The Lowcountry, the areas around Charleston...to Savannah, are teeming with story and history. My grandfather's family were from the Plantation country around Beaufort known as Prince William's  Parish and Indian Land, near the settlements called Yemassee, Pocotaligo, and later the village of McPhersonville, established for planter families in 1800.

My own family is so intense & colorful, I did not have to go to the ancestors to look for inspiration for my painting, but I was drawn by questions. My mother’s old cedar chest full of letters and the box of daguerreotypes, from the steamy little pineland village of McPhersonville in the South Carolina low country during the Civil War, were too intriquing. Also the serendipidous accidents like stumbling upon the tombstone of a Hutson, which is my middle name, in Miami, Florida in 1985, while there taking photographs on assignment in college. That Hutson turned out to be a cousin, ironically, 750 miles from the Carolinas, where I was born. This set into motion a fascination with the ongoing puzzle of my own family history. I have spent hundreds of hours piecing together the family history, graphing out my family ‘tree’ in the attempt to understand the relationships of all the Hutsons & Hays & the Colcocks, and what life was like then, when transportation was by carriage & the steamboat up the river from Beaufort and the islands.

In the fall of 2006, I spent an idyllic two months on Edisto Island, where my mother and step father built a beach cottage in the 1980's. The paintings I came home with reflect my deep sense of home on this unspoiled island. I have no doubt but that part of my connection with Edisto has to do with my ancestor, Dr Henry Woodward, who was an early explorer and friend to the Indians - an interpreter and trader. He was instructed by the King to buy the island for the English, according to Cheves Leland's landmark collection of The Shaftsbury Papers. An Indian was traded for him, perhaps the Edisto chief named Shadoo, or Wommony from Port Royal, in a sort of cultural exchange, while Henry Woodward, whom they called a surgeon, stayed here, learning the languages and customs. He is widely considered the first English settler in South Carolina and an fascinating character about whom I long to know more. I have also been intrigued by Ephraim Mikell and his descendants, an ancestor of several generations here.

One of my own interests now is the period of Southern history that included slavery, so strangely intertwined with my ancestors’ strong and fervent Christianity. I want to know who Pompey was, the family servant who hand carried some of these letters I have, and more about ‘Mam Hannah’ who is often and reverentially referred to in the young mothers’ letters. The stories of the black slaves particularly the strong black women in my own very white past, are mysteriously absent on my ‘family tree’, but their influence in my own life is mammoth. I suspect that mine is not the only Southern family so influenced.

One of the connections I found to Charleston was Joshua Hett Smith's sister, my ggg "Aunt Elizabeth Blanche Smith". who married John Torrans, the merchant, moved to Charleston, and raised a house full of children at 36 Queen Street. She and died in Charleston in 1817, at the rare old age of 82, and is buried with her husband, brother and sister at the Circular Church on Meeting Street. In the summer of 2005 I found where her house had been, in the French Quarter, at Church and Queen, one of the most beautiful and historic corners in Charleston at the spot where St Philips, the Huguenot Church and the Dock Street Theatre convene. Cobblestones, God, and theater... who could want more? Recently, to my great delight, I found that "Aunt Elizabeth's" daughters, Rosella Torrans, and her sister, Mrs Eliza Cochran, were full time artists, who Dr David Ramsay, in 1858, considered "first place among female artists of Charleston. He went on to say that "In landscape painting, they exceed none." (Ramsay's History of South Carolina, Vol II, 1858)

Oil on Canvas 20"x24"	Sisters: Emmeline Colcock Hutson, Charlotte Matilda Hutson & Martha Florida Hutson. For more on the Hutson Family  follow this link....
This is my painting of the house, at Haverstraw, NY, on the Hudson River, near Fishkill, where Joshua Hett Smith my Revolutionary War grandfather lived, when he was accused of treason by aiding Benedict Arnold. He was later exhonerated, but the infamy is renowned. He was a lawyer, well versed in Latin and a gifted writer, and he married a young Charleston girl, Elizabeth, whose father John Gordon married his sister, Catherine. The Smiths, and his sister Martha and her husband Col. Ann Hawkes Hay, entertained and dined those coming to and from West Point on the Hudson River at this house. After 'the Arnold affair" however, all their property was confiscated. Joshua took the children to England to petition the government for reimbursement, but his young wife died soon after he left, at 30, in his words, "a martyr to grief". They were my grandparents many generations back, and their granddaughter was Charlotte Hay, the first family 'Charlotte'.	Based on provenance, I believe this unidentified ambrotype includes John McLeod Martin, Josiah Mikell McLeod (seated in the middle front row) and some of the other Martin brothers of Bindon Plantation.

 

from the Elizabeth Martin Ball papers, passed down from her father, Dr. Thomas Hutson Martin  1892-1965, and today in the possession of Cousin Molly Hutson Ball  we have the will of William Galt Martin,signed in 1847. He own owned Bindon Plantation on the Pocotaligo River, in Prince William's Parish.His will was signed by his daughter Elizabeth Smith Martin,

and Richard Woodward Hutson, and George Chisolm Mackay.

The directions to Bindon Plantation and to Stoney Creek Cemetery are below,

hand drawn by my stepfather, Thomas Joseph Hawthorne, Sr. in the early 1980's.

                                                                                                                 top

     Recommended Resources :

      

         www.southcarolinalowcountry.com

         the Visitors Center, in the restored Frampton House,

         is off I-95 at exit 33 and US17 is very close to Stoney Creek Cemetery

[top]