Subject: Forgotten Graveyard of Mount Parnassus
    Date: Fri, 03 Jul 1998 15:28:13 -0400
    From: Jean Prather 
      To: [email protected]

Plantations of the Weapons Station
Foster Creek Brickyards and Mount Parnassus
Story and photo by Terrence Larimer, natural resources specialist
Published In: The Cannon Ball, April/May 1998

This is the fourth of a series of excerpts from a paper written by Natural
Resources Specialist Terrence Larimer covering the history of the lands occupied
by Naval Weapons Station Charleston. A complete history with bibliography and
references is available from the Natural Resources Office, 843-794-7951.
 
Foster Creek, dividing the Station's Northside area from MenRiv Housing and the
Marrington Outdoor Recreation Area, is named after an early settler, John
Foster. It was originally called Appeebee by the local Indians. The properties
on both sides of Foster Creek were used extensively for brick manufacturing. In
an advertisement in 1773, Henry Gray's plantation in Goose Creek Parish was
offered for sale and described as being located on a "bold deep creek, called
Foster's" and that a "very advantageous brickyard may be established on it." A
1775 plat shows a brickyard on the north side of Foster Creek along with a
"Gray's Landing" and another "Brick Yard" on the creek's south side. Other
planters known to have manufactured brick on Foster Creek include Samuel
Elliott, as well as Benjamin and Isaac Mazyck.

A 1786 announcement in a Charleston newspaper stated:

"It is with pleasure we inform the public that the Tile manufactory established
at Goose Creek, about sixteen miles from this city, is brought to great
perfection. A Correspondent hopes the citizens will encourage so good an
undertaking, to prevent the dreadful calamity of fire, as they can he sold at a
very cheap rate; a cargo of them has already been brought to market, and
esteemed by judges to be no way inferior to those from Europe. Carolinians
encourage your own manufactures!"

The Northside area of the Station along the Back River was home to one of the
earliest and most notable Station planters, Zachariah Villepontoux. A Huguenot
immigrant, Villepontoux, was probably the most important brick maker in the
Charleston area during the mid-eighteenth century. His bricks were manufactured
on his plantation, Mount Parnassus (later shortened to Parnassus), on a bluff
above the Back River. Villepontoux's bricks were cited as the standard when St.
Stephen's Parish ordered bricks for construction of a new chapel in 1759. He
also provided brick for the Charleston city fortifications, St. Michael's
Church, Charles Pinckney's (Snee Farm owner) town house, and the Pompion Hill
Chapel on the East Branch of the Cooper River.

In the late 1700s, ownership of Parnassus passed to a planter named
Delajonchere. Historic plats from that period show Parnassus with a number of
buildings, two boat landings on the Back River, an "old brick yard" and "brick
yard" south of the settlement, "old Indigo vats" north of Big Island and another
"old brick yard" on Foster Creek. DelaJonchere sold Parnassus to Samuel Smith in
1803. An 1805 property plat shows a plantation complex on the southwest side of
the property line. This complex included a main house, outbuildings, probable
slave houses, a "garden" and a "shed for brick" (drying shed).

In A Day On Cooper River, published in 1932, Louisa Stoney wrote,

"Parnassus, which Dr. Irving calls Mount Parnassus, was once the home of
Zachariah Villepontoux, a wealthy Huguenot and a vestryman of Goose Creek
Church, who furnished the brick for St. Michael's Church in Charleston from this
plantation. In 1842 it had belonged for some time to Dr. Charles Tennent, and
remained in his family until '67.

"When this book was in preparation the writer visited Parnassus with Miss Laura
Tennent, whose grandfather and father had owned it, and who is now the last
surviving member of the family who can remember it as it was. Her recollections
form a typical picture of the fate of many Cooper River places. There was little
left to embody her description, besides the giant oak that must have been
already a big tree when Villepontoux built his house in its shade two centuries
ago, and the still beautiful avenue that leads over a gentle swell of ground for
a mile towards Goose Creek. Dwarfed stumps of ruined oaks show where it would
have stretched for a mile and a half farther, to the gate on the property line,
if the war had not come and ended the care of Dr. Tennent's young trees.

"Beside the big oak is a tumbled mass of broken brick from the house covered
with moss and wild rose vines, and back of it a line of cedar stump along the
terrace that overlooked Back River. A few fine magnolias and clumps of hardy
exotics show how extensive the gardens were. In the tangle of vines you find
oddly shaped pieces of brick: hemispheres and rounded bases, parts of finials
that some ingenious plantation artisan baked in the plantation kilns to ornament
vanished gate posts. This, like Medway to the north of it, was once a great
brick plantation as the wide extents of the old clay pits bear witness.

"Until mid-February of '65, Parnassus was not actually touched by the war, whose
first guns had been clearly heard there nearly four years before. Then Sherman,
marching from Savannah, took Columbia, and the outflanked Confederate army about
Charleston, with every man they could muster, moved towards North Carolina.

"On this plantation no white men were left; only Mrs. Tennent, and her young
daughters waited for what might happen. First a federal gun-boat steamed up the
river, firing ahead into the unprotected country; that night a band of marauding
Negro troops came to the house demanding supper in the dining room and
questioning the whereabouts of non-evident silver. The mistress of the house
could truthfully say it was not on the place, for it was buried at the end of
the cedar walk, just beyond the line-bank on the Cottage place under the limbs
of a magnolia that is still standing. When the intruders left, promising to come
back the next night to dance "with the girls," their mother at once packed her
daughters into a boat and took refuge with the Gourdins at Cote Bas.

"During the next week the little girls could see from across the river soldiers
coming and going, encouraging the plantation Negroes to loot the house and the
store rooms. When at last it was safe for them to go back, the house was almost
bare. Not a paper of any sort was left in it, save in Laura Tennent's bedroom
which had for its sole furniture a little paper doll lying in the middle of a
bare and dirty floor.

"In the days that followed there was hunger so bitter that their mother in
despair kept her girls playing away from the house with its empty cupboards and
shelves. Strange little gifts of food went from one plantation family to
another, while the Negroes, drunk with their new freedom, wasted provisions and
wandered about the country in wild idleness.

"At last the family gave up and moved to Charleston. Then desolation began in
ernest on the plantation, for small-pox broke out on the place and scattered the
Negroes. A son of the family rode up to find no living soul in the line of Negro
houses that flanked the avenue. Only one sick old man had been left behind to
die and his putrefying body lay just within the door of the empty potato-house.
In his hands were a few stringy roots he had gnawed at, before pestilence and
famine had destroyed him. In the next summer a wild fire burned across to the
grass-grown yard, caught the dry tree ferns on the big oak and, running along an
extended branch, set the shingle roof of the house and burned it.

"After that the Tennents sold Parnassus and it passed into strange hands. One
group of owners seem to have systematically looted it. They cut the walks of
cedars and, for the brick in them, tore down the ruins of the house, the walls
of the garden and burying ground, and the very foundations of a tomb. The site
of the little graveyard was forgotten until, in 1930, Miss Tennent, pointed it
out; then a piece of stained marble projecting from a mound of earth proved to
he part of a stone of the violated grave erected by the Commissioners of the
Charleston Orphan House, on account of her benefactions, to Teresa Julia de
Tollenare.

"Out in the Negro burying ground, now lost in the pinewoods, is another stone
which marks the grave of an old nurse in the Tennent family and bears the
inscription 'To Bella, a faithful servant.'

"After John Bennett used the big oak as one of the landmarks the cryptogram of
his "Treasure of Peyre Gaillard", some literal minded trespasser dynamited a big
cedar stump near the site the house, in search of fabulous jewels. He [the
dynamiter] must have worked by day or old 'Pontoux' the plantation ghost, [must]
have been unwary. Occasionally relived by the boys from the big house who acted
as understudies dressed in sheets, 'Pontoux' used to take particular care of a
spring that bears his name. Scary Negroes sent at night for a bucket of the cool
'blue' water from under the protecting canopy of brick work, oft threw away
water and bucket both, in the terror of the return along the cedar rimmed
terrace. Maybe even 'Pontoux' has grown lonesome and has left his garden and its
spring to the deer that lie in the myrtle thickets and the wild turkey that
gobble and strut on spring mornings under the dog-woods.

"The house site of Parnassus is now a part of the estate of the late Samuel
Gaillard Stoney."

The Tennents of Parnassus were leading Presbyterians related to William Tennent,
who founded the famous "Log Cabin" college in Jersey in 1726. It later became
New Jersey College and in 1896, Princeton University.

Little evidence remains now of this once-proud plantation. What time had not
already erased, Hurricane Hugo further obscured. Several hard-to-idenfify brick
scatters, Bella's headstone, an overgrown, declining oak avenue, and the fallen
walls of the last identifiable brick structure can be identified by persistent
investigators. Following the Stoney familys ownership, the property was acquired
by John Poppenheim. The Historic and Archaeological Resources Protection Plan
For Naval Weapons Station Charleston recommends this site as eligible for the
National Record of Historic Places.

PLEASE NOTE: Federal law (the National Historic Preservation Act) prohibits the
disturbance or removal of historic artifacts on federal property including such
items as arrowheads, bottles, bricks, bullets, coins, pottery shards, farming
implements, eating utensils, etc.


==== SCROOTS Mailing List ====
Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
                                               - Longfellow (1807-1882)