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The Second "Yankee" Invasion

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the 1930s, many Cooper River plantations were acquired by wealthy Northerners as winter homes and hunting retreats. To account for this trend, historian George C. Rogers, Jr., has cited the persistent and persuasive myths of the Old South as a powerful incentive for Northern purchasers who wished to attain or replicate their vision of the status and grandeur associated with colonial and antebellum plantations.

 In many instances these new owners had the financial means to obtain large tracts of land and to restore or renovate surviving historic buildings. Other owners replaced historic buildings with buildings designed and intended to evoke the feeling of a “Southern plantation” as they believed it had been or should have been. Those replacements were often of a scale and architectural style larger and more elaborate than the original plantation houses, many of them much more modest than the plantation myth led their owners—or their guests—to believe.

 The influx of money into the Cooper River region during this period of economic and agricultural failure ensured the survival of these plantations. Because many of the newly acquired plantations were to be used as hunting preserves, former rice fields were also retained to provide habitats for ducks, fish and other wildlife. Maps of the lowcountry beginning in the 1920s show that many plantations were owned by individuals prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “captains of industry” such as members of the Carnegie, DuPont, Field, Pratt, Pulitzer, and Vanderbilt families.64

Among the plantations which were acquired by wealthy Northerners and restored were Dean Hall, acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Kittredge of New York at the end of the nineteenth century; Mulberry Plantation, purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Chapman of New Jersey in 1914; Gippy Plantation, bought by Nicholas Roosevelt of Philadelphia in 1928; and Lewisfield Plantation, purchased in 1937 by Robert R.M. Carpenter, vice president of E.I. du Pont. Medway Plantation, purchased in 1930 by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Legendre of New York, is perhaps the best known of the restored Cooper River plantations. While preserving much of the historic fabric of these plantations, many of these owners also left their mark upon the landscape in the form of new buildings and professionally designed formal gardens. They enjoyed a camaraderie and their interconnected circle brought a vastly different social setting to the Cooper River.65

In some instances, whole new domestic complexes were constructed in the early twentieth century on former plantation tracts. These include the main house at Bossis Plantation, built ca. 1910 by St. Clair White; an entire complex of Tudor Revival buildings at Richmond Plantation constructed in 1927 under the ownership of George Ellis, a cofounder of E.F. Hutton; a Colonial Revival House at Pimlico, no longer extant, built by Mrs. and Mrs. George Dana Boardman Bonbright; and the house at Rice Hope Plantation, built in 1929 by former United States senator Joseph Frelinghuysen of New Jersey.

These dwellings were generally built as replacements for historic buildings that had been lost by fire or age and were generally designed to evoke a sense of advanced age and grandeur. One notable exception to this was the complex of buildings at Mepkin Plantation designed by Edward Durrell Stone in 1938 for publisher Henry Luce and his wife, writer Claire Booth Luce. Important landscape architects such as Loutrel Briggs and Ides Vandegracht transformed and augmented existing, or created new, gardens at Mulberry, Medway, and Mepkin into gardening showplaces.

 Some families retained their plantation holdings. The descendants of Benjamin Simons remained at Middleburg until the 1970s, as did the Stoney descendants of the Ball family of Kensington. The Stoneys were prominent among the locals who also kept the history of the Cooper River alive with literary and artistic works, and they were the center of a circle of native and transplanted writers and artists. While the Stoneys still owned Medway and neighboring Parnassus, John Bennett used the Medway house as the setting for his novel, The Treasure of Peyre Gaillard (1906). Hervey Allen

published several poems about the area, including one about Medway, in his Earth Moods and Other Poems (1925). Samuel G. Stoney’s mother Louisa Cheves Stoney produced various artistic works and edited a reprint edition of John B. Irving's Day on Cooper River, adding commentary and a historical narrative on the Cooper River plantations since Irving’s time, in 1932. Augustine T. Smythe Stoney turned out important maps and drawings of numerous plantations including a valuable and often-reprinted map of the Cooper River Plantations as they were in 1842. His work aided his kinsman Samuel G. Stoney in the production of Plantations of the Carolina Lowcountry (1938), the culmination of a survey that utilized the drawing talents of noted local architects Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham and the photography of Judah Ben Lubshuz and Frances Benjamin Johnson.66

Home Page for the Historic Resources of the Cooper River, ca. 1670-ca. 1950

Historic Resources of the Cooper River, ca. 1670-ca. 1950
Name of Multiple Property Listing Berkeley County, South Carolina
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet