Rose Hill Mansion, a playhouse: Daisy Pinckney Frazier, born in 1928

ROSE A PLAYHOUSE

Daisy Pinckney Frazier

Born in 1928

While farming and oystering together for a living, she and Oscar gave birth to eleven children, eight boys and three girls, and raised ten of

Although Daisy Pinckney Frazier’s family never owned the “big house” at Rose Hill, she knew countless ways for children to have fun in it.

   Today, the restored and meticulously maintained Gothic revival antebellum house wins wide recognition as a thing of beauty. Seventy years ago, Daisy admired its functionality as a place for sliding down the banister of the circular staircase, for yelling to hear the echo in the high-ceilinged spaces and for playing hide and seek in the attic.

   Bub Walker owned Rose Hill and farmed the land when Daisy lived with her family in a log cabin on Rose Hill in the 1930s, but the big, main house was unoccupied. So the Rose Hill children made a playhouse of it.

   “We loved that old house,” she said many years later. “There wasn’t a thing in it. We would lose one another from room to room. We’d ride those stairs all day long. If we’d see somebody, we’d get out the door quick before they caught us.

   “I tell you this, though,” she added. “We never broke any windows in that beautiful house. Mama told us there’d be seven years bad luck if we broke a window, and us children were careful of that.”

   The children’s other favorite playground was Rose Hill’s Long Pond. From there, they would gather the jelly mass of frogs’ eggs and take them home in a jar to watch them morph into what she called “wiggletails,” also called tadpoles or polliwogs. Then the children would return the wiggletails to the pond to mature. A frog is a good toy, Daisy explained, if you just watch him jump about the reeds and grasses at the edge of the pond.

THE PICNIC

Daisy was the fifth in a family of nine children of Elliott and Isabelle Pinckney. Before moving to Rose Hill, Daisy’s father sharecropped corn, sweet potatoes and peas with DeSaussure Pinckney in Pinckney Colony, and Daisy was born on Calhoun Plantation. She and her siblings had the most fun on Calhoun, as she remembers it, on Sundays when the grown-ups would walk to the First Zion Baptist Church in Bluffton for worship services, leaving the youngsters up to their own devices, free from the supervision of adults for several hours.

   The good times rolled. There would be music and feasting on the Okatie River. A brother would pick the three strings on his homemade “box” guitar. Others would beat on pots and pans in rhythm. The older children would go into the Okatie River for crabs, shrimp, clams, oysters and conchs. Over an open fire, they would boil some of the catch in the sugar-cane syrup kettle and steam the rest of it.

   “When our parents got home, we’d be so full we’d be lying around and couldn’t eat another bite. It was a good time, too. We loved Sundays when they’d go to church.”

   When Daisy’s father’s poor health made it difficult for him to sharecrop any longer, he moved the family to Rose Hill. Daisy was about ten years old. Without a deed or a title, or a question about one, the Pinckneys were granted permission to settle for no charge on the Rose Hill property. The Hamilton, Kitty and Baker families also made their homes on Rose Hill, tilling its soil, fishing its creeks and enjoying its scenery as if they owned the land. Daisy explained how it worked: “We just lived on other people’s place. They didn’t care. Daddy planted crops wherever he felt like staking a garden out. We didn’t have to pay rent or anything. That was the way it was then.”

   Unable to farm commercially, Daisy’s father, along with the rest of the family, nevertheless was able to plant enough vegetables and raise hogs, cows and chickens to keep food on the table. They would “bank” sweet potatoes from the fall harvest by digging a trench around a circle of soil, covering the soil in pine straw and then stacking alternating layers of potatoes and pine straw to build a mound. Protected from the cold and from touching one another, the potatoes would be good until the spring.

SHUCKING OYSTERS FOR CASH

Daisy’s mother brought cash into the house by shucking oysters in Joe Pinckney’s factory at Low Bottom on the Chechessee River. When Daisy got big enough, she also shucked there and in Junior Graves’s factory in Bluffton.

   Daisy had become a pretty good shucker by the time she married oysterman Oscar Frazier, a native of nearby Belfair Plantation, in 1944.

   Seven or eight gallons per day wasn’t an unusual day’s shucking for her. Once, she stayed at the shucking table, her knife flying, until she had shucked ten gallons in a single day. “You are tired when you have shucked that much,” she said later, smiling when I interviewed her in 1982, because she no longer had to shuck oysters for a living.

   For a while, though, she and two other women shucked on a team for Oscar. The more oysters they shucked out of the bushels Oscar picked, the more money they made and the more Oscar made. Wages for shuckers went from 15 cents a gallon to $5 a gallon between the time Daisy’s mother started shucking and the time Daisy finished shucking a few decades later. Still, Daisy understands why few young people aspire to become oyster shuckers.

   Soon after marrying, Oscar and Daisy went to work farming for Louisa Wilson Simmons Martin, who owned Trimbleston and Sawmill Creek Plantations. In the 1950s, Oscar and Daisy bought land on Simmonsville Road. While farming and oystering together for a living, they gave birth to eleven children, eight boys and three girls, and raised ten of them. Daisy explained that there was always an older woman around, like a grandmother, to help take care of the babies while they worked.

   For many years, Daisy did domestic work for the Gene Martin family of Hilton Head Island. Sometimes even during those years, on her day off, she would go to the Bluffton Oyster Factory to shuck oysters for Oscar.

   But when the work was done, and when Daisy was still and her house empty, sometimes her childhood memories would flood over her. She remembered how it was with Rose Hill’s big house, Long Pond’s frogs and the Okatie River’s conchs.

   Oh, yes, the conchs, the most delicious of all seafood, she said. For many years in March, when the conchs rise to the top of the oyster beds, Oscar often brought home a few conchs for a treat. Few Lowcountry residents today would know what to do with them. But Daisy knew. You crack the shell with a hammer and pull out the live conch, dice it up, boil it ’till tender, then sauté it with bacon, black pepper, salt and onion. “That’s a dish,” Daisy said, licking her lips.