Letter from Henry C. Hammond to Ellen, March 9, 1932 (page 3)

Scanned page 11 of Book 1 — Scan of original. Open full size →

Page 3 of the March 9, 1932 typewritten letter on Hammond & Kennedy letterhead.

March 9, 1932

-3-

On the Old Town plantation his son Paul once marketed forty bales of cotton in this market on the 4th of July, grown from cotton stalks that had ratooned.

Our great-grandfather never took medicine of any kind. When he was sick he confined his diet to corn bread cooked in a way to make it ~~all~~ [handwritten in ink above:] only / two crusts.

He was not a religious man, but tolerant of his wife in this respect, she being a devout Episcopalian. She was the daughter of Paul Pritchard, Hobcaw, a ship builder.

At the house in Beach Island one night, grandmother, a child, and her mother, retired, leaving him reading before the fire with grandmother’s large black cat opposite him on the hearth. Suddenly the cat sprung at his face, clawing him viviously, then dashed out of the room. He pursued with the chair in which he had been sitting, chased the cat around the house and finally overtook it and killed it. She mentioned this to show what a man of resource and determination and physical prowess he must have been. Much of what grandmother knew of him must have come from her mother, who was a sainted woman — but no more of these ancient memories.

AI Notes

Page 3 of the March 9, 1932 letter from Henry C. Hammond to Ellen. Includes recollections of Christopher FitzSimons’s son Paul marketing forty bales of cotton on Old Town plantation, the great-grandfather’s diet during illness, his religious tolerance toward his Episcopalian wife Catherine (daughter of Paul Pritchard of Hobcaw, ship builder), and an anecdote about a black cat at Beach Island. A small typed correction shows ‘all’ struck through with ‘only’ written above in ink. The typist’s ‘viviously’ is a typo for viciously; the word ‘devout’ is overstruck/typed heavy for emphasis. In this 1932 letter Hammond names Catharine Pritchard’s father as Paul Pritchard of Hobcaw, ship builder — matching the W. Huger FitzSimons memorandum on p003; eight years later (p007, 1940) Hammond had mis-remembered the father’s name as William and had switched ‘ship yard’ to ‘dry dock and ship yard,’ making the 1932 reading the more reliable of the two Hammond accounts.

Letter continues on the next scan.

The “Paul” marketing forty bales of July-4 cotton from “ratooned” stalks at Old Town is the emigrant’s son Col. Paul FitzSimons (ancestor of the Georgia FitzSimons branch). A ratoon crop is regrowth from previously harvested cotton stalks — an unusual gamble dependent on a mild winter, cited here as evidence of the family’s farming sophistication. Hammond’s slip on Catherine Pritchard’s father (“Paul Pritchard, Hobcaw, a ship builder”) here matches the W. Huger memorandum on page 003; by his 1940 letter (page 007) he had mis-remembered the name as William — which was actually Paul’s son and the shipyard’s later proprietor.