John D wrote:
> ... What I can read of the post mark was PANASS_ _, S.C.  
> The missing letters look like "US"....

Perhaps it was "Parnassus" which was on the Back River.  The following excerpts
about the lost site of Parnassus can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ridge/9980/burial1.html or
http://members.tripod.com/~SCROOTS/burial1.html.  

... 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...."


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