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Excerpt – Dust Jacket:
In the days when cotton was king, Edisto Island, forty miles southwest of Charleston, South Carolina, was the center of the kingdom. For Edisto’s fertile black soil produced, better than anywhere else, the famous Sea Island cotton, avidly sought by the mill owners of the world. It is said that Edisto cotton was never put on the market; it was contracted for before the seed was pub in the ground.
To Edisto’s planters Sea Island cotton brought almost unbelievable wealth. They built magnificent mansions, set out formal gardens filled with exotic shrubs, entertained lavishly beneath the crystal chandeliers of their dining rooms and ballrooms, and sent their sons to Europe for schooling…
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Cassina Point was the home of Carolina Lafayette Seabrook and James Hopkinson, the young northerner, who fell in love with her and Edisto Island as well. It is said that Carolina preferred social life in the North and that the lumber for the house lay on the spot chosen for their home for three years before she consented to have it built. Cassina Point is owned by Mr. and Mrs. LaRoche Seabrook.
The present Episcopal Church building is the third in which Edisto Islanders have worshipped. The first church was replaced by a new building in 1840; and the second building, having survived the Confederate War, during which it was used by both armies, was destroyed by fire in 1876.
Seaside, now the home of Admiral and Mrs. C.D. Murphey, was once called Locksley Hall and as such was known as a "house of tragedy." Two suicides, two accidental deaths, a probable murder, and a persistent ghost accounted for its former reputation, which has now disappeared with its old name.
"In the name of God and by the authority of the United States Government, we are here to reclaim our church!" proclaimed the Reverend William States Lee after the Confederate War to the astonished Freedmen who had taken over the Presbyterian Church wile its regular congregation had refugeed Up Country during the Federal occupation. Built in the 1830’s, the church is considered one of the most beautiful in the Carolina Low Country.
The Presbyterian Parsonage On Edisto. Henry Bowers’ grant of land for the support of a Presbyterian minister in 1717 marks the beginning of the "oldest uninterrupted Presbyterian organization in South Carolina." Earlier records were destroyed during the Revolutionary War, but the Session Minute Brook provides a continuous history of the years since 1790.
Old House, formerly called Four Chimneys, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Arthur F. Langley, was once owned by the Whaley family. The Palladian door, the fanlight, and Doric columns show the influence of the classical revival on even comparatively simple homes.
Built in 1790 for Ephraim Baynard, Prospect Hill had doors of solid mahogany and doorknobs of silver. Once pursued all the way from the Presbyterian churchyard to Prospect Hill by a "ghost," Baynard himself, years after his death, disturbed the rest of a Negro retainer who slept in one of the basement rooms. The house is now owned by P.H. Whaley of Washington, D.C.
The last remaining slave houses at Cassina Point. Note the similarity in construction of these cabins in the "row" and that of the "big house." Like their master, the servants lived in houses with clapboard sidings, pitched roofs, and ornamental chimneys.
Two orange trees, filled with fruit, grow beside the ruins of Brick House, built in the 1720/s by Paul Hamilton of brick imported from New England. Here, over a hundred years later, the young Northerner John Cornish wooed and won Martha Jenkins, whose family had acquired the home in 1798.
As Edisto’s planters prospered with Sea Island cotton, they built impressive town houses in Charleston, where they resided for the social season. Isaac Jenkins Mikell’s home in the city, now occupied by the Charleston Free Library, is a fine example of the classical revival of the 1850’s.
Inside front cover: The Grandeur of Edisto during the lush days when Sea Island cotton was king is shown in the old print of Bleak Hall, home of the Townsend family for a hundred and fifty years, and the photograph of the approach and formal gardens of Oak Island, one of the Seabrook plantations, here seen shortly after its occupation by Federal troops during the Confederate War.
Inside back cover: The end of an Era at Edisto is here recorded in two old photographs made at Oak Island while it was under Federal occupation during the Confederate War. In the top picture slaves working at raking the cotton scattered by the departing owners to keep it from falling into the hands of the invaders, while soldiers loaf on the wharf. A Yankee gun boat can be seen in the distance. In the bottom picture two slaves and two soldiers take their ease in the sunshine before the plantation office.