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 Photo from Gary Ridout
balloon and pontoon plane, peat bog on fire
Gary Ridout has been compiling personal
memories for a number of years for a
newsletter he produces for present-day Holt
Lake residents. We're sharing selected samples
from time to time with readers of the Sun.
Here are excerpts from Gary's March 2013
interview with Charles Wilson:
In 1951, when
I was a senior at Selma High School, Mildred
Oliver became our interim senior sponsor (she was
one of the Pine Level Olivers). At the end of
the year, she took us out to Holt Lake. It was the
first time I had had any connection with Holt
Lake.
At that time, in front of the Dance Hall, near the Highway 301 bridge, people would come and pay about ten cents to swim. There was a platform about halfway across the lake and people would swim out there and back. I remember a lot of pine trees with nice picnic tables. I did not bring my swimsuit; I was just happy to be at a hot-dog roast. In the early 1970s, I had my second encounter with Holt Lake. I got to be a good friend of Jack Gardner's, who ran the In and Out restaurant. Jack was a good friend of Dr. Davidian. On a couple of occasions, I would come out and pick up Jack and Dr. Davidian and take them to the Raleigh-Durham Airport so they could fly to Florida to look at their orange groves. Dr. Davidian lived on the end of Skinner Road, so I would pick them up at his house. In 1976, I was
reading The Smithfield Herald one
Friday afternoon. I
read that there was a cottage on Holt Lake for
sale. I checked into it and found that it was at
the end of Skinner Road diagonally across from Dr.
Davidian’s house. The address was 412 Skinner
Road. The Stancils owned it. Mr. Stancil was a
barber in Benson and Mrs. Stancil worked at
BB&T in Downtown Smithfield.
One Sunday morning, I was reading my paper and I looked out the back door and two bald eagles came to a cypress by my boathouse. It was a beautiful sight. I have a three-foot retaining wall at the shore line of the lake. After Hurricane Floyd, there had been so much rain that the water came over the retaining wall up to my back steps. People were out rowing their boats in my backyard. You could see the fish swimming in my yard. One day a hot-air balloon came over the lake from near the Country Clubhouse. It came over the pine trees and dropped down almost to the water in the lake. Then the basket of the hot-air balloon dragged along the water. I thought the balloon was lost, but then I realized the people in the balloon were just having fun. I heard the burner ignite and the balloon took over and went over the pine trees into the distance. Another day, someone landed a pontoon plane with double wings on the lake. They spent the night somewhere along the lake and then the next day I saw them take off. They started below the Country Clubhouse and gained speed going toward the wide part of the lake. The pilot gunned it and near Pete Johnson’s house the plane finally lifted up and out of the water. I did not think it was going to make it! Two times
since I have lived on the lake, the dam has broken
and the lake became powder dry. The only water
was the run of Black Creek, near the middle of the
lake.
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