What These Walls Have Seen

On a few square miles in the heart of a gated community in a beach resort town visited by millions every year lies a relic of the past and of the Old South.  Most people that live on the island of Hilton Head, South Carolina have no idea that it exists- even people who live in the very neighborhood will pass by it without even realizing that it is there.  In its current state, it is nothing grand, simply a melancholy set of unremarkable standing stones.  But in the past, it flourished, and even now, it serves as a reminder that though the days of the plantations are long gone, their impact on the history of the South and its people will not be forgotten.

The Stoney-Baynard House was built in 1793 by James Stoney, Jr., son of Revolutionary War hero Captain John Stoney, on a ridge overlooking Calibogue Sound.  “Captain Jack”, as he was known, came into the possession of thousands of acres on the southwest end of the island, and his sons James and John, a merchant who lived in Charleston, sought to establish a large-scale plantation on this land.  Just like many other farms in the wet and humid Atlantic South, the conditions were optimal for growing rice and cotton.  The house was “built local” in the purest sense of the word- it was made of tabby bricks, which used shells and sand from the nearby beaches as the base, and then coated in white stucco for an elegant appearance, and it was positioned toward the sea so that cool breezes could ventilate the house in the oppressive summer months.  Behind it sat the house slaves’ quarters and the kitchen; although those weren’t given the same gleaming finish as the main house, they were still built of exactly the same sturdy tabby brick.

Touring the ruins today gives you a good idea of the conditions that James would have found his father’s property in when he first inherited it.  Crabgrass and mosses grow wild and thick, and palmettoes and live oaks bunch together so closely it’s impossible to see the shore that is less than a mile away.  However, in his time the island would have been even more remote than it is now- a bridge from the island to the mainland wasn’t built until 1956.  Just getting workers, whether slave or free, building supplies, and food to the property at all would have been a Herculean task.  And yet the brothers managed to not only do that, but clear the overgrowth of vegetation, build a beautiful house, fertilize the sandy soil, and plant their first crops.  By 1800, Braddock’s Point Plantation, as it was called, was a successful agricultural enterprise. 

Certain grand old houses in the South are sometimes referred to as a feature of the land instead of a residence because they have sat there for so long, but in the case of this house, it was literally built of the land which it now stood on.  The fact that the house was built out of tabby was a necessity rather than a stylistic choice- they made do with what they had.  Southern culture is tied to land- everything revolves around where a man chooses to make his home, because with only a few exceptions it would be where he chose to live out the rest of his days.  In this case, he lived in the exact same land he was in charge of cultivating.

Sadly, as the risky business of agriculture is wont to do, the plantation was an unsuccessful enterprise in the long run.  When John died in 1839, the bank seized the property to pay his debts.  The new owner of the plantation would be William E. Baynard, a planter who used the land to grow the famed Sea Island cotton, a genus with long, silky fibers that made luxurious and expensive textiles and clothing.  Baynard grew rich off this cotton, but the glory days of the plantation would be cut short by war.  The Union occupied Beaufort County in 1861-2, and the house was used as a headquarters.  At the site today, you can see where the soldiers dismantled out-buildings to use the bricks as a base for their tents.  Although the house was spared from the destruction of the Yankees, in 1869 it burned to the ground.  The Baynard family was never able to recover the agricultural operations at the property because of the lack of labor, and the plantation changed hands several times.  By 1949, the fields had disappeared completely under the trees, and the property was sold to a Georgia-based venture that planned to use the land for logging.  But as the island slowly began to develop, the son of one of the executives in this company saw a future for the land to be used residentially instead.

Charles E. Fraser was a smooth-talking son of southeastern Georgia who had recently returned to his home from a sojourn at Yale Law School.  He saw potential in the thousands of acres that his father’s company held on the island­- not for logging but as a planned community.  The Island was fast-growing, as a bridge to the mainland had just been completed; that same year, in 1956, Fraser bought the controlling stake in the logging company and set to work planning the area that would come to be known as Sea Pines Plantation.  Fraser, as a member of one of the Old South’s illustrious families, understood the importance of preserving history, especially Southern history, and more importantly, he understood that at that time a historical site was of huge interest to potential buyers (the more cynical will say that this was the only thing that motivated him, but that is neither here nor there).  Sites such as the ruins of the plantation and the old Gullah graveyard were marketed on brochures to attract residents.  His strategy paid off, and by 1958 the first lots had sold.  One can put this into perspective with what would likely happen today if a land-development company were to buy a large tract of land with an Old Southern plantation house on it to build a neighborhood.  At best, they would bulldoze the old house.  At worst, they would make a big show about how their new community would attract a diverse and progressive group of residents who are not racist and evil like the people who lived in that house, and then bulldoze it.  But the Fifties and Sixties were a different time, one where people actually had some respect for history and their forebears.  And so, the once-wild and untamed land that was formerly Braddock’s Point Plantation once again became prosperous, but in this case, instead of crops, a community had grown on the plantation.

Sea Pines today is still a beautiful community, but there’s just something that seems a little bit missing about it.  In 1956, there were no gated beachfront communities.  Today, they’re everywhere.  The ruins of the house lie in the center of the property, but tucked back behind a line of trees and I doubt that most people who live there have gone to visit it, or even know it exists.  Even though Sea Pines is not marketed as a retirement community, it seems to attract the same kinds of people as every 55+ Stepfordville in Florida does: retirees who blow in from some failing Rust Belt city up north who will spend their remaining years on this earth sitting on the beach, drinking their troubles away, complaining about the weather, complaining about their neighbors, pushing their small dogs around in strollers, playing golf poorly, spending their Social Security checks at the kinds of stores that charge $20 for a hamburger or $30 for a scented candle, not talking to their children, or just sitting on their porch staring into space until they expire.  It’s easy to blame Fraser for this- Sea Pines was, as one of the earliest planned communities in the South, the prototype for every carpetbagger trap and retirement hellhole in the Sun Belt.  But I don’t think it’s fair to place all the blame on Fraser, and I think he would probably be horrified to see what his creation had become.  He built Sea Pines and sold it under the pretense that home buyers would be living among history.  Sadly, just like almost everywhere else, this history and Southern history has been subsumed under the rising tide of a “culture”, if you can even call it that, based on consumerism.

Perhaps it is for the best that the house is located where it is, ignored and a ruin- because of that, no placards will stand beside it pointing out the evil of the owners of the house and of the Southern people, no politician will attempt to have the house demolished, and no black-shirted mob will come to smash the windows and spray-paint the walls.  Still, it’s almost as painful for the house to be slowly forgotten about.  Just think, for a second, about the house itself.  Imagine what has grown up around it in the many hundreds of years it has been there, or how time has passed.  Imagine how it became a plantation from nothing, and then a burnt ruin, and then a thriving community.  It has lived through the War of 1812, tens of Presidents, the War Between the States, the bombing of Hiroshima, and a man being sent to the moon.  It’s especially ironic that it survived burning only to fall victim to apathy of those around it.

However, it’s also a good reminder of how nothing physical will last forever.  We, as sons and daughters of the South and students of history, can preserve homes and monuments and battlefields and all other sorts of sites as long as we can, but eventually they will no longer stand.  It is our job to keep these sites and the people who lived in them alive as memories, and to pass them down to our children, and for them to pass them down to theirs, and so on.  So, even if some place like the Stoney-Baynard House is demolished and buried, it will never die so long as our memories don’t, and neither will the South itself.  We owe it to them.

-By Kaoru and originally published at The Solitary City

Sources:

https://www.scpictureproject.org/beaufort-county/stoney-baynard-plantation.html

https://www.hiltonheadislandsc.gov/ourisland/history.cfm