Subject: Forgotten Graveyard of Mount Parnassus From: Jean Prather Date: July 03, 1998 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 ==== Go To: #, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, Main |