By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, early, and it is cold in Port Royal. This morning I have my coffee, Starbuck’s Breakfast Blend, and a view of our sun-streaked back yard. This morning I also have the book, “Northern Money and Southern Land — The Lowcountry Plantation Sketches of Chlotilde R Martin,” published by the South Carolina University Press in 2009.
In “Northern Money” we learn that Northerners — mostly stock brokers, insurance executives and railroad magnates — began drifting into coastal South Carolina at the turn of the last century.
“Before the end of the century tens of thousands of acres were gathered up by clubs to serve northern hunters. Mrs. Martin claimed the first of them, the Pineland Club in Jasper County, was started about 1877.” Apparently there were six members from Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Baltimore who bought 13,000 acres that had been part of Jasper’s Cotton Hall Plantation.
“In 1893 a group of sportsmen from New York, New Jersey and Pittsburg completed a deal for 32,000 acres that would become the Okeetee Club.”
These were successful business leaders who would come down between Thanksgiving and February. “Almost all of them coming for sport, especially hunting (usually birds, not deer) though no doubt the cheap land prices were also attractive..”
“They came down with Purdy (or Boss) shotguns costing as much as $60,000; piling into mule-drawn wagons and led by dogs sniffing for quail,” Thayer Rivers tells me.
“These dogs would locate a covey — point to the hidden birds — and the men in their British driving caps and green “Wellies” would shoot as birds took flight.”
“At 11:00 they would pause for consume’ and cheese and maybe a little “shooting sherry.” This was followed by bacon wrapped quail over charcoal at 1 or 2 in the afternoon.”
Jasper County was a prime target for these clubs; although others were established in Georgetown, Beaufort and Colleton counties.
Chelsea Plantation — on the western side of the Broad River Bridge just behind the Beaufort-Jasper Water and Sewer Authority — was originally owned by John Heyward, who, according to Chlotilde Martin, was “the possessor of a rare beauty, feminine like in its delicacy.”
John Heyward died in 1839 having been thrown from his horse; but he apparently treated his slaves with an unusual degree of compassion.
“The same records say that he (Heyward) was ‘known throughout the Carolinas as the master whose slaves never knew their bondage, so humane was their treatment.’”
The Chelsea Club came into existence in 1891 and its membership included insurance magnate, Frederick Gaston; utilities owner George Heyward; railroad builder George Slade; and Harold Stanley who was chief executive of Morgan Stanley and also a principal at J. P. Morgan and Company.
At this point Chelsea had 20,000 acres, and its members had their own dogs, some like “Stylish Pat” and “Old Mike,” who were prize winners.
In 1936, the old antebellum house burned to the ground, and shortly thereafter Chelsea’s vast acreage was purchased by Marshall Field. Field, one of the wealthiest men in the country, owned newspapers, banks and other businesses including a huge flagship department store on State Street in downtown Chicago.
In 1968, Beaufort and Jasper Counties made national headlines in terms of their endemic hunger and widespread poverty-related disease. Ruth Field, widow of Marshall Field III, gifted 5 acres (of Chelsea) to Comprehensive Health for the 1st of several clinics.
Thereafter, Field gave $25,000 to Comprehensive Health for its home health workers — professionals who went into the homes of those patients who had no transportation.
“Once or twice every year, I would meet with Ruth Field at Chelsea,” says Thomas Barnwell who was the Director at Comprehensive Heath, “and she would want to know everything about our agency.”
When Ruth Field died in 1994 she left the “Comp Health” $400,000 in her will.
In recent years, the Nature Conservancy has been looking these former hunting clubs throughout South Carolina.
In recent months it has looked at Chelsea, and reliable sources tell The Island News that the Nature Conservancy is in negotiation to purchase a large tract bounded by Bolan Hall Road on the north, Hazzard Creek on the South and the Broad River on the East.
If a sale is forthcoming it will put thousands of acres under protective easements that will keep this tract — on the Broad River — from becoming one of the gated communities that now characterize most of Hilton Head Island and the sprawling developments around Hardeeville.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
