Sweet corn, children and catechism: Paul Pinckney, born in 1912

SWEET CHILDREN AND CATECHISM

Paul Pinckney

Born in 1912

He grew up believing the Pinckneys absolutely “had more fun than anybody else.”

Descendants of the prominent South Carolina rice planters of the seventeenth century, and related to the family of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, signer of the U.S. Constitution, the Pinckney Colony Pinckneys created a special culture in their section of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Settling after the Civil War on a peninsula of rich earth between the Colleton and Okatie Rivers, they created a family tree as productive, interesting and far-reaching as the sprawling live oaks.

   Even in a region where extended families with ingrained traditions were commonplace, the Pinckneys set several records. Along with creating their own diversions and occupations in the fields, woods and marshes, they ultimately developed their own school, church and summer camp for children.

SETTLED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In 1866, after service in the Confederate Army, Eustace Bellinger Pinckney of Walterboro paid the taxes on his wife’s homeplace, the three hundred acres of Calhoun Plantation, and moved his family there to farm. Four of his fifteen children later reared their own families in that same area, tilling the land for food, livestock feed and cash. All the families in the colony had the space they needed. They could walk from house to house for half a day or longer and not see another soul except their kin and the black families who lived with them.

   One of the nine sons of the first Pinckney Colony generation was an auburn-bearded legend of a man who rode a horse until the age of ninety-four—William “Willie” Eustace Pinckney (1863–1957). When Willie was a boy, he helped his father raise hogs and cotton. He then farmed Callawassie Island himself for fifteen years before buying Guerard Point, five hundred acres of combined cleared, high land and marsh that make up the tip of the Pinckney Colony peninsula, property later called “Pinckney Point,” then “The Point.”

   Willie outlived all four of his wives. His first and fourth wives, Lula Johnson and Mary Jane (Madie) Johnson were sisters; his second and third wives, Catherine Kirk Pritchard and Helen (Ella) Pritchard, were also sisters. All together, his wives gave birth to twenty children, of which fifteen lived to adulthood.

   Having graduated from St. Vincent’s Academy in Savannah, Catherine Kirk Pritchard came as a bride to the Pinckney household to tutor and care for Willie’s seven older youngsters after the death of their mother. In 1912, when Paul Pinckney was born to Willie and Catherine, Willie’s two-story house at The Point was already filled with children.

   Paul built up a reputation for himself as fun loving and mischievous, and grew up believing the Pinckneys absolutely “had more fun than anybody else.” Without a moment’s hesitation, into his eighties, Paul could provide example after example of the kind of fun he enjoyed as a child: “I remember tying a thread around a fiddler’s claw and tying it to a leaf. The fiddler would run all around waving his claw, dragging the leaf. We thought that was the funniest thing.

   “You want another one? They were using stakes at the edges of the field to plow straight rows when Daddy was farming Rose Hill. One time I sneaked out and moved one of the stakes about ten feet and then got behind a myrtle bush to see what would happen when the fellow got to the end and saw he’d plowed it all ‘catty-bias.’ I remember the expression on his face even now.”

SCHOOLING FOR THE CHILDREN

After a few years of home tutoring, Catherine had Willie build a house in Bluffton—on Pritchard property on the May River—so the children could attend the Bluffton school. For a few years, the children, Catherine and their servants would stay in Bluffton weekdays during the school term and spend summers and weekends at The Point, where Willie continued to work the farm.

   After a time, Willie and his brother Coty built a one-room school not far from their homes and then hired a tall, slender man with a white mustache, pin-striped breeches, small spectacles, a derby and a bow tie—Edmund Bohun Bellinger, a distant cousin—to live with the family and teach. In Over Home, the Heritage of Pinckneys of Pinckney Paul’s sister, Mary Pinckney Powell, remembered Mr. Bellinger as an “excellent teacher.” In an interview when he was in his sixties, Paul, who was younger, remembered Mr. Bellinger differently. “I couldn’t learn a thing from that man,” he said.

   In the 1920s, the older Pinckney children began to drive a hand-cranked Model T automobile to school. When Paul got to the Bluffton school for the first time, he had no idea what grade he was supposed to be in. “I didn’t even know what ‘grade’ meant. I got in the line with the other boys about my size, and that’s how I got to be a third-grader in the regular school.”

CATHOLICS IN THE MIDST OF

In addition to the challenge of educating the children in Pinckney Colony, there was the challenge of meeting the families’ religious needs. The first Pinckney who settled in southern Beaufort County was the only Roman Catholic in a region dominated by Baptists, Methodists and Episcopalians. For forty-two years, the family was without a resident priest and without regular Mass. Finally, the men got together in 1915 and built St. Mary’s in the Woods Church. At first, a priest came once a month, then twice a month, but the parents continued to worry that the children were not getting sufficient instruction in the faith.

   In 1928, a visiting Irish priest suggested a solution to the problem, and Willie and his brothers, with the involvement of everybody in the colony, founded Camp St. Mary.

   They started with tents and cots from the U.S. Marine Corps depot on Parris Island, vegetables from their gardens, meat from their livestock pens as well as fish, crabs and shrimp from the creeks. Camp St. Mary, for three weeks every summer, was a place of organized games in the fields, woods and rivers as well as organized religious instruction. The Sisters of Mercy convent in Charleston provided nuns in black habits to teach and supervise the campers, and priests came to say Mass at the outdoor altar. Soon, children from all over the state were coming to St. Mary’s, as many as one hundred at a time.

   After several years and a few seasons of camp in Pinckney Colony, in 1935, the diocese bought property across the Okatie River, built permanent structures and began running a series of camp sessions throughout the summer. From 1929 until 1966, the sounds of the liturgy, catechism and hymns augmented the cries of the gulls along that waterfront.

   In the meantime, the original St. Mary’s in the Woods Church was replaced in 1932 by St. Andrew’s Catholic Church. The Church of Saint Gregory the Great now uses St. Andrew’s for a chapel.

   For more than a century, Pinckney Colony resembled a commune. For example, Willie and his brothers staggered their planting times to ensure that, every month, somebody in the neighborhood had fresh vegetables ready to pick. They all raised big gardens, from which everybody gathered what was ripe. When it was time to butcher hogs and grind sugar cane, the cousins—first, second, once and twice removed—and the aunts and uncles and in-laws came together to get the work done, to share in the benefits and to have a good time.

   Shortly before Christmas every year, groups of the older children would go to a hammock they called Buzzard’s Island for holly, berries, vines and Christmas trees. They used the mule Ginny and the mule cart to make the trek at low tide, the only time it was accessible. On the way, whoever reached the mailbox first would drape a piece of moss over it as a signal that the gathering of greens had begun. The family laughingly called their means of communication the “moss code.”

   Paul remembered another Christmas tradition, a trip to Savannah, Georgia, one child at a time with Mother for a two- or three-day stay with a relative. He was six years old when it was his turn to go. “We rode in the horse and buggy to the railroad track and flagged down the train,” he said many years later. “It was just first dark when we got to Savannah, and that station there was the biggest building I’d ever seen. I couldn’t get over hearing the echo in it and seeing all those redcaps running around. Then I’d never heard such noise in my life as the streetcars on those cobblestone streets.”

   For Paul the biggest shock of all was the “swoosh” and roar that came from the overhead tank on the indoor commode in his aunt’s house on East Anderson Street. “I had never seen or heard such a thing, and the first time, it scared me so bad I wouldn’t go back to the bathroom the whole time we were there,” he said, laughing.

   Growing up surrounded by immediate family, half-brothers, half-sisters and dozens of cousins—and related through his mother to the Pritchards of Pritchardville—Paul had to check the local girls’ ancestors carefully in order to find a bride. He and Lucille Hodge, who grew up on Palmetto Bluff, daughter of the woods rider and butcher on that hunting plantation, eloped in 1932. They planned to keep their marriage a secret at first, but after they dropped the marriage certificate in Bluffton’s main street, their secret was out.

   With no jobs in this area, Paul and Lucille moved to Washington, D.C., to live near a relative and look for work. Called “Country” there in the city, Paul nevertheless learned to cope and worked for seven years in a theater. He then spent two years working in a service station in rural Jasper County, two years working in construction and in oil fields in Texas, a short time helping to pave what is now U.S. Route 278 on Hilton Head and thirty-three years working for Savannah Electric and Power Co. Paul and Lucille had a son, Coty, and a daughter, Virginia (Pinckney) Dean.

   To this day, once a year, the descendants of Eustace Bellinger Pinckney flock to Pinckney Colony for a reunion to renew the Pinckney traditions and retell the Pinckney stories. As many as five hundred from eight states come. Under the shade of live oaks, the older family members talk about the parents and grandparents, and recall the characters linked to the Pinckneys in the past—the tutor with the bow tie, the Irish priest who gave Willie the idea for the camp, the nuns of Camp St. Mary, a mule named Ginny. And they make sure the younger ones know how they spent their days in the colony. Again and again, they talk about breaking sweet corn, climbing pecan trees, playing on the sandbars as well as swimming and crabbing in the two rivers that lapped against the shores of their private peninsula—the Colleton on one side and the Okatie on the other.