A production of South Carolina ETV in association with the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism ♪ (male singer) ♪ Oh, I have found the sweetest place ♪ ♪ where people smile and know my name.

♪ ♪ Oh, I have found the sweetest land ♪ ♪ as warm as sun and cool as rain.

♪ ♪ A place so faaarrr... from all we had, ♪ ♪ a place so far from all we've known, ♪ ♪ a quiet place that we can love ♪ ♪ and call our home.

♪♪♪ ♪ ♪ [no audio] (Joanna Angle) This is the town hall in Meggett, South Carolina, housed in the restored old post office.

By 1720, present-day Charleston County was divided into parishes.

The area between the Wadmalaw and Edisto Rivers, approximately 50 square miles, became St. Paul's Parish.

That parish included the present-day towns of Ravenel, Hollywood, Meggett, and Yonges Island.

Welcome to St. Paul's Parish and to "Palmetto Places," a series that explores and celebrates South Carolina's small towns and countryside.

I'm Joanna Angle.

African slaves, brought to work the area fields, constituted the majority of the parish population as early as 1708.

The first major slave rebellion in the colony occurred here in 1739.

Twenty slaves had organized on Johns Island, planning an escape to Spanish Florida.

After crossing the Stono River, they recruited other slaves throughout St. Paul's Parish.

The group was eventually cornered and most were executed.

Slaves were crucial to the agriculture-based economy.

In 1790, only 5% of parish households had no slaves, while 68% owned more than 10.

By 1850, there were 209 white households and 4,692 slaves.

The planters of St. Paul's Parish prospered through the cultivation of rice and cotton.

The famed sea island cotton was first grown here in 1788 by Mrs. Kinsey Burden.

Developed from experiments by Mrs.

Burden's late husband, sea island cotton is characterized by silky fibers, twice as long as those of short-staple or upland cotton.

Its smooth, black seeds were easy to separate from the fibers by hand.

Sea island cotton could thrive only on the coast and outer coastal plain.

Its superior quality and limited availability commanded prices six times higher than other cotton.

Cotton and rice built planters' homes all along the Lowcountry riverbanks.

The oldest remaining residence in St. Paul's Parish is Summit Plantation house on the Toogoodoo River.

A family journal and account book recorded the 1819 construction cost at $2,358.44, including $91 for, quote, "two stacks of chimneys" and $29.33 for "blue paint for the inside."

We visited with Summit's owner, Jack Boineau.

(Jack Boineau) Amarinithia Jenkins married William Wilkinson.

William Wilkinson was from here in Saint Paul's Parish, and she was from Edisto Island.

Her father, Daniel Jenkins, had bought the property prior to 1800.

She inherited her portion of it in 1816 and began the house, and they finished it in 1819.

They have pretty good records for that in the Caroliniana Library.

Before she lived here, they lived in a house up the avenue about 500 yards in a house called-- they called it Rat Hall because it was so old and full of rats until they called it Rat Hall.

It had been built by John Bull, son of Stephen Bull of the Ashley River.

When she moved in here, this was the summit of her happiness, so they named it Summit Plantation.

They lived here until he died in 1847, and she died in 1879.

The house is a Federal period house built on tabby construction and beaded weatherboarding with five windows upstairs and four windows and a front door across the front downstairs.

Tabby, the foundation on which it's constructed, was a combination of sand and oyster shells and lime... made into a mixture that was used by the Spanish, I know, early...early on.

I'm not sure exactly what the origin of it is, but it makes a cement.

The foundation here is a solid foundation, continuous foundation, all the way around the original part of the house.

Summit is a farmhouse, a modest house.

It's not a mansion, wasn't built to be a mansion.

The people were moderately well off but not fabulously wealthy.

William raised cotton... basically, on this place.

His wife was from Edisto, and I know he had access to the sea island cotton seed, which was guarded closely.

In 1829, he won a silver cup from the Saint Paul's Parish Agriculture Society for having the best five acres of cotton in this parish.

[no audio] When I bought the house in 1966, the porch had fallen off the front.

There was no porch on the front of it.

They just had a little stoop out there with steps goin' up, a makeshift sort of a thing.

The weatherboarding was rotten.

They had allowed ivy to grow on it, and that further rotted it.

It had been originally beautiful beaded siding on it.

I saved some of it but not much.

Then I added the wings on it, because we needed a downstairs bathroom and a downstairs bedroom.

To balance it off, I put a downstairs den on it, so we had two wings of equal size on each end of the original house.

The windows were in such bad shape, I had to make all the windows for the old part of the house and for the new part of the house and transfer all the panes of the wavy glass.

I was able to fortunately find enough glass to add to the wings that I added on.

We have five... excuse me, we have four live oaks here that are listed in the Live Oak Society out of Louisiana, and, um... they have to be at least 18 feet in circumference to be able to qualify for the Live Oak Society.

There's four here on the place.

They are at least 3- or 400 years old.

[no audio] (Angle) Yonges Island has known the fear and deprivation caused by war.

While husbands and sons went to soldier, women were left to manage on their own.

Two Wilkinson women have provided personal accounts of enduring the enemy's presence.

A dozen letters written by Eliza Yonge Wilkinson, a young and reportedly beautiful widow, describes the island's invasion by the British.

Her account began in 1782.

"While we were at breakfast, "we heard cannon towards Stono Ferry, "roaring in a horrid manner.

"We immediately quit the table "and ran out of doors to harken if it was there.

"We found it was, and for a long time "both cannon and small arms "kept up a continual, awful thunder.

"With clasped hands I invoked Heaven "to protect, to shield my friends and countrymen "and was in the greatest anxiety for the event.

"The two officers who were with us "mounted their horses and repaired to their posts, "and we remained in great distress, "our ears still shocked with the solemn sound "of what carried death and destruction.

"We traversed the hall with impatience, yet dreading to hear how it had fared with our army."

And later... "We have been humbled to the dust, "again plundered... worse than ever plundered.

"Our very doors and window shutters "were taken from the house "and carried aboard the vessels, "which lay in the river opposite our habitation.

"The sashes beaten out, furniture demolished, "goods carried off, beds ripped up, "stock of every kind driven away.

"In short, distresses of every nature attended us."

At least one Redcoat was charmed by Eliza's feisty defiance of the Crown.

A Captain Sandford departed with these words... "God bless you, Mrs. Wilkinson.

"I wish you every happiness, "but do not think you shall stay on this island long.

"I intend to get an order and will come and carry you off."

Eight decades later Amarinithia Wilkinson's letters convey the anguish of waiting for the War Between the States to end.

"December 12, 1864... "My Dear Daniel, we have had stirring times since you left, "but have not yet been overcome by our assaulters.

"They have not the road on the Carolina side, "but have it on the Georgia side.

"Consequently, no trains from Savannah.

"I fear we have not troops to contend with Sherman, "now so near Savannah.

However, I will hope, even against hope."

And then, after being evacuated to Charleston... "February 24, 1866... "My Dear Francis and Emily, "no tongue can describe my state of mind at this moment, "to be in a city which in a few hours "is to be given to our bitter foes, "to be under the rule of the Yankees.

"This is almost insupportable.

"Oh, may God Almighty strengthen me "in this hour of trial.

"It was considered by the military men "best that we should come here "rather than be subject to lawless troops in the country.

"Oh, that I could have gone up "and thrown myself upon my dear, dear children.

"Our communication is cut off, "and whether for weal or woe, we will be ignorant of each other's fates."

[no audio] After the War Between the States, farming based on a captive labor force ended.

In 1868, William C. Geraty of Yonges Island was one of the first to begin truck farming.

Soon cabbage boats were crisscrossing Wadmalaw Sound.

Cabbages and Irish potatoes grown here were being shipped by rail to New York City.

Spur lines developed to link the fields and packing sheds, making Yonges Island a shipping hub.

Nearby Meggett became known as cabbage capital of the world, with a stock exchange and direct communication with Wall Street.

The crossroads of Barrelville emerged to produce containers for the cabbages, tomatoes, radishes, and potatoes that filled refrigerated boxcars bound for cities north and south.

While the land yielded its bounty, the waters around Yonges Island produced a rich harvest of oysters.

The oyster boats were one part of a long boating tradition.

Writing in the "New York World" around 1915, William Simmons wrote that, quote, "Every planter owned one or two 10- to 11-oared barges, "which conveyed the family and the crop to the city "and supplies back to the plantation.

"And what delightful trips those old barges provided.

"There is a pleasing suggestion "of the power and pomp of royalty, "and the diversion of the oarsmen songs "were characterized by that weird Negro melody which had captivated music lovers the world over."

Today the legacy of the watermen is a constant inspiration for Tom Boozer, a South Carolina Folk Artist of the Year.

(Tom Boozer) Duck huntin' is very special to me.

I started at a real young age.

My father was good friends with Huck Babcock, who was the son of Havilah Babcock that taught English at the University of South Carolina, and also wrote extensively for "Field and Stream" and sports magazines.

So duck huntin' has been a part of my life since a very early age.

A good friend of mine, and of the family, Olin Ballentine, was a duck hunter and kind of got me started into decoys.

Traditional decoy makin' is simple.

It's straightforward.

They're all hand tools that are used in the makin' of those decoys.

In reverence for the wood and the old makers and the way of makin' decoys, I have chosen to work only with hand tools.

In fact, my favorite tool, the drawknife, this particular one, is well over a hundred years old.

I believe to make a true, workin' decoy, they should be manufactured the same way that they were in the past.

The drawknife is a very efficient tool.

It's been used ever since the 1200s... that we have documented, and if you keep it good and sharp... you can work the wood down.

Like I say, just think round.

All we're doin' is-- like gettin' a good haircut where we take off the rough and sharp edges.

I've always told people if you want to learn to make decoys, if you know anything about cuttin' hair, you can make a decoy.

[drawknife scraping wood] I make a particular decoy that's called the hollow body, which, around 1846, 1847, appeared first in New Jersey and then later on in Connecticut, and it became known as the Stratford, Connecticut, style bird.

[drawknife scraping wood] That's the extent of the use of the drawknife.

Then a simple backsaw is used to define the primaries... [rhythmic backsaw noises] which are the flight feathers.

[rhythmic backsaw noises] This little detail gives a lot of interest to the birds when they're sittin' on the water.

Just like a diamond with all of the different facets on it, the more detail that you can put in primary characteristics... [tapping sounds] just helps show up real good on the water.

Now what you use is a simple wood rasp to take all of the knife marks out of the body... [rasp grating wood] and again, to help make it...round.

One of the beauties of the wood rasp is it leaves the wood rough enough to impart sort of... a feathery texture.

[rasp grating wood] Also, the paint sticks to it a whole lot better because it's rough.

[rasp grating wood] What I'm doin' now is makin' a little seat for the head.

[rasp grating wood] The head is carved in a separate piece.

That's the extent of workin' the decoy on the top side.

[wood clamp jingling] We'll round the bottom side.

[scraping sounds] You can leave it on the bench right there as you start the hollowin' process.

[no audio] All I'm gonna do... [rhythmic boring sounds] is bore a series of holes... [drill squeaking] close together.

[rhythmic boring and squeaking] [drill squeaking] [mallet pounding] The hollowin' process will take actually more time than roughin' out the body, simply because there's so much wood that has to be removed.

[mallet pounding] That's what...makes it a very special decoy.

[mallet pounding] Historically, duck hunting was always done from some sort of boat.

An easy thing for me to do, since I had built boats since I was about nine, was to build some of the old, historical duck hunting boats.

This particular boat is called a dory, and it dates back as far as 1790.

In fact, the plans that I found for this boat were dated about 1793.

Up on the Chesapeake Bay where a lot of your market gunning was done, they used this as a layout boat.

You can see that it's entirely rigged with the canvasback decoys that have the old cowbell weights around the necks.

You have a case of Peters Victor shells... old brass shells... a pair of shotguns... the oars to row it with.

When they would row out into the Chesapeake Bay, they would cover up the boat with a piece of canvas.

That was good camouflage for hunting divers.

Then of course, to complete this rig, I have a supper layin' on the seat of five prime canvasbacks.

They say that George Washington's favorite meal was a bottle of Port wine and canvasback duck from the Chesapeake.

The canvasbacks fed on wild celery, which grew on the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, which added a lot of flavor to their flesh.

Another little, neat boat used around 1890, startin' around 1890, was the night gunning boat.

This little boat was the predecessor to what we call the sneak boat.

As you see on the bow, it has a kerosene lantern.

They would row out at night and find ducks sleepin' and raftin' on the water.

The lantern would silhouette 'em on the water for hunters to start baggin' 'em.

These little boats were very, very small, and they used tiny hand paddles that they would lay down in the boat and use hand paddles to swing the light around on the flocks of ducks to silhouette 'em.

Since it was sometimes too many ducks to pile into the boat, they would take a towrope and have two or three hundred ducks tied onto a rope behind the boat.

They would row back to the wharves and sell the ducks at market.

Course, that's come under fire by your antihunters in the present day.

But in the old days, they were simply doin' a job they were hired to do, and that was to provide food for a growing America.

We didn't have domesticated livestock and animals and things that we depended on for food as we do today, so they depended on their natural resources.

Wild duck was one of the most numerous and a favorite.

[no audio] In 1736, a little ship called the "Eagle" sailed into Charleston Harbor.

On that ship was my grandfather, at the time six.

He was, of course, one of the early settlers in Charleston, a master woodworker.

He was of German descent.

He helped build a lot of the houses in Charleston before he migrated to the upper part of the state.

Bein' from the Alps region, they thought that Fairfield County offered a few more hills, or maybe even a little mountain, and so he established his homestead there.

As generations... came on down, a lot of his knowledge was passed on to his sons, their sons, and on down.

Of course, my father was also a very excellent woodworker.

I was always workin' with his tools as far back as I can remember.

That talent that I had was bein' shaped by generations that I really didn't know a lot about.

As I became more attuned to my heritage and studyin' about them and readin' about the family history, talkin' to my grandfather, who was still alive when... when my interest was sparked in this, and also my great-grandfather, I became more in tune, so to speak, with what they had accomplished during their lifetime, the contributions that they had made.

I felt that the old ways simply needed preservin'.

By usin' the old hand tools and makin' the decoys, usin' all hand tools in the construction of the boats and the models of the boats, this is one of the ways that I repay a debt-- or attempt to repay a debt-- that I owe them.

I just believe that more young people need to be in tune with the efforts that were made by their predecessors to make the United States, and especially South Carolina, the very special place that it is.

[no audio] (Angle) Saint Paul's Parish, South Carolina... smiling faces, beautiful places.

♪ ♪ Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 (female singer) ♪ And here we live, ♪ ♪ within this land ♪ ♪ of mountains' edge and ocean's shore.

♪ ♪ A land of strength... a land of grace... ♪ ♪ of men and women gone before.

♪ ♪ So many smiling faces here, ♪ ♪ so many memories still to come.

♪ ♪ Beautiful places we hold dear ♪ ♪ in this our home.

♪ (choir joins) ♪ South Carolina, always near... ♪ ♪ and always hooommmme.... ♪♪♪ ♪