Back to Running Deer Plantation: Wilson Sanders, born in 1907

BACK TO

Wilson Sanders

Born in 1907

Some counties paid teachers for five months, others as many as seven. Wilson’s mother would send the boys to one school until it ended for the year and then send them to

In the winter of 1982–1983, Wilson Sanders repaired a grape arbor that had been growing on Running Deer Plantation near the Okatie River at least since the turn of the century.

   The structure and the vines it supported measured about seventy feet by twenty-five feet. In midsummer, it produced bushels of scuppernongs, excellent for snacking, preserving, fermenting into wine and aging into sherry in bottles stored in Wilson’s third-floor attic.

   Under that same arbor, when it was quite a bit smaller, Wilson as a barefoot boy had chased his brother and his mother’s chickens. Over the decades, it continued to bear fruit and to grow, and to grow, and its split-rail props began to sag with the weight and with time. Its southwest corner almost touched the ground when seventy-five-year-old Wilson pointed to it with his cane and said resolutely, “This will be my next project.”

   The soil of Running Deer, the pines and oaks, some of the dogwoods and the house with its seven working fireplaces were as much a part of Wilson as his five senses. When he and his wife, Virgie, heard hickory nuts falling onto their tin roof, they knew they were being dropped from the same tree that dropped nuts onto the roof of his grandparents’ bedroom. That sense of heritage propelled him to historic restoration and genuine enjoyment of the property.

PROSPERITY

As Wilson was told the story by his family, in the 1700s the Eicherenkotters, who immigrated to this country from Bavaria, owned about two thousand acres between the Okatie River and Ridgeland. They had a house on Cherry Point on the Okatie. With court connections in Europe and rice growing in the Lowcountry, they prospered for one hundred years or more.

   Six years before the start of the Civil War, in 1855, the Eicherenkotters gave a daughter land near Cherry Point as a wedding present when she married a Sanders boy from Colleton County. The bridegroom, who became Wilson’s grandfather, planted rice, cut timber and built a sawmill on the place, supplying the lumber for the big house at Rose Hill Plantation, which was started at about that time.

   During the Civil War, after the Union troops captured Hilton Head Island to create a major base for their Southern operations, they dismantled the Running Deer sawmill and moved it to Hilton Head. (Many decades later, Wilson found a magazine article about Hilton Head Island’s role during the Civil War and a picture of that sawmill. Outraged, he contacted the writer to lodge his protest of what he considered a theft. By then, there was not much either the writer or anyone else could do to make restitution.)

STARTING OVER

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the holdings of the Eicherenkotter family were reduced to four hundred acres. Their Grahamville mansion had been burned. Wilson’s grandfather had to figure out how to make a living during a national depression in the nation’s most depressed region. He sold salt, planted cotton and corn, as well as built a cotton gin and a rice and grits mill. By the time Wilson’s father, Edward Sanders, came along in the same Okatie location to make a living, the family’s economic circumstances had improved and the economy as a whole had improved. In addition to farming, ginning and milling on Running Deer Plantation, Edward financed small farmers nearby for their fertilizer and other pre-harvest expenses. Then the boll weevil wiped out everybody’s cotton in 1919; Edward lost his own crop and his loans—and had to start over.

   Wilson Sanders grew up in what came to be called an “extended family,” meaning he, his brother, his father and his mother lived in the Running Deer Plantation house with his grandmother and an aunt.

   The various little schools scattered about operated terms of varying lengths, depending on how much the county could afford. Teachers were paid for five months at some schools, for as many as seven months at others. Wilson’s mother sent Wilson and his brother to one school until it ended for the year and then to another to maximize their time in the classroom. After graduating from high school in Ridgeland, Wilson headed to Clemson College. To help pay his college expenses, he raised mallard ducks for the market. He graduated in 1930 with a major in agronomy and a minor in horticulture.

   Soon after graduation, while working as a lab assistant at Clemson, Wilson met and married Virgie, a Tennessee girl teaching school in Walhalla.

AGRICULTURE IN THE UPSTATE

Wilson spent most of his career as a pest-control specialist in the northwest corner of South Carolina, where peach orchards require regular expertise to keep them healthy and productive. He took his turn in the military service during World War II and the Korean War.

   During his working years, Wilson returned occasionally to visit his family on the Okatie, often bringing flowering shrubs to plant there. After his mother died, however, the house was shut up for about two decades and the family furnishings stored, except for a couple of years when a neighboring family used the place.

   In 1968, forty years after Wilson moved away to go to college, he and Virgie bought a house on Hilton Head Island and started working on Running Deer Plantation’s house. Its floors were dingy and scratched, its plaster falling off the walls, its fireplaces weakened by years of use, its gardens overgrown. Once the restoration was done, the couple moved in to enjoy the beautiful, old rooms with high ceilings, wide molding, wainscoting and natural pine floors; marble insets in the fireplaces; new closets; two modern bathrooms; and a modern kitchen. One upstairs bedroom wall had been enclosed in glass to show off its original character—and the pencil markings of the ages and heights of Wilson and his brother when they were children.

   Most of the furniture had been in either the Eicherenkotter or the Sanders family for decades. Some of it was valuable, some only interesting and all of it had meaning for Wilson.

   For all his pride in the restored house, Wilson was equally proud of Running Deer’s grounds on the shore of the headwaters of the Okatie River. The grounds also required an overhaul after years of neglect. He pruned and cut to create an appealing landscape using dogwoods, Confederate jasmine, banksias rose, sago palms, English daisies and horsemint among the natural pines, oaks and hickories. And the camellias, ah, the camellias on Running Deer flourished, hundreds of them. Wilson collected and grafted, experimenting and producing buds and blooms famous in the Lowcountry.

   “This high-hat is an early bloomer,” he said, showing off a pink blossom one day in the fall. “If it gets cold, this beautiful coronation will bloom in two to three weeks.”

   Emotionally bound to the rural homeplace and to the woods and fields of his childhood, Wilson saw even in the 1980s that the Okatie region was changing. He had no inkling, though, that in less than two decades, it would become famous as a hub of commercial development, complete with a Wal-Mart Superstore in the neighborhood.