Mount Hope at Willtown Bluff

Mount Hope stood on the only high bluff for fifty miles along the South Edisto River — the river the colonists called Pon Pon, an Indian name said to mean “Big Bend.” The house faced the water from Willtown Bluff, about ten miles below Adams Run, in a stretch of Colleton County so far off the main routes that even in the early twentieth century visitors usually came in by boat or by way of an old ferry landing. The plantation took its name from the rise of ground itself: a piece high enough to keep its feet dry above the tidewater rice fields that surrounded it on three sides.

The house was an unusual one. Built late in the eighteenth century by Col. Lewis Morris, who had served on Gen. Nathaniel Greene’s Revolutionary staff, and by Morris’s Elliott son-in-law of the William Elliott family of Pon Pon, it was a frame dwelling laid out around octagonal rooms — an architectural scheme almost unknown elsewhere in the Lowcountry. A long Charleston-area newspaper feature on Willtown Bluff, preserved on Book 2, p20 and Book 2, p21, describes the octagonal living room and the enormous fires kept up in it: at a distance of several feet, the writer recalled, the heat would “literally ‘scorch the pants off’ if one were not careful.” Other visitors remembered the wide piazza, the dormered roofline, and the live oaks dripping Spanish moss that arched over the lawn and the sandy drive — all of them visible in the photographs collected on Book 2, p48, Book 2, p113, Book 2, p114, and Book 2, p115.

How it came to the FitzSimonses

By the 1890s the Lowcountry rice country was no longer the gold mine it had been before the war. Emancipation had ended the slave labor on which the great tidal fields had depended; the freedmen who had stayed were drifting away to the new sawmills, where the cash wages were steadier and the work less brutal. Mechanized rice operations in Louisiana and Texas were undercutting Carolina prices. And the storms kept coming — the hurricane of August 1893 swept through the Edisto and Combahee districts, breaking banks and drowning fields, and many planters either sold out or simply walked away.

It was in that depressed market that the property changed hands again. The compiler’s memoir on Book 2, p4 gives the family’s own account: her father, Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr., had at first intended to plant for himself at the Schoengaussen tract, but his older brother Christopher FitzSimons Jr. — “Uncle Kit” — bought up Mount Hope, Oak Hurst, and Rosemont together “out of the blue” and proposed a partnership. Dad was to plant the lands; Uncle Kit was to finance them until they paid for themselves. The brothers, the memoir notes, “were devoted & loyal,” and the Schoengaussen plan was set aside. Mount Hope, she adds, had been bought from the Grimballs.

From that moment until the second decade of the new century, Mount Hope was Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr.'s headquarters. The same Willtown Bluff feature on Book 2, p21 recalls him in his prime as the master of “thousands of acres of rice fields,” and the house as “the scene of lavish and easy hospitality.”

Amy’s childhood there

The album’s compiler, Amy FitzSimons (Mrs. James Pickens Walker), was about five years old when the family moved from Rock Spring to Mount Hope. Her own earliest memories of the place, as she set them down decades later on Book 2, p4, are domestic and small: confusion on moving day, her mother Mannie in a big apron carrying baskets, her little brother Bub running around with a cowbell tied around his neck so that Mannie could keep track of him and keep him out of the river. The river — broad, tidal, and dangerous — was the constant background of Mount Hope life.

She grew up there through the 1890s and into the 1900s. The three photographs of her arranged together on Book 2, p51, captioned in her own hand “Amy Perry Fitz Simons — 1902 & 1904,” show her at fourteen and sixteen in white blouses and long skirts, one of them standing at the foot of a great live oak draped in Spanish moss — almost certainly on the Mount Hope grounds. The Mount Hope house-party photographs on Book 2, p44 catch the same years from a different angle: Herbert Ravenel Sass, later the dean of Lowcountry nature writers, beside a horse under the moss-hung oaks; her brother Bub, with Genie Coffin and the young Theodore Ravenel Jr., standing in a row in the sunshine. “We used to have wonderful times riding — fox hunting and driving,” Amy wrote of those winters. Louise Ravenel, she added, “used to spend every winter with us.”

The hospitality reached beyond the immediate circle. Harry Hampton — later one of South Carolina’s best-known conservationists, and at the time a boy of twelve or fourteen — remembered in his 10 December 1930 “Woods and Waters” column for The State, reproduced on Book 4, p20, being out on the bank of a rice field “at Willtown Bluff, then the home of the late Samuel G. FitzSimons,” walking past a blue-wing teal while his cousin Theodore FitzSimons looked on. The column appeared seven weeks after SGFS Sr.'s death.

The 1911 hurricane and after

The end of the rice-planting era at Mount Hope came suddenly. The hurricane of August 1911, the Willtown Bluff article reports on Book 2, p21, “plus the invasion of the sawmills which took the workers, put an end to this great industry, breaking the banks beyond repair.” A few of the most stubborn planters held on another decade — Governor Duncan Clinch Heyward on his Combahee fields, Theodore Ravenel on the same river, Mr. Doar on the Santee — but Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr. did not. By the time Amy’s son James Pickens Walker Jr. was born in Charleston in January 1912, as she records on Book 2, p70, “Dad had given up rice planting that year and had bought an island near Beaufort S. C. — Cain Island.” Mount Hope, for the moment, was let go.

It came back to him briefly. The caption to a snapshot of the garden on Book 2, p82 records that “Dad moved from Cain Island back to Mt. Hope about this time. He sold Mt. Hope to Mrs. Harmon of N. Y.” Samuel Sr. and Mannie lived for a while in the old Parsonage at Willtown Bluff and then built themselves a smaller house beside the original plantation house, where they remained until they died.

After Samuel Sr. sold it, Mount Hope passed through a string of owners — the chain set down on Book 2, p21 runs from the Harmons to Arthur Whitney, and then briefly back into the family: the article’s “Mr. Fritz Simmons” is the newspaper’s own spelling of the name FitzSimons, and the “Mrs. Donald Alston” who held the place for a time was Mary Anne FitzSimons (1899–1985) — Samuel Sr.'s daughter and the compiler’s younger sister — who had married Donald McKay Allston. From her it went on to Harold Stanley of New York, who held the house at the time the article appeared and who, the writer noted regretfully, had “somewhat changed” its lines from the originals.

Most of the surrounding rice tracts found a new economy in the same period. The duck populations that swarmed the abandoned fields made them valuable to sportsmen, and the banks and trunks that had failed under the rice were rebuilt as preserves: the Hope, the Wayne, the Village, Prospect Hill, Springfield, Block Island, Bonny Hall, Jehossee. Mount Hope itself drifted toward the same use — the high bluff and the canopy of oaks now framing a shooting-house rather than a rice headquarters.

In the album, the Mount Hope of the 1890s and 1900s is what remains: the octagonal rooms with their scorching fires, the moss-hung oaks, the cowbell on the little boy, the young woman in the white blouse at the foot of the tree.