UNC at Pittsboro? Historians reveal what might've been and more

 

Imagine that our great University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, would, but for the tight-fistedness of an 18th century landowner, have been our great University of North Carolina at Pittsboro.

On Pokeberry Creek, no less.

It's true, and the details of this near-miss of the 700-acre Chatham County Jones Grove plantation as a site for the University in 1792 -- as well as the secrets literally dug from unmarked slave graves -- are revealed in a tantalizing new book, "Miss Mary's Money: Fortune and Misfortune in a North Carolina Plantation Family, 1760-1924" (McFarland Publishers, Jefferson, N.C., $29.95 softcover.) by H.G. Jones with David Southern.

Trust Jones, who's taught history in several universities, served as state archivist and director of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History and as curator of the North Carolina Collection at UNC, to nail the most elusive facts and make history come jigging to life.


David Southern is a managing editor at Duke University Press of "The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle" and a genius of a sleuth.

Let's put aside the complicated Smith genealogy that begins with a 1760 land grant to one Richard Parker, and just say that Mary Ruffin Smith became the sole heir of several sizable parcels, including Jones Grove, which over the years expanded to more than 1,000 acres, and which, at her death in 1885, she willed to the University. Proceeds from the sale of the property were parlayed into scholarships.

Mary Smith never married. But her unsavory bachelor brothers, Francis Smith and Sidney Smith, one a quasi-doctor and one a binge-drinking lawyer, sired four daughters with a slave woman named Harriet, often as the result of rape.

And that's only the beginning of this fascinating story, which anyone interested in dysfunctional families, horrific treatment of slave women by their white owners, great wealth, family devotion and heart-swelling generosity, will definitely want to read.








 

Novel based on harrowing story is set on a Lowcountry plantation

Dee Phelps

Disappointment rooms -- spaces in attics or basements fashioned to hide mentally or physically handicapped family members -- were a fact of life in the antebellum South.

The idea of such isolated bondage grips us, in both horror and fascination.

Dee Phelps, a long-time surgical nurse of Beaufort, S.C., listened as her mother-in-law told her the "fascinating and sometimes harrowing stories" passed down from her ancestors who once owned a  Lowcountry cotton and indigo plantation in Jasper Co., S.C.

Phelps did not consider herself a writer, but the stories she'd heard begged to be told. "The Disappointment Room" (River City, $26.95), in which a conniving mother hides her afflicted son in the attic, an act which affects the next eight generations, is the result of Phelps' perseverance in finally getting the stories on paper.

Pat Conroy calls the novel "haunting and fascinating." In her acknowledgments, Phelps says Conroy's wife, Cassandra King Conroy, "took me under her wing and helped me fly. A better mentor and friend would be hard to find. Thank you for helping me navigate my way around the perplexing world of publishing."

Phelps opens the novel in 1844 and uses as its fictional setting the now privately-owned Coffin Point Plantation in St. Helena Parish, Beaufort, S.C. The original house, no longer standing, was built about 1801 by Boston native Ebenezer Coffin, who married Mary Matthews, whose father gave the couple 1120 acres and 63 slaves.

In 1861, the Coffins, along with other sea island plantation owners, abandoned their homes as Union troops advanced into the Lowcountry.

"The Disappointment Room" recently won The Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel at ceremonies in Nashville, Tenn.