More Ghosts of Georgetown
Page 4
A dance was held at one of the boardinghouses on the island that night. By the end of the evening, nearly everyone on Pawleys Island knew of the terriers’ heroism.
No one was prouder than the lady who owned them. The male terrier and his smaller female mate were her greatest joy. She brought them along every summer to her family’s house on the island. The family had several dogs, but the terriers were her favorites and her constant companions. She kept them impeccably bathed and groomed, fed them from the table, and talked to them as if they were human. She had spent many hours training them and positively reinforcing their good behavior, with the result that they were exceedingly obedient and well mannered. She included them in as many of her family’s activities as was practical and safe. Disciplined and nurtured as intelligent, sensitive creatures, the terriers—as nearly all dogs will when treated so—developed intelligent, sensitive personalities.
Morning and evening, no matter what the weather, the lady walked her terriers along the shore. Although they had the freedom to leave the veranda of the family’s oceanfront home, cross the high dunes, and romp on the beach at will, this did not equal the pleasure they took in their twice-daily walks with their mistress.
The terriers would race into and out of the shallow water, sometimes paddling seaward for a few minutes before making their way back to shore. There was no end to their delight as they romped with one another, snapping at the foam that always evaporated in their mouths and chasing the shorebirds that never failed to fly out of reach just in the nick of time. They never seemed to run out of energy as they pranced and played during these walks, showing off wildly for their beloved owner.
The day after the terriers saved the toddler, a hurricane swept the coast. It did not make landfall near Pawleys Island, but the gale-force winds, the raging rain, and the danger of hurricane-spawned tornadoes and waterspouts kept everyone on the island securely indoors for two days. The third day dawned with clear blue skies and a stiff breeze that seemed placid compared to the hurricane. At last, it was safe to frolic on the beach once more!
The mistress was delighted to finally have a stroll on the shore with her dogs. The terriers, friskier than ever after having been confined, gallivanted at the edge of the ocean, paddling out and back repeatedly, each time swimming a little farther.
While swimming toward shore, the male terrier was suddenly engulfed by a tremendous wave that came up behind him. Tired from his forays into the ocean, he was unprepared for this onslaught and was rolled under the wave. The fierce undertow then sucked his struggling little form back out, allowing him no chance to come to the surface for air.
Meanwhile, the other terrier did not bark but ran, tail tucked between her legs, up and down the hard-packed sand near the spot where she had last seen her mate. The mistress, fearing her pet was tiring, had been calling him in when the wave overtook him. When he did not surface after being engulfed, she became frantic. She, too, ran up and down the shore adjacent to where she had last seen the dog. Her eyes strained for a glimpse of his dark head, but he had disappeared.
After more than an hour, the lady returned sadly to her house, carrying the remaining terrier in her arms, for it refused to leave the shore on its own.
Late that afternoon, the lady crossed the sand dunes to walk along the ocean, as she did nearly every day. Only now, there was a lone terrier instead of a pair, and both mistress and dog were very sad indeed. Instead of frolicking on the shore, the terrier walked slowly and listlessly at her mistress’s side, occasionally raising her head to gaze dolefully at the ocean.
All at once, the little creature was filled with energy. She raced across the shore to a dark mound partially covered in wet sand. The terrier dug rapidly and quickly unearthed the cold, wet form of her companion. When the lady caught up to the dog, the terrier was pulling her lifeless mate along the sand toward her mistress. Tears fell unchecked from the lady’s eyes as she knelt to caress the wet, sandy fur. Slowly and sadly, she walked back to her house cradling the lifeless dog in her arms. She felt even worse for the remaining terrier, which barked happily and danced around her feet, thinking her mate was being brought home.
A pall fell over the entire family, which sent for a carpenter to build a tiny wooden box. The family lined it with soft blanket material before closing the little form away.
Rather than burying the terrier on the island, the family members took the coffin back to their plantation on the mainland, where they interred the little box in a quiet area of the garden. As the summer was nearly over, they decided not to return to Pawleys Island for the remainder of the season. This decision was not entirely for practical reasons. None of the family wanted to spend time so soon at the place where the cherished pet had died.
The surviving terrier suffered a worse bereavement than anyone in the family. Day and night, she whined and pawed the door until she was allowed outside, at which time she went straight to her companion’s grave. The grieving dog could not be persuaded to leave the site, but had to be carried away no matter how long she had been sitting there. Nor could the dog be persuaded to eat. Despite all the love and tender care lavished upon her, she fell deeper into melancholy.
After less than two weeks, the lone terrier died, lying forlornly on the grave of her beloved mate. Another wooden box was made. Soon, there were twin graves in the garden. Petite marble stones were made to commemorate the final resting place of the two heroic dogs.
The following summer, the family made its annual move to Pawleys Island. Although everyone still missed the terriers, their quiet sadness had evolved into a wistful nostalgia. The terriers’ mistress was now able to remember them with a smile rather than with tears.
Not long after the family’s arrival, the nanny from a neighboring oceanfront house called on the mistress. She told the lady that her dogs were playing unattended on the beach. The nanny had been about to leave the shore with her young charges when the terriers had run down to the water near the delighted children. She had called the dogs but had not been able to get them to come back to the houses. Reaching the top of the dunes with the children, she had turned to call the dogs once more, but they were gone. Knowing that the lady would not want her dogs running loose, the nanny had come to tell her of their whereabouts.
The lady could not help smiling fondly at the description of the dogs. Appreciating the nanny’s concern, she told her that these must be the pets of another, for hers had died nearly a year ago.
As the summer progressed, however, reports of her free-running terriers came to her from children who had played with the dogs during previous summers. These were the same dogs, the children innocently insisted, except that they played without barking and disappeared before they could be petted.
Still assuming the terriers in question belonged to another summer family, the lady began hoping to get a look at them. One evening, she was sitting atop the highest dune separating her home from the seashore, having just returned from the west veranda of her house, where she had watched a spectacular sunset over the creek with her family. She had just settled down on her high, sandy perch to view the twilight over the Atlantic when two dancing, prancing little creatures caught her eye where the surf met the hard-packed shore. Her terriers! Without another thought, she ran down the dune calling the dogs’ names.
At the sound of her voice, the terriers stopped abruptly and pricked their ears. Then, in one motion, they bounded toward their mistress and ran in huge circles around her, pausing only to leap into the air and prance on their hind feet.
Arms held wide, the lady laughed out loud as the lively pair frolicked silently around her. When she was sure they must be exhausted and ready to lie down panting, they vanished! As far as she could see up and down the empty beach, no dogs were in view.
Many more times during the summers of her long life, the lady saw the terriers. Each visit was unexpected. She saw them by moonlight, in the heat of the afternoon, and in the misty early morning, but most often at twi
light. Never was she able to touch them or hear their barks, but the dogs never failed to cause her heart to sing with joy. Fleeting as their appearances were, the dogs always appeared vibrant, alive, and exuberant.
Over the years, the lady and her family passed away. The house they summered in became the seasonal home of others who loved the island. The terriers, however, continued to frolic silently on the stretch of beach where they had once romped with their mistress and become heroes for saving the life of a helpless toddler.
Now, a century later, island residents who have heard the legend of the terriers know the fruitlessness of trying to catch these frisky creatures and return them to their owner. The phantom dogs and their mistress are occupants of another time in the genial history of Pawleys Island.
Prospect Hill
_____________________Loved and cherished through the last two centuries, Prospect Hill is home to the ghosts of a pair of former owners from two very different times in the plantation’s history. One ghost is that of a benevolent mistress from Prospect Hill’s glory days. The other is from the forlorn post—Civil War years, when the plantation was close to being lost by a man who desperately wanted to keep it.
Low country rice production increased following the Revolutionary War. More and more planters settled along the rivers of Georgetown County to cultivate the lucrative golden grain. They built elegant plantation homes overlooking the dark waters. Lush gardens and hundreds of acres of rice fields kept the plantations thriving. The planters entertained lavishly and traveled extensively. Most of them owned several fine homes in diverse locations in addition to their plantation manors. It was not uncommon for a planter to own a home on one of the sea islands off Georgetown, an “upcountry” or mountain retreat, and townhouses in both Georgetown and Charleston.
During the grand days of the eighteenth century, Prospect Hill rose magnificently from the fertile soil along the Waccamaw River. Owned as a separate property first by Joseph Allston, born in 1735, the plantation was left to his son Thomas, born in 1764. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Thomas married his cousin Mary Allston. The couple built the two-story Prospect Hill manor house and, with the help of an English gardener, landscaped elaborate formal gardens adjacent to it.
Thomas died in 1794, leaving Mary a childless widow with a 550-acre rice plantation. Once she began managing the property, Mary soon knew most of Prospect Hill’s more than five hundred slaves by name. Though slaves on some other plantations were treated badly, Mary soon became legendary for her benevolence.
After several years, she married Benjamin Huger, Jr., the son of Major Benjamin Huger, a Revolutionary War hero. A politically important man of French Huguenot descent, the elder Huger had hosted the Marquis de Lafayette in his North Island home during the war. Benjamin Jr. was a prominent political figure as well, serving in the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Fourteenth Congresses of the United States. He was also a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1798 and 1799 and from 1808 through 1812. A member of the South Carolina Senate from 1818 through 1823, he served as that body’s president from 1819 through 1822.
After a summer tour of New England to celebrate their marriage, he and Mary settled into a busy but blissful union at Prospect Hill. They traveled widely in political circles and hosted important persons at the plantation during the early 1800s.
Their most notable social and political honor came in 1819, when Prospect Hill was an overnight stop on the national tour of President James Monroe. The fifth president of the young nation left Washington on March 30 to visit the country’s most influential cities. His entourage included Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and his wife and children; Samuel Gouverneur, the president’s private secretary and future son-in-law; and Major General Thomas Pinckney, who would host the president at his El Dorado Plantation on the South Santee River.
The party was met at the South Carolina line by a governor’s aide and a committee from All Saints Waccamaw. Traveling by carriage, it reached Prospect Hill on the morning of April 21. After a full and joyous evening of dining and entertainment, the party spent the night. The members awakened the next morning to a splendid breakfast, then prepared to embark for Georgetown, where they would enjoy another day of grand events in the president’s honor, including a welcoming address written by Benjamin Huger.
Departing Prospect Hill, the presidential party walked on a fine red carpet the Hugers had laid from the steps of the manor house down the entire terraced quarter-mile bluff to the canal, where a plantation barge waited. The barge soon cut through the dark waters of the Waccamaw with flags flying proudly, lavishly decorated in red, white, and blue. It was poled by livery-clad servants.
Benjamin Huger, Jr., did not live a long life. When he died in 1823, Mary found herself a childless widow in charge of her great plantation once more. Doubting now that she would ever raise a family, she threw herself into the continued development of Prospect Hill’s gardens and the welfare of her beloved servants.
Some years later, Mary was diagnosed with a rare, incurable, lingering disease. She did not cloister herself away, but worked even harder to make sure Prospect Hill and all who lived there would prosper after her death. When her illness finally forced her to remain near her bed, she took to spending as much time as possible on the small upstairs portico near her room. From this vantage point, she could look down upon her life’s work and be seen by the slaves she was too weak to join outside.
In addition to grieving over their mistress’s illness, the servants at Prospect Hill dreaded what might become of them after she passed away. Since Mary had no children to inherit Prospect Hill, the cruel facts of slavery dictated that they would have a new master when she was dead and buried. The new owner might treat them just as kindly as “Miss Mary” always had. Or he might treat them indifferently or cruelly. Or he might divide Prospect Hill, selling the slaves to distant plantations and tearing apart their families. They might even have a master who lived elsewhere, leaving their fate in the hands of a hardhearted overseer.
Mary’s death in 1838 cast a pall over Prospect Hill, a sad silence punctuated only by the mournful spirituals sung with great feeling by her hundreds of slaves. During the nights following her death, small groups of them gathered at the boatman’s house, located between the manor house and the Waccamaw River at the head of a canal. Sitting beneath the stars on the wood-plank landing, they sang and prayed, pondering their fate. The comforting sight of the light that had long burned in Miss Mary’s bedroom was gone, leaving the dark facade of the mansion as a poignant reminder of her passing. Those who were old enough to remember back nearly two decades reminisced about the grand visit of President Monroe.
On one of these nights, a slave gazed toward the darkened mansion and, to his surprise and awestruck delight, saw the glowing figure of a lady who could be no other than the beloved Miss Mary standing on the upstairs portico.
Dressed in flowing white and illuminated by the moonlight, the figure was not frightening, for she was a familiar sight to all the slaves. Many nights during the years preceding her death, they had seen Miss Mary standing alone on her portico in her white nightclothes, gazing across the Prospect Hill gardens toward the river. To see their beloved mistress once more was a sign, the slaves knew, that she was still caring for them and that their home was secure.
Shortly thereafter, all of Prospect Hill—slaves included—was purchased by Colonel Joshua John Ward of Brookgreen Plantation. Being familiar with the integrity of the Ward dynasty, the servants knew they had no worries as to the new owner’s treatment of them. They were immensely relieved that their homes and families would remain intact.
Of course, the slaves who saw the loving ghost of Miss Mary and celebrated the Wards’ ownership of their home had no way of knowing that they and their children would be free men and women within three decades. Neither did they know that a Ward heir would come to love Prospect Hill so much that he would rather die than lose it.
Many planters gave up and moved away, selling their plantations and seashore residences at low postwar prices. Others sold everything except their declining plantations and stayed on. They struggled to make a living with the help of former slaves who did not want to leave their lifelong homes and now worked for their former masters for wages. Unable to maintain the rice fields that had made them wealthy, some destitute planter families raised chickens and grew vegetables on their formerly manicured front lawns just so they could have food. Many families lost their plantations for lack of money with which to pay property taxes.
Although Colonel Joshua John Ward had died in 1852, his vast holdings were not dispersed to his eleven children until 1867, after the Civil War had ended and every child had come of age. At the time of his death, the tremendously wealthy Ward had been one of the largest slaveholders in the South, but the war had vastly depleted his empire. In order to fulfill his bequests to his daughters, the family’s spacious Charleston townhouse and their beloved summer retreats—a mountain manor in Flat Rock, North Carolina, and a cottage on Pawleys Island—had to be sold. A plantation was given to each Ward son, according to the colonel’s will. The son who was heir to Prospect Hill fulfilled his father’s wish that a Ward should one day inherit what the childless Hugers had left behind.
Owning Prospect Hill after the Civil War was vastly different from the lifestyle in which the young Ward heir had been raised. His primary responsibility was simply keeping the plantation out of bankruptcy. There were no lavish entertainments or luxuries. Faithful servants still lived at Prospect Hill, but their work was bought, not owned. The heir made a written agreement with the former slaves that he would support them until the crops were harvested. In return, the freedmen would work the plantation and receive half the crops.