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During the two years that I lived in The Manse of the Presbyterian
Church on Edisto Island in my childhood (1945-1947; see accompanying
story), it escaped destruction by fire three times that I know of. All
three times were caused by human error, not mechanical failure. As an
adult, and particularly as a historian, I shudder even to think of this
grand, historic old house burning down. To me as a child, the idea was
very scary, but part of life. It happened to houses all the time.
Before the advent of both telephones and fire engines in rural
communities, there was no hope of saving a house once a fire got a solid
start. On Edisto Island, that era lasted into the 1970s. It's still a
good idea to put out the fire before it gets out of control, but help is
on the way. In the old days, people learned both to use and to control
fires in their daily lives much more routinely than we do today. Both
my parents were of that old school.
I'm not sure of the
correct sequence of these three events, so I'll start with the least
scary. On a cold winter night, probably early in 1946, a fire swept
through the woods toward the manse from the west. We learned later that
old Dr. Jenks Pope, the loveable but eccentric owner of Middleton farm,
a Presbyterian elder, and Mother's uncle, had set a backfire in his
fields to protect his own buildings and woods. The fire had gotten out
of control and burned through not only his woods but part of old
Ravenswood next door and thence into The Manse woods. As an
eight-year-old, I watched in terrible fascination with my mother and
brothers from an upstairs window as the flames consumed the underbrush
right up to the edge of The Manse yard. Daddy was out there with the
other men, white and black, desperately using shovels and brooms (water
hoses were not available) to beat out the fire before it jumped to our
house. They stopped it. Perhaps The Manse, with its large grassy yard
surrounding the house (partly for this reason), was never seriously
threatened. But at the time, we could not know. (I learned later that,
only a mile or two away, Trinity Episcopal Church had lost its big,
handsome neo-Classical sanctuary to a similar, out of control fire in
1876 -- a fire, ironically, from the adjoining farm of Dr. Pope's own
father, Dr. Daniel Townsend Pope. That fire had consumed not only
Trinity Church but at least one adjoining plantation house and,
probably, a number of African-American cabins.)
The second
near-burning of The Manse was caused by my father's attempt to get rid
of wasps on a hot summer day. Daddy was a rather unskilled but intrepid
handyman who hated to ask for help on routine home-maintenance
projects. The wasps were living under the weatherboard, high up at the
back corner of the house, where the back porch adjoined the kitchen.
They needed to go. I don't know what he tried first, but while I was
watching, he tried to smoke them out with a burning torch. High atop a
ladder, Daddy's torch disappeared inside a hole. Wasps came out, but so
did flames. The house itself was on fire. A small fire, to be sure,
but the time to control it was clearly brief. As best I remember, Daddy
hurried down the ladder, grabbed a bucket of water (which he may have
placed strategically nearby as a precaution), and doused the flames.
Saved again. When siding was removed from that back corner during the
renovation in 2007, the contractor, Mike Kaiser, told me he saw the
burned wood from our wasps.
The scariest fire was
inside the house on another cold winter night, probably in early 1947.
I would have been eight. Our family was finishing Saturday night
supper, and the drill was for each of us, in turn, to prepare for Sunday
by taking a bath in the big upstairs bathroom. (Strict observance of
the Sabbath ordained that one did not leave until Sunday any work that
could be done on Saturday, and in any case, it would be difficult to
take five baths and still get the whole family to Sunday School at 9:00
A.M.) Daddy would build a fire before supper in the small wood-burner
to warm the bathroom, and Mother would heat a kettle of water on the
kitchen stove, carry it upstairs, pour it in the big claw-foot tub,
dilute it with cold water from the faucet, let one of us bathe, drain
the tub, then repeat four more times until we all were clean. As we
finished supper, Mother pointed to me and said, "Charlie, you're first.
Get undressed, and I'll bring the hot water." When I opened the
bathroom door, smoke billowed in my face and flames were visible in the
room. Daddy had left the pasteboard box of kindling too close to the
red hot stove, it had caught fire, and the fire had spread to the
heart-pine flooring and the plaster walls. I ran to the top of the
stairs screaming "fire." Both Mother and Daddy came running with
buckets which they could fill from the faucet in the tub, and put out
the fire. Just barely. The burn marks on the floor were still visible
sixty years later, during the renovation of the house.
Stay safe, old house,
and enjoy your modern central heating and air conditioning, gas logs
secure in each fireplace, and fire engines screaming out onto 174 at the
dial of 911. May you, at least, never again be threatened by an open
fire. And may you house many more families with children as happy and
secure as I was, in your embrace.
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Respond to this article by E-mail to:
c.s.spencer@att.net
Charles Spencer's two-volume Edisto: A History has been published
by The History Press in 2008.
It is now available at the EIHPS Museum and in local book stores.
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