Clemson rep turns back hands of time Ralph Mancini 22 hrs ago With the celebration of the American Revolution's 250th anniversary a little over two years away, Clemson University's official historian Otis Westbrook Pickett Jr., Ph.D. appeared at the April 24 Rotary Club of Mount Pleasant meeting to share his school's vision of getting its history out to the people.
The public land-grant research institution's location in the Upstate played a key role in securing the nation's victory in the American Revolutionary War, according to Pickett, particularly along the I-95 corridor between Kings Mountain, Fort Rutledge and Fort Prince George.
"Historians are finding that there are more battle sites in South Carolina than in any other state of the Union, with the exception of New York. And a lot of these battle sites have not been recognized because they were battle sites between loyalists," began the Charleston-area native.
Since becoming Clemson's historian in 2022, the self-described Lowcountry boy became increasingly aware of the connection between Charleston and the Upstate when examining the nation's history.
In fact, the Upstate region served as a summer vacation destination for many prominent families of the 18th and 19th centuries.
"If you go to the Episcopal Church in Pendleton and you read some of the markers there, it's the Gilliards, it's the De Saussures, it's the Pinckneys. It's all these families that summered up in the Keowee River," he detailed.
Clemson University's footprint, he noted, sits on John C. Calhoun's old plantation.
"We see this as South Carolina history ... a lot of the things that happened nationally ... happened in that (western) corner of the state," continued Pickett. "We're going back to before Clemson was a university, which was founded in 1889. But what happened before 1889 was very significant."
The Hanover House was an example of that, as the one-time Berkeley County structure that flooded upon being placed on Lake Moultrie was torn down brick by brick and relocated.
Built in 1716, Hanover House is believed to have been built by enslaved African laborers and was used as a rice plantation owned by French Huguenot, Paul de St. Julien.
Its new home was on the Clemson campus since the school had the only architecture program in the state back then. In 1994, the house was transplanted to the nearby State Botanical Gardens, about a mile away from the school.
Pickett recounted how the 10th oldest house in South Carolina was resided in by the St. Juliens and the Ravenels, the latter of which had eight children who fought in the American Revolution.
The house was sold late in the 19th Century and occupied by African-American sharecroppers.
"This house also has this deep connection to the New Deal because it was through the WPA (Work Progress Administration, an employment and infrastructure program created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt) that they took the house down and moved it up to Clemson," the speaker added.
While referencing the French words on the structure's tabby that read peu à peu (i.e. little by little), Pickett described how grateful the Christian Huguenots were to escape religious persecution in their native homeland.
Their story was instrumental in understanding the history of South Carolina, Rotarians learned, which distinguished itself as one of the few states with a constitution that allowed for freedom of religious worship and practice.
It's one of the reasons why the Palmetto State features a strong Catholic and Jewish presence as well, per Pickett.
Later in the presentation, the historian and publisher of several journal articles and book chapters mentioned an assortment of notables figures that Clemson is currently highlighting, such as former US Senator and American Revolutionary War soldier John Ewing Colhoun.
Colhoun's daughter, Floride Bonneau Colhoun would go on to marry her father's first cousin John C. Calhoun. The couple's grand estate, Fort Hill Plantation, would eventually be inherited by their daughter, Anna Maria Calhoun, who married Thomas Green Clemson. Upon his wife's death, Clemson was willed with a three-fourths share of the plantation, which became Clemson University that was founded as a public scientific and agricultural college.
The Philadelphia-born Clemson felt that the government didn't value the importance of an agriculture education. Now more than a century later, the Clemson campus features 17,500 acres of multipurpose greenspace known as its Experimental Forest. In addition to advancing best scientific natural resource management practices, the Experimental Forest serves as a historical and scientific repository of regional land use and research, as stated on the school's website.
Clemson's third historian in school history also focused on the present during his visit with Rotary by communicating a recent rise in applicants, as students are increasingly favoring southern institutions of higher learning over Ivy League venues.
"One of the schools they're looking at is Clemson. We had 60,000 applications this last fall. We admitted 4,700 students in the incoming freshman class, which is just unbelievable. So, it's a wonderful place to come and study," informed Pickett.
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