Sophia Marie Friedheim Beers speaks on her family background and her growing up in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Her grandfather, Arnold Friedheim, left Lech, Germany, and after living in Baltimore, Maryland, for two years moved to Salisbury, North Carolina, ca. 1849. He served in the Civil War for the Confederacy and moved to Rock Hill and opened a store there when the war ended. He brought over his brothers Julius and Sam (who ran his own store in Richburg, S.C.) to help him. The interviewee recalls, in great detail, her childhood memories of the department store, which sold nearly every type of item and was the most popular store in town. A. Friedheim and Brother supplied the uniforms for the students at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, before the store closed in 1964. Her grandfather married Sophia Stengel of Germany, and they had twelve children, eleven of whom survived. They were the only Jewish family in Rock Hill at the time; of all the children, only one married a Jew. While the others and their descendants practiced different religions, all were aware and proud of their Jewish heritage. The interviewee's father, Albert, married Marie Louise Yoder, who had come to Rock Hill from LaGrange, Indiana, to teach music at Winthrop College. Their daughter, the interviewee, was an only child and grew up very comfortably with her Jewish and non-Jewish relatives. The family helped sponsor some cousins, the Schwartzes, as refugees from Nazi Germany; they came to live in Rock Hill in 1938. Sophia Marie Friedheim attended Winthrop, worked in the family store, married Paul Dupre and was divorced after sixteen years. She later married a Mr. Beers.
