Did you know that the founder of this little newspaper was secretly married.

The story comes from a lady who knew him well. Blondell Harman lived in a large white house on West Main Street in Lexington. It’s the one with the green steps next to Radius Church and across from the Lexington Chamber of Commerce.

Blondell has since gone to her reward, as we Southerners say. But in the years she shared Uncle Josh’s secrets with an editor who followed him at the Dispatch-News, she imparted a wealth of stories, many shared in this little newspaper.

As a girl, she had helped at the Dispatch-News office and recalled him fondly.

GODFREY HARMAN, later affectionately known around town as Uncle Josh, was born June 4, 1845, in his parents’ Harman Hotel on the northwest corner of East Main and North Lake Drive.

I wasn’t around at the time but you can take the word of former Lexington County Museum Director Horace Harman.

Horace wrote about him in Uncle Josh, Remembrances of Old Lexington County, a book available at the museum today.

Josh became interested in news and journalism around age 10. He would help out at the Lexington Telegraph , a newspaper that did not survive the Civil War.

I call it that although it wasn’t a “civil” war. None of them are civil. And this was not a civil war to take over the Union. It was a war of separation from the Union.

Some of us emphasize with that today, watching what goes on in Washington.

WITH THE FIRING on Fort Sumter, like many young men in 1861, Josh marched off to war. When it was found that he was not yet 16, they sent him home.

Undeterred he waited a year to rejoin.

Local history reveals little about his war experience but that he was engaged in combat in Virginia. He returned in 1865 to find that Sherman’s troops had burned his family’s hotel, the courthouse, St. Stephens Lutheran Church and most of the town.

A house they spared belonged to Josh’s future father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Boozer.

They spared the judge’s home, the one where Blondell Harman told me this story, because he had opposed succession.

As a Union sympathizer, he opened his doors to Sherman’s officers and they stayed there during their brief visit to the town.

AFTER THE WAR, Josh and the judge’s daughter Pauline fell in love. But the judge opposed her relationship with a man who had fought to dissolve the Union.

Pauline convinced a servant to help her slip out of the house after dark to meet with Josh. He urged her to secretly marry him.

They walked east along what is now Main Street (US 1) to the home of a minister who lived near Tarrar Springs Road.

He married them and they walked back, Pauline slipping into the house undetected.

Blondell did not tell me when the secret marriage was revealed or how the judge reacted when he learned of it. But the lovers managed to live a long life together.

Love really can conquer all.

Next: Laugh it off

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