Newspaper feature: 'Willtown Bluff'
Book 1, Page 338 ·1960–1980
Transcription
A tall newspaper feature pasted along the left of the album page, with the right two-thirds of the page left blank.
Top photograph: an oblique view of a two-story wood-frame house with full-width verandah, set among trees draped in Spanish moss.
Headline:
WILLTOWN BLUFF
Article:
This house is all that remains of the town of New London, later called Willtown for King William III. The Lords Proprietors, in 1682, planned a town that would rival Charleston in overseas trade. A 1708 census showed the community had 80 houses.
Willtown Bluff was built in 1807 by Lewis Morris of Morristown, N. Y. It overlooks the Edisto River near Hollywood, S. C., south of Charleston.
The house was used as a hospital in 1863 when Federal gunboats advanced up the Edisto in an attempt to cut the Charleston-to-Savannah road at Jacksonboro. There is evidence today of the bombardment, in the earthworks overlooking the river, but the “hospital” was spared.
Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Jervey now own Willtown Bluff.
Second photograph (left, vertical): a tall whitewashed brick pillar standing alone among bare trees.
WILLTOWN BLUFF’s main house (top) shows several new additions, but essentially remains unchanged.
BRICK PILLAR (above) is all that remains of the church that served the thriving community of Willtown.
Third photograph (center): an interior view of a parlour with a marble mantelpiece, mirror, and antique furniture.
LIVING ROOM (above) is shaped like a slightly irregular polygon.
Bottom photograph: low grassy earthen mounds with a small outbuilding visible in the distance.
MOUNDS (left) are all that remain of Civil War fortifications on the high bluff.
AI Notes
A single tall newspaper feature pasted at the left side of the album page, with four photographs (the main house at top; a lone brick pillar at left; the polygonal living room interior with marble mantelpiece, mirror, and antique furniture; and Civil War earthwork mounds at bottom) and a short text panel headlined ‘WILLTOWN BLUFF’. The rest of the album page is blank. Of particular interest to the FitzSimons family file because Willtown Bluff, on the Edisto River south of Charleston, is confirmed as the death place of Stewart Greenleaf FitzSimons Sr. (d. 18 Oct 1930). The article prints ‘Morristown, N. Y.’ but Lewis Morris was a New Jersey, not New York, Morris.
Morris’s place of origin is given here as “Morristown, N. Y.” but he was almost certainly from Morristown, New Jersey.
Willtown Bluff is the FitzSimons home place: the compiler’s father Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr. acquired the Edisto River property in the late 1890s and died there on 18 October 1930. After passing through later owners (including a William Harmon remodelling and the Whitneys’ winter-home period in the 1930s), the plantation house and 33.5 acres were gifted back to the compiler’s sister Mary Annie (“Minnie”) FitzSimons Allston by the Whitney widow in the late 1930s — see page 350 for the deed clipping.