SCDORCHE-L Archives

From: "Susan Reed" <>
Subject: [SCDORCHE] Plantation Story
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 11:03:22 -0500

Plantation's richest treasure is bound up in family history


Sunday, February 13, 2000
Associated Press



AFFNEY - Mildred Bell's family tree glitters with legends.
She counts among her ancestors exiled supporters of a pretender to the
British throne, a murdered American patriot and a cunning Confederate
courier.
Bell lives among reminders of that remarkable family history in a
160-year-old plantation house filled with antiques crafted by slaves and
Hepplewhite.
She was born in that house and has lived there for 79 of her 80 years.
Her daughter, Kathleen Huskey, was born there as well and lives with her
there today.
"I am humbly grateful that we have this history, and that the house has
been preserved for future generations," Bell said.
Bell's home once was surrounded by slave cabins, but today there is
only a smokehouse built during the Civil War by the family's slaves. Bell's
grandmother buried her jewels in the log building's dirt floor to keep them
away from rapacious Yankee soldiers.
Just up the lane are the burned-out remains of another house that once
was the plantation slave commissary building. Bell's granddaughter, Alice
Martin, lived there until a malfunctioning refrigerator caused a fire last
fall.
The plantation house itself is a beautiful 10-room building with
towering square columns and soaring ceilings. In 1830, a man named Huskey
built it for Bell's great-grandparents, Mary and William Lipscomb, for the
sum of $250.
She said most of her home is constructed of heart pine joined together
with wooden pegs rather than nails. What nails there are were handmade.
The joists that support the floor are made from entire trees, stripped
of bark and hand-hewn, and the interior walls are plaster.
There is an elegance to the house, thanks to the fine old antiques that
fill it. Many of them were collected by Bell's son, the late James Lipscomb.
Two of his treasures stand in the dining room, an English Hepplewhite
mahogany table and matching sideboard, both massive, beautiful pieces that
date to 1780.
In the living room, there's a delicate piecrust table, six Chinese
vases, and a pair of andirons said to have been made for one of the signers
of the Declaration of Independence. On the walls hang landscapes painted by
Bell's mother in the 1890s.
The den holds another family heirloom, a wooden cornmeal barrel
handmade by a plantation slave from pine staves held together by bent
branches.
But perhaps Bell's most valued treasures are the pair of thick tomes
that occupy a place of honor in the living room: the two-volume, 1,250-page
genealogy of the Lipscomb family that her son James published when he was a
precocious 15.
She said her son was a sickly boy whose heart was damaged by rheumatic
fever.
"He was always interested in books because he couldn't play outside,"
Bell said.
The book lists the births and deaths of the descendants of Joel
Lipscomb, the family's founder, who came to America three centuries ago.
To write it, James Lipscomb spent countless hours in cemeteries and
county courthouses in Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union counties, researching
wills, and birth and death certificates as he traced down Lipscomb's
descendants.
For example, Joel Lipscomb came to America because he had no choice. He
had been forced to flee England after participating in a failed attempt by
James Fitzroy, Duke of Monmouth, to take the British throne. Monmouth, the
illegitimate son of King Charles II, was defeated in battle, tried for
treason and beheaded.
Another flamboyant Lipscomb descendent was Bell's grandfather, Edward
Lipscomb, a courier during the Civil War.
"He was carrying a message through the Northern lines to one of the
Southern troops," Bell said. "They asked him 'Who goes there,' and he said,
'Gen. Pompey,' and they let him through."
Bell said that from that day forward, her grandfather was known as
"Pompey Ned."
Such gems of family history, along with Lipscomb's extensive research,
made his book a modest success after he published it in 1960. He sold all
250 copies of the two-volume set for $15 per set to Lipscomb descendants all
over the country.
Lipscomb, who became a photographer, died of cancer in 1990 at age 46,
but Bell still treasures his gift to her - the story of the Lipscomb family
and the wonderful old house.
"He said he did it out of love for his family," she said. "I have a
deep, deep appreciation for it."

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