The Hunt For The South Windermere Scrapbook

It all started with a statement made in passing during an interview with Julian Keil about his knowledge of the beginnings of South Windermere. Julian and his wife Barbara purchased their lot in the new West Ashley neighborhood of South Windermere in 1953. W.L. Riggs was the contractor who built their Sheridan Road home.
They moved into it in May of 1954. The Keils were long-term residents, community leaders, and full of local stories of the early days in South Windermere. One little story was about how the mailboxes were situated in the neighborhood. They were not individual ones at each home. Instead they were all in one group in the lot that now houses the branch of the Charleston County library. The roads were not paved initially nor where they marked with street names.
Keil expressed an interest in writing a little book about South Windermere and had even gone as far as to interview Bill Ackerman in May of 1998. Ackerman developed both the neighborhood and the adjacent shopping center and was a resident of South Windermere at the time.
Keil’s intriguing statement to me was that Ackerman had shown him his scrapbook during that interview. Now scrapbooks are notorious for being a wealth of local information. So the hunt began for Ackerman’s scrapbook about South Windermere. Initially this may have sounded like a simple task, but Ackerman, his wife and his children had all passed away. The hunt took me on a road that included many conversations with Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., other family members, and colleagues in the Jewish community. Each conversation provided a clue that got me closer but never quite to the prize.
Finally after a relentless two years of searching I asked Dale Rosengarten, Special Collections Curator and founding director of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston Library, if she had ever heard of such a scrapbook. I had a hint it was with the Frisch family. She asked the question of the family and the scrapbook was transferred to Rosengarten’s safe hands for us to peruse. What a treasure of family memorabilia, local events, and information about the neighborhood and shopping center — a true time capsule for local researchers, archivists, and historians.
Know of any scrapbooks with local photographs, stories or tidbits of St. Andrew’s Parish? Contact Donna at westashleybook@gmail.com.