Flat Rock of the Old Time

Description

A documentary history of a settlement adopted by Lowcountry gentry escaping the heat of weather and war

The intoxicating "champagne air" of Flat Rock, North Carolina, captivated residents of lowcountry South Carolina

in the nineteenth century because it offered them respite from the sickly, semitropical coastal climate. In Flat Rock of the Old Time, editor Robert B. Cuthbert has mined the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society to publish a documentary history of the place and its people. While many visitors came and went, others chose to become permanent residents. Among the Flat Rock settlers were some of the most distinguished South Carolina gentry: Blakes, Rutledges, Hugers, and Middletons.

They established the Episcopal parish church of St. John in the Wilderness Church, where many of them are buried. They also supported a local economy that helped provide livelihoods to native residents who supplied them with goods and services. Visiting each other daily, they swapped news and gossip, sharing their joys and burdens. Lowcountry families refugeed to Flat Rock during the Civil War, thereby escaping the devastation of the coast but not the revolutionary consequences of the war, such as emancipation, occupation, and economic collapse. And through it all they wrote letters. Some refugee-residents sent off missives every day, describing the delicious weather, the activities of their neighbors, and the entwining relationships of family, faith, business, and recreation that sustained Flat Rock.

The century chronicled in Flat Rock of the Old Times is viewed with a combination of nostalgia and clear-sightedness, not only by Cuthbert but also by his correspondents. Guided by the editor's copious introduction, annotations, and textual apparatus, readers experience the conjunction of people and place that was Flat Rock.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Civil War Period
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Winter rest
• St. John in the Wilderness
• On the Way Home
• Superiority (short story)
• I Wish (manhwa)
• His Family
• William Porcher Miles
• Vestry
• Pretty Face
• Picturesque
• Henry William Herbert
• Christian Church
• Old Fashioned
• History of the Americas
• United States
• Malet
• Kruger
• Carl Sandburg
• John Edwards Holbrook
• Washington Irving

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611176476
• Langue: English

Extrait

FLAT ROCK OF THE OLD TIME
FLAT ROCK
OF THE OLD TIME
Letters from the Mountains to the Lowcountry, 1837-1939
EDITED BY
Robert B. Cuthbert
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-646-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-647-6 (ebook)
Front cover photograph of Flat Rock, NC,
courtesy of the Library of Congress.
For A.L.C.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Editorial Note

Introduction
One
1837-1852
Two
1862-1865
Three
1865-1866
Four
1870-1879
Five
1880-1889
Six
1890-1899
Seven
1900-1912
Eight
1914-1939

Epilogue
Cast of Characters
Genealogies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Twenty years ago at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston, I opened for the first time a box of letters from members of the Middleton-Cheves family. I ve been returning to those boxes ever since. These two families, connected by marriage, were, in the nineteenth century, large coastal rice planters. To escape the dreaded malarial fever and the exhausting summer heat, they sought refuge in the Appalachian settlement of Flat Rock, North Carolina. The families were prodigious correspondents, keeping in touch with Charleston by weekly-often, daily-letters, and they religiously saved every one, amounting to thousands, covering the period from 1837 to 1939, a family history of a century.
Mostly for the reading pleasure, I began copying some of these letters in notebooks, but also to please my friend Elise Pinckney, a Charlestonian who since childhood had spent summers at Flat Rock with her family at Hemlocks on Rutledge Drive. She and I took many excursions in those delightful summer days in the mountains-picnics and hikes. That is how I came to know Flat Rock. It was Lise who guided my hand with an affection I will never forget.
My notebooks began to fill, and in the winter of 2010 I had the idea for producing a book of letters. Karen Stokes, the archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society and a published author and authority on the Civil War, offered to type the letters from my pencil copies with their erratic punctuation, spelling, and ellipses. With her patience and persistence, 233 pages appeared, and I felt we had made a book; Karen was truly its godmother.
I ve known Steve Hoffius almost forty years. He too is a published author, an editor, and a partner in a publishing company. There came a period when the typed manuscript required a bit of polishing. The essential message veered away into verbiage that lost the reader s interest. Steve, with a skilled ear, knew when to save the pulp in a paragraph and discard the rind. We spent many hours in the surgical procedure to keep our letters vibrant and yet faithful to the writers intentions. To chronologically arrange a book of letters in which many are undated, where only internal information may hint at the year, is to face hours of speculation and uncertainty. That was a great challenge. Steve took on the onerous labor of shaping the structure of the book by chapters, arranged for maps and photographs, and negotiated with the requirements of the publisher, never with impatience or discord: I have no words to express my appreciation.
Many Saturday mornings were spent at the South Carolina Historical Society. The staff were wonderfully helpful, friendly, and tolerant of my slow paper-and-pencil style while laptops worked all around me. I have forgotten many names, but those I remember I think of as family members, especially Susan Dick Hoffius, Lisa Hayes, Karen Stokes, Pat Hash, Mike Coker, Neal Polhemus, Pat Kruger, Mary Jo Fairchild, Virginia Ellison, and Molly Inabinett.
I am privileged to use several rare photographs in the book, and other written material, and here acknowledge the generosity of the donors: Elise Pinckney; Mrs. Lawrence Lee, who made copies of correspondence between Langdon Cheves and I on Lowndes; Mrs. Frank P. Rhett, who provided an image of Daniel Blake of Combahee and the Meadows; Mrs. A. B. Peterson, for the photograph of a painting of John Parker s Rockworth; Mrs. Philip Ambler, for an image of Frederick Rutledge; Mrs. Thomas Pinckney, for giving permission for the use of Captain Thomas Pinckney s reminiscences; Henry Burke, for a Lowndes family genealogy; Dr. Alexander Moore, for his own notes on Flat Rock; John Cudd of Hendersonville, for generously sharing information he had gathered on Farmer s Inn; and the Henderson County Public Library, for the images of Judge Mitchell King and Mr. McAlpin s house. I am grateful to Paul F. Rossmann for his skillful laying out of the two maps included here, essential contributions to this volume.
My own good fortune at the South Carolina Room of the Charleston County Public Library led me to Lish Thompson, Linda Bennett, Dot Glover, and Molly French. These charming ladies instructed me in the wizardry of the perpetual calendar and the riches of the Internet.
An inordinate amount of my time was spent in the offices of the register of mesne conveyance in Hendersonville and Asheville, North Carolina-a necessity, a challenge, a frustration, but mostly a final reward, with a willing staff at hand.
Editorial Note
The letters in this volume have been divided into eight chapters arranged chronologically. An introductory heading reflects the new material, community news, and the affairs of the summer people. Unless noted otherwise, all the letters are among the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston. Occasional gaps appear in the chronology of the letters-for instance, from 1852 to 1862. Dr. Charles M. Cheves bought Acton Briars in 1854 and died in December of the following year. He left a wife, Isabella, and four children, none older than seven. Later, Acton Briars would be the source of the bulk of this correspondence, but not yet. Also, no letters appear between 1866 and 1870 because so many lowcountry families had lost virtually all their male heads of households in the Civil War. Women and children would not have stayed in Flat Rock by themselves. For decades, though, the households were dominated by women and most of these letters-the news and gossip, the viewpoints and perspectives-are theirs.
The letters have been edited to reflect the changes in Flat Rock and in the families resident there. A great deal of the correspondence was intensely personal-health woes, inquiries as to individuals travel plans-and much of this has been removed, the excisions identified by ellipses. Unedited, all these letters would fill double these pages, and while the editor has enjoyed perusing all of them, he has chosen not to inflict them on the reader. Likewise, a multivolume set would be necessary to hold the full correspondence. Paragraph breaks have occasionally been inserted for easier reading. Misspellings have not been corrected. Salutations have been removed to save space.
Unfortunately, many of the letters from Isabella Cheves to her son Langdon in the 1880s and 1890s were not dated, and are here dated cautiously, based when possible on their interior information. Isabella s preference for pencil and cheap tablet paper has presented a challenge not easily mastered. Legibility varies among the correspondents-Langdon s writings are clear until he passes his eighth decade-and occasional inscrutable words are replaced with the word illegible in brackets.
In this introduction and in the notes to the correspondence, reference is often made to land transactions: so many acres were purchased one year and resold another year. All of that information was gained from years spent searching through the records maintained by the register of mesne conveyance, primarily in Hendersonville, Henderson County, North Carolina.
INTRODUCTION
They were a grand race those gentlemen of the old time. Self willed and overbearing perhaps, but with no meanness or paltryness about them. Theirs was the strength of the lion.
Langdon Cheves, 27 October 1905, on hearing of the death of Richard Henry Lowndes (1815-1905)
A B RIEF H ISTORY OF O LD F LAT R OCK AND I TS P EOPLE
A traveler in the early 1800s coming up from South Carolina to the crest of the Blue Ridge would have discovered a country of great natural beauty and an invigorating climate. Scattered settlers had already cleared home sites among these rich forests of pine, hemlock, and oak. A small farm was identified by a tight log cabin or house, with a cow, a horse, chickens, and a few pigs, along with a modest orchard of plum and cherry, and several rows of corn, potatoes, cabbage, and beans. A little distance away, Kalmia and rhododendrons sheltered a fast stream of pure water. Along the threaded creeks of the flatlands, the soil was particularly fertile and suited for crops. Neighbors lived some distance away. Dirt roads cut through the woods, disappearing over the undulating countryside. While the far views of high mountains might tempt the dreamer, the settler s life was too severe to yield to romanticizing.
As the settlement grew, there was need for a geographical identity, and the name chosen, an obvious one, was Flat Rock, for the several acres of bare granite coming to the surface on both sides of the main road. When travelers reached the rock, they were in Flat Rock. Until recently, Native Americans had used the site for ceremonies, but they were now almost entirely gone, moved west first by the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785 and finally in the Trail of Tears in 1838. In 1931 Langdon Cheves, who had spent time at Flat Rock since before the Civil War, replied to an inquiry, No Indians at Flat Rock in my time, except Cooper s and the last of the Mohicans! 1
The earliest known commercial enterprise in Flat Rock was Colonel John Earle s