Typescript: Rose P. Ravenel reminiscence of Mulberry Plantation (conclusion), Aug. 1, 1923

Scanned page 234 of Book 1 — Scan of original. Open full size →

A typewritten sheet, the closing portion of a longer reminiscence. The text fills the upper half of the page; the closer (signature, address, date) is set off at the lower right and lower left. A few in-line corrections (an overstruck initial letter, a hand-drawn caret, and a horizontal strike through one parenthetical aside) are visible in the original.

Miss Milliken’s old negro maid was a tall, fine looking old Maumer. One afternoon Miss Milliken found Maum Daphne on her knees in Miss Milliken’s bedroom by the window looking at a womderful sunset; Maum Daphne said, “Miss Susan, look at dem clouds of gold, I think the gates of Heaven must be like them”. Miss Milliken said it was so wonderful and beautiful she was as much awed as Maum Daphne, and they both remained silent until it faded away.

I remember the window panes were small in the dining room and our room. (Ihear [caret inserted below by hand, marking the missing space: I hear] ~~a tin roof has taken the place of the shingled roof~~). Window panes in dining room are large and modern. They had an old fashioned garden to the back of the house. I think it is now owned by a Club. They bought it from Major. T. Barker;— he was the nephew of the Millikens’, and lived there some time after the Millikens’ died.

I can never forget how kind those old people were to me, and how much pleasure I had in those visits to Mulberry Plantation.

                                                Rose P. Ravenel,

                                                13 East Battery,

                                                Charleston, S.C.

Aug. 1, 1923.

AI Notes

Concluding portion of a typewritten reminiscence by Rose P. Ravenel of 13 East Battery, Charleston, S.C., dated Aug. 1, 1923. Recounts an anecdote about Miss Milliken’s old maid Maum Daphne watching a sunset, describes the windows and garden of the house at Mulberry Plantation, notes that the property was later bought from Major T. Barker (the Millikens’ nephew), and closes with the writer’s affection for her visits there. The parenthetical aside about a tin roof replacing the shingled roof was struck through by the typist, with a hand-inked caret added below ‘Ihear’ to mark the missing space between ‘I’ and ‘hear’. Continues from a previous page.

Rose Pringle Ravenel (1850–1943), the daughter of merchant-shipowner William Ravenel of the William Ravenel House at 13 East Battery, was a lifelong Charleston memoirist whose notebooks of Lowcountry recollections were later edited by her great-niece as Charleston Recollections and Receipts (USC Press, 1991). Her 1923 Mulberry reminiscence is one of the family’s principal sources for the antebellum Milliken household: she would have visited as a girl in the late 1850s when Susan Milliken and her brothers John and Edward were still the resident generation, before TGB bought the place out of probate after 1874.