Tabor woman’s appreciation, love live long after death

By RAY WYCHE

Columbus and Horry (S.C.) counties are better places for some students, thanks to the generosity of a Tabor City woman who died 10 years ago.

Harriett Lewis Sikes wanted to say thank you to her family’s neighbors for the support they had given to her family’s businesses over the years.

Sikes came back home, after living in Edenton, Cincinnati, Ohio, and New York City for several years, to take care of several farm-related businesses, farms and tracts of timber accumulated by her father, the late John Leon Lewis, in the Tabor City area and in adjoining Horry County. John Lewis died in 1958.

She was in charge of the operation and later the disposal of a tobacco warehouse, a hardware store, a mortuary and an automobile dealership. She also oversaw the management of farms and timber holdings.

Later, her son Lewis Sikes came home to Tabor City and assisted his mother in the many details involved in handling the properties until his death in 1990. Lewis Sikes, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UNC-CH, had lived in New York City where he was engaged in Broadway theatrical productions.

In the 1960s, Harriett and Lewis Sikes formed Tara Travel System of Myrtle Beach, S.C., an upscale tour company that arranged trips to Europe and other places that often included visits to private castles owned by European royalty Lewis Sikes had become acquainted with during his stay in New York City.

After returning to her hometown, Harriett Sikes became active in civic and cultural affairs of the area as a way of showing her appreciation for what area citizens had done to help bring prosperity to her family. This appreciation resulted in the establishment of the Lewis A. Sikes Foundation, initially funded by a gift from Harriett Sikes.

“Harriett was very appreciative of how the community had helped her family prosper,” said Tabor City Attorney Richard Wright, trustee of the foundation.

The foundation’s main activity is providing college scholarships to students from Columbus and Horry counties who study for careers in the agriculture or timber fields and who agree to return to the area to practice their professions after their schooling.

“She said that agriculture had been the foundation of the prosperity of the family,” Wright said.

Sikes had the foundation set up so as to ensure that funds would continue to accumulate for the scholarships and for other charitable purposes.

During her last years, Sikes made many gifts anonymously, including some to churches in the Tabor City area. One of her donations is highly visible: the attractive sign in front of South Columbus High School. Wright says Sikes remarked, on seeing the new school, that it was nice but that without a sign, people would not know what it was.

She gave the sign in memory of her son Lewis Sikes.

The drama classes at Tabor City and later at South Columbus high schools also benefited from Sikes’ interest and generosity. Harriett and Lewis Sikes arranged for the old Tabor City High School to present at least one Broadway stage production each year, paying the required royalties themselves, and engaging townspeople to assist the high school students in staging productions that were elaborate by area drama standards.

The Sikes worked closely with sisters Beth Woody and Nell Fowler, teachers in the Tabor City High School who handled chorus and drama activities at the school.

“She (Harriet Sikes) would help with the costumes and settings. Harriett had the whole community volunteering. The ladies sewed the costumes and Don Hughes built the sets,” Wright recalls.

The Lewis A. Sikes Foundation is governed by a board of directors and awards scholarships of $3,000 each to four students from Columbus County and four from Horry County who study agriculture or forestry at North Carolina State University or at Clemson University in South Carolina and who agree to return to the area to work.

In addition to these scholarships, the foundation also provides for a forestry technology scholarship to Southeastern Community College for $1,500.

“She gave two farms to the Lewis Sikes Foundation and specified that a house was to be sold and the money was to go the foundation,” Wright said. Sikes also stipulated that a farm she controlled in Horry County was to be used by SCC to teach forestry practices and surveying.

The Sikes Foundation receives an annual income from timber sales, farm income, the tobacco buyout payments and from gains from the original gift to the foundation.

“About $35,000 a year is spent,” Wright said.

Among the college scholarship recipients from the Sikes Foundation is Howard Wallace, presently commercial horticulture agent with the Extension Service in Whiteville and a former high school vocational agriculture teacher after graduating from N. C. State University.

“Had it not been for the Sikes Scholarship, I would have been in a tight situation,” Wallace says. “I would have to have taken out a loan.”

Wallace says he did not plan on a career in agriculture education when he was growing up on a farm in the Cerro Gordo community. He enrolled in a high school agriculture course, he says, in order to get out of school for a day to visit the N. C. State Fair.

“When I was growing up I had no intention of doing anything on a farm,” he says.

But after being inspired by the enthusiasm of his agriculture teachers, particularly Josh Bledsoe, at West Columbus High School, he changed his mind and aimed a career in some phase of agriculture.

“I was active in FFA (Future Farmers of America) in high school and later taught vocational agriculture in high school,” he says.

His move to the Extension Service, the federal-state-local agency that deals with all things relating to rural, home and agricultural affairs, “was a natural progression,” Wallace says. He is now taking a post-graduate course at N. C. State University and plans to enroll soon in a masters degree program.

Wallace is a good example of Sikes Foundation money continuing to aid people of this area.