyles and Corey Barnes were at the courthouse today, not to celebrate the sundial but to get a marriage license, so the sundial could be the symbol of their time together.

“Are you going to get married in front of the sundial,” I asked?

“No were not we’re going to get married at Edisto Beach,” said Myranda.

The sundial has been in town fifteen decades, but it’s not an easy clock to decode.

I asked Rodney Brown what time it was and he said “thirteen forty,” but I think he was talking about military time.

“But how do you tell time at night,” I enquired, “I don’t come here at night,” he laughed.

So how do you find the sundial, well in Barnwell it is right next to Wall Street.

At Shonda Davis’s hair salon, they know things are cloudy on Wall Street these days.

And clouds are bad for a sundial.

But I heard congress was coming to bail out Wall Street, it must be for the 150Th anniversary of the sundial.

“No I don’t think so. I think we’ve got a mistake here,” said Davis.

But make no mistake this is the sundials time to shine out there somewhere in Barnwell.