Berlin Wall in South Carolina

It is a strange thing to find pieces of the Berlin Wall standing on a front lawn in upstate South Carolina, but here they are. Two tall concrete segments of the barrier that once split the German capital were brought to Spartanburg and set up by Menzel, a German textile machinery company one of the older foreign manufacturers in the state. Between the slabs fly the German and American flags, with two bronze plaques.

One carries John Kennedy's nineteen sixty-three declaration at the wall, I am a Berliner. The other carries Ronald Reagan's challenge from nineteen eighty-seven, when he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and demanded, Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Two years later the wall fell.

These fragments, once symbols of division, now stand as a quiet reminder of how quickly a thing built to last forever can crumble.