Dwelling Place Read online

  The glorious sunlight, the soft south wind, and the green earth and the blue heavens—Mother sees and enjoys it all; but she is too busy now to come out and take a view. If she has visitors, she is sitting at work and in conversation with them, or for an hour or two before dinner takes her book or pen in hand. But sometimes she indulges in a quiet little doze, and gets up refreshed just before we are called to dinner. This meal she usually enjoys, but is never much of an eater; enjoys her food, but in much moderation.

  For an hour or two after dinner she retires, and about the middle of the afternoon makes her appearance dressed for the evening. Then she is full of her uniform cheerfulness, and attracts everybody to her—husband, children, servants, visitors, old and young. The sea breeze is blowing sweetly. Our friends have driven over; the horses have been taken from the carriage, and the drivers have gone to pay their calls in the servants’ quarters. The chairs are set out in the piazza, and here we spend a social hour and take tea. Our friends take leave, and then we have family worship. Sometimes they unite with us before they go. We all retire now to our study or rooms, and when the business of the day is over, then Mother enjoys the quiet, and loves to sit up reading and writing and conversing. She says this is the pleasantest part of the day to her.

  You will recognize all this as very natural—what you have seen many times. Surely our hearts should be full of gratitude to God for all His unnumbered and undeserved favors to us as a family. May we all through riches of grace be saved in a brighter, better, and more enduring world than this!8

  Such, no doubt, was what Charles saw as he observed Mary’s daily routine. But it was also surely what he wanted to see—an ideal image of a plantation home that had long shaped his imagination. All was pleasant, orderly, purposeful, and pious. Family, friends, and servants all had a place in such a home and went about their allotted roles with cheerfulness. Even nature itself—singing birds, domestic animals, “the glorious sunlight, the soft south wind, and the green earth and the blue heavens”—seemed to conspire with Charles’s ideal of home and its ordinary responsibilities and pleasures. For Charles this scene of domestic tranquillity seemed “very natural”—the way things ought to be. Such a vision had deeply influenced his work as a missionary in the settlements, and such a vision was increasingly to dominate his thoughts in retirement and influence his response to any threats to his idealization of Montevideo and Maybank.9

  While Mary was busy with her responsibilities in the gardens and house, Charles took up a new work that was to occupy him for the remainder of his life. He had decided to write a history of the Christian church. The idea, no doubt, had come to him while he was in Columbia. As a professor of church history, he may have thought that he had gotten started on the task with his lectures. But it was an immense undertaking—especially for someone located on a low-country plantation far from any major library. Nevertheless, he took up the task, beginning with the Old Testament and God’s covenant with Abraham. Day by day he would work steadily in his study, writing with his now shaky hand and ordering books for his library as needed. Charles may never have realized that it was an improbable project, but he no doubt knew that it was an important one for him, providing as it did purposeful work and an intellectual focus for the last years of his life.

  In addition to these routines that marked much of their retirement, Charles and Mary also developed—like many a retired couple—an increased interest in their ancestry. Already before their return to Liberty County, Charles had written a distant cousin in Charleston, John Colcock, about Charles’s great-grandfather John Jones, who had been killed in the Revolution. And inquires were made among some of the old slaves—who were valuable repositories of information—about what they could remember of Mary’s mother and of Charles’s mother and her family. Old Mom Clarissa, who lived at the Retreat, reported that Charles’s “mother’s mother was Miss Hannah Splatt, who was married to Mr. John Girardeau,” but the old slave did not know “where and when” they were married or where Charles’s grandmother had come from.10

  A short time after their return, they had gone to the Retreat, a place of such deep memories and sacred ground, and Charles had even paid a visit for the first time in years to old Liberty Hall, where he had been born. He walked into the garden, the same spot, he wrote Charlie, “cultivated by my mother.” He found the “gate in the same place and the leading walk and bed, on each side the same!” He remembered how as a child he gathered flowers in the garden and how he tried to catch “the thistle birds when they went into the cabbage heads.” And he remembered his mother, a young widow, who would take her guitar and walk on the east piazza in the evenings and play and sometimes sing.11

  So Charles and Mary entered vigorously into their retirement years as they began renovations of home and gardens, tried to fill the gaps in their knowledge of their family’s genealogy, and visited the old home places. And Charles, with Mary’s support and encouragement, took up the task of writing his church history. As a couple, they were in a way trying to build a new home with their boys now off in the North and coming home only for occasional visits. But they were also trying to re-create the best and the happiest memories of the home they had known as a family—and even more, they were trying to realize the ideal of a plantation home nurtured by piety, friends, and the beauty of a low-country landscape and sustained by the labors of obedient and cheerful servants. To a remarkable extent Charles and Mary would be successful in these endeavors. For a few short years after their return to Liberty County, they made Montevideo and Maybank places of beauty, warmth, and great attraction for the whites who were privileged to call these places home or who were invited there as guests of a distinguished and hospitable family. But their low-country home was no invulnerable bastion, and its peace and harmony were to sustain deep blows from nature itself and from within the circle of those who were thought to be not only obedient but also privileged slaves of benevolent owners.

  Earlier in the summer of 1854, eight months after Charles and Mary had returned to Liberty County, Roswell King died at Woodville, the Kings’ summer home on Colonel’s Island. His death, Charles wrote, created “a great vacuum in our little community.” He had been a gruff and plainspoken man, famous for his aphorisms. He had written Charles in Philadelphia: “one half the boys raised these days are like the buttons on the back of a coat, of no use at all because they are kept at home to gratify the parents eye. I would rather have a son of mine celebrated for piracy or a Cuban Liberator than for Indolence.” William Maxwell, he wrote in the same letter, was “like a Hen on a hot griddle, not being able to keep his cotton down.” And of Laura, he reported, “I know from her symptoms [she] is in a fair way of getting a Touch of the Times.” In spite of his gruffness, his plain talking, his frequent lack of tact and Victorian refinement, he had been a good friend to Charles and Mary. Some of this was no doubt because of family connections through Susan Cumming and her children. But Charles and Mary also felt close to him because the two families had shared so much as neighbors. Their children had grown up together and had studied together in the little plantation school, and so it was not surprising that Charles would call King on his death “our old and kind friend and neighbor.” Charles and Joe (who was home at the time) “performed the last sad office of friendship, preparing him for his grave,” and Susan made his shroud. King was buried in the Midway cemetery, but he had never had a conversion experience and was not regarded as a Christian. Julia was distraught by this and cried to Mary, “Oh, if there was but one word of comfort!” And Charles lamented that from “a spiritual point of view Mr. King’s death is a very melancholy one! He died as he lived.”12

  Two months after King’s death, as the summer’s crops of rice and cotton were maturing in the fields, a huge hurricane came roaring up the Atlantic coast from the Caribbean. As the winds at Maybank increased to a gale, the family prepared for the storm. Windows and doors were made tight. The winds continued to grow in intensity. Charles looked out th
e house across the Medway marsh, and not a spear of cord grass could be seen above the surging tide. He later wrote Charlie that a “clear rolling sea” was “all around us and reaching away to Bryan, Sunbury, and Palmyra, the whitecaps keeping it in a foam and the driving spray and mist shutting the distant shores from the sight.” Soon the trees around the house began “to fall and to lose their branches. The rain drove into the house under the shingles, through the plastering. All hands securing the windows, tying them hard and fast. Servants with tubs swabbing up the water as it pours into the entry and rooms.” Shutters on the front of the house were suddenly “blown to with a loud report” shattering glass and allowing rain to pour through the broken panes. “Waiters, sheets, etc., crammed in and water shut out.” “There goes the old cedar on the lawn!” wrote Charles. “Poor old fellow, riven from top to bottom, split in two. How the wind roars! The trees are in an agony. Their limbs are torn and twisted off.” Andrew appeared at the front door. Charles yelled above the roar of the storm: “Where are the people?” “Every soul came over with me,” shouted the driver. “Would not stay behind.” They were all in Patience’s house, the newest and most secure house on the lot. “Master,” asked Andrew, “is this a storm or a harrycane?” “Harrycane, Andrew, sure,” said Charles. As the wind grew more violent, all who were in Patience’s house suddenly appeared at the door, having made their way through the fury of the storm. They came in dripping wet. Mary had a large boiler of strong coffee made and gave them all some “so that although most of them were drenched, nobody took cold.”13

  When the storm finally passed, they surveyed the damage. The trees along the avenue were “rent and torn and blown down everywhere.” The causeway to the island had been rendered impassable by the tide flowing fiercely over it. Everywhere fences were flat, but surprisingly no buildings were destroyed at Maybank. Reports began to come in, however, of even greater damage inland. At Montevideo a “new cotton house, the barn, a large shuck house put up last year, and the millhouse” were destroyed, and the renovations at Montevideo were much “thrown back” by the storm. And at Arcadia a corn house and a rice house had been destroyed. Similar reports were received of damage at South Hampton, at White Oak, Lodebar, Lambert, and other surrounding plantations. Miraculously no lives were lost anywhere in the county, but crops were badly damaged everywhere. “Our losses in crops and expenses in repairs will be heavy,” Charles wrote, “so we must make economy the order of the day.” With Charlie at Harvard Law School, with Joe in medical school in Pennsylvania, and with major renovations under way at Montevideo, it was a bad time to lose most of the crop and most of the income for the year. If the storm made “economy the order of the day” for the whites, it made life more vulnerable for those in the settlements, especially for a family at Carlawter.14

  While no one died from the high winds of the hurricane, the storm left in its wake flooded cisterns and stagnating pools of water. From these arose clouds of mosquitoes, intensifying the misery of a yellow fever epidemic that had already broken out in Savannah. Unlike malaria, yellow fever was primarily an urban disease, for its carrier, the blood-sucking Aedes aegypti mosquito, disdained swamps and lakes. Among its early victims in Savannah was Dr. Charlton Wells, the young husband of Mary King. He had left the relative safety of the country to go into the city, saying, “in times of sickness the physician’s post of duty claimed him.” Night and day he was engaged attending the sick, “most of whom were poor people.” Worn with fatigue, he had been drenched when the storm struck and was soon taken with the fever, dying shortly thereafter. Mary Jones wrote Charlie that they had “seen a good deal of him this summer, and a more lovely character is seldom met with: talented and accomplished in his profession, pure-minded, gentle, and affectionate, tender and devoted in all the relations of life, reflecting peace and happiness. Who could fail to love and admire one so truly amiable, accomplished, and gentlemanly?” And then she added: “Poor Mary! God alone can comfort and sustain her! They were all in all to each other, devotedly attached.” And Sarah Howe wrote of her concern for the widowed Mary, “knowing how she loved him with the most uncontrolled affection.”15

  Charlton Wells was not the only young doctor to fall in the line of duty. Dr. Stephen Harris (it was he who had eloped with Emma Jones, provoking Joseph to strike her from his will) had developed a reputation as a skilled physician and was held in high regard in Savannah. When the epidemic struck the city, he did not flee to the safety of the countryside but stayed in the city, tending the sick until he too was struck down by the fever. Emma was devastated. She would later marry again—to the younger brother of Dr. Harris—but when she died in 1913, she would be buried in Savannah beside the one with whom she had fled the Retreat in 1846. The inscription on her tomb would read: “Her body lies beside the husband of her youth. We have loved in life, and in death we will not be divided.”16

  Emma returned to the summer home of her mother in Walthourville and, while the fever still raged in Savannah, persuaded James Newton Jones, her older brother, to go into the city to retrieve some papers. On his return to the county, he stopped at Lodebar to see his brother Henry Hart. Here the fever, contracted in Savannah, struck Jimma, as he was affectionately called. It began with fever, chills, and muscle aches and apparently followed the familiar pattern of liver failure and jaundice. Hemorrhaging began from the gums, nose, and stomach lining. The digested blood, when vomited, looked black, a kind of “ropy fluid, like coffee grounds mixed with a glairy, shining fluid,” while muscle spasms produced excruciating pain. Jimma’s hands blackened, and blood settled under his nails. Charles and Mary were summoned from Maybank, and they hastened to Lode-bar. At his bedside they joined his mother and his wife, together with William and Betsy Maxwell, Susan and Laura, and Henry Hart and his wife, Abby. The doctor had already bled Jimma and had given him much quinine and brandy. Blisters had been applied to his “legs, thighs, stomach, breast, and arms and back of the neck. Every effort made to bring on reaction.” Mary “rubbed his hands and arms incessantly, others his feet.” The doctor said there was no hope. Charles knelt and prayed beside the bed. Jimma stirred and repeated to himself the first two verses of the 103rd Psalm: “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.” He began to sink. His wife, Sallie, horrified by his slipping away, crawled up on the bed beside him trying to hold him back from death by the strength of her love. “Jimma, Jimma,” she cried, “my dear Jimma, speak to me once more. Do you know me? Who am I?” He replied: “My own dear Sallie.” Bending her face nearer still, she cried again: “What do you say?” “My own dear Sallie.” And with his last act of consciousness, he “turn[ed] over to her and fix[ed] his dying eyes upon her!” His body was carried to the Retreat, where he was buried in the family cemetery behind the house, near Joseph’s grave.17

  So death came among the young couples of the county who—only a few years earlier—had flirted and courted on the piazzas at South Hampton and at the Retreat and at weddings in Walthourville. And while Charles and Mary needed no such reminders, these deaths so shortly after their return home were intimations of “How empty and transitory is life, the pursuits of life, the possessions of life! How near we are to God and eternity with all its amazing realities!” 18

  By the summer of 1856 Charlie and Joe were back in Georgia, beginning their professional careers in Savannah. Charlie had graduated from Dane Law School, Harvard, in the class of 1855, and later that year he began practicing law with the family friend John Elliott Ward, the mayor of Savannah. While he quickly made a name for himself as a rising young lawyer, Charlie also turned to archaeology—his old love from his school days on Colonel’s Island. Within three years of his return to Savannah he would publish Indian Remains in Southern Georgia, the first of some eighty papers, pamphlets, and books that were to flow from his prodigious research. Joe, on his part, received his medical degree in 1856 and was soon practicing medicine and s
erving as professor of chemistry at Savannah Medical College. He had already, as a medical student, published four first-rate articles—three in the leading national medical journal, the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, and one in the Smithsonian Institution’s prestigious Contributions to Knowledge. Both of the sons were clearly on their way to distinguished careers, to what Charles and Mary called “usefulness in society.” And both were also deeply a part of a lively social life that was centered in Savannah and that flowed out to Maybank and Montevideo and the surrounding plantations of Liberty County.19

  The most important social event for the Jones family in 1856 was the marriage of Laura Maxwell. She was the beauty of the family, bright, personable, and a lover of a funny story. She would write about the peculiarities of the latest fashions in Savannah, Philadelphia, or New York, or tell of blundering beaux or of a stout Savannah matron who had had leeches applied as a treatment for her rheumatism only to have the leeches curl up and die. Only her Aunt Betsy Maxwell could match her in teasing Laura’s dignified and proper Uncle Charles. Laura was well connected—through her mother, Susan, and her father, Audley, and her stepfather, Joseph Cumming—to a bewildering array of low-country cousins, aunts, and uncles. After the death of her brother Charles Edward, she was the owner with her mother of Lambert plantation and of Social Bluff on Colonel’s Island, and was the sole owner of forty-two slaves. In addition, White Oak and some other thirty slaves were owned by her mother and were anticipated as part of Laura’s inheritance. She had been courted much. Henry Hart Jones had been only one of many to fall in love with her. There had been aspiring young men in Savannah, and a Yankee beau from Philadelphia, and even young Robert Quarterman Mallard had called on her—Laura had called him a “a very smart beau.” But the one who finally won her heart was the Reverend David Buttolph, a handsome young man, a native of New York, and a graduate of Williams College and Columbia Theological Seminary. Buttolph had served two years as the associate pastor with Thomas Smyth at Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston before accepting a call as the pastor of Midway Church in Liberty County. Not long after his arrival in the county, he had started courting Laura. Eliza Mallard, on learning of the attention he was giving Laura and knowing her wealth and social connections, wrote with amusement that he was courting “one of the fattest lambs of his flock”!20