From These Roots

Silas Franklin “Frank” Boyles was born on April 4, 1869, in Pilot Mountain, North Carolina to parents John Henry Boyles and Sarah Needham Boyles. The Boyles family were farmers, and Frank was near the middle of nine kids. He attended Wake Forest College but did not graduate. He also managed a baseball team for a while in his early 20s.

                Boyles married a widow named Irene Crumpler Rainey on January 25, 1898. Irene’s first husband and her seven-year-old daughter both died of typhoid fever within days of each other.  At the time of their marriage, Boyles was teaching at Pinnacle Academy and farming. The couple would go on to have seven children together including Frank, Carlisle, Elsie, Bessie, Willie, Winnie, and Edith.

                Boyles and North Greenville’s 3^rd principal, O.J. Peterson, both attended Wake Forest, and both had taught at Pinnacle Academy. It is very possible that they knew each other and that is how, in 1900, Boyles came to North Greenville High School to teach under Principal Peterson. In 1902, Boyles was promoted to principal after Peterson resigned from the position.

Boyles continued the military component that had begun under Peterson and enrollment in the school continued to rise reaching around 100 students. He also tried to continue an associational newspaper which he named the “North Greenville Mirror”, but it was not as successful as Peterson’s “North Greenville Courier”. The very first graduation ceremony was held in 1901 under the leadership of Boyles, and a full account of the day was printed in the “North Greenville Mirror”. Lastly, Boyles started a campaign at North Greenville for the construction of a boys’ dorm which was desperately needed.

Boyles only served as principal for one school year before leaving to begin a new boarding school named Oak Knob Academy with Rev. I.W. Wingo in Campobello, South Carolina. However, the school seems to have closed after just one year. The closing of Oak Knob also seemed to be the end of Boyles’s career in education.

Boyles’s next venture would become his career for most of his life. He became an insurance salesman in Greenville for a company named the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company. He seemed to do quite well in the business and in 1917 he won a cash prize of $50 for the 3^rd highest new business sales in the company.

Around 1919, Boyles transferred to the Charlotte, North Carolina office of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company. In 1923, the family was living in Monroe, North Carolina when their youngest daughter unexpectedly passed away at the age of 20 from type 1 diabetes. A few years later, in 1929, Boyles lost his wife as well.

In 1938, Boyles moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina and became a salesman for the National Wire Goods Manufacturing Company. He died a year later on September 27, 1939. He is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Charlotte, North Carolina next to his wife. In 1963, one wing of the former men’s dorm, Lawton Hall, was named in honor of Silas Frank Boyles. Lawton Hall was torn down around 1981.