PRESERVATION

EDISTO ISLAND — Only the central core of the Hutchinson House is standing, reinforced by preservationists, its exterior painted green, its metal roof painted red, its window trim painted white.

The house sits on short brick columns. Fifteen windows ensure that light and breeze move freely through the two-story structure’s four rooms. Two brick chimneys rise over the roofline.

The old residence certainly exudes historical interest and charm, but one is inclined to flesh out the scene using a bit of cinematic imagination. Looking upon the house, with its large trees clustered by the rear-right corner, see in your mind’s eye the view morph from present to past.

Watch as the trees shrink in size and the fields fill with planted crops. Notice how the house becomes adorned with a large wrap-around porch, its extended roof held up with cedar pillars, and how an extra room is added at the back. Observe the dusty front yard where horses and carriages are ready to transport ginned cotton. A pigsty materializes, and a barn, then a couple of outhouses.

And standing proudly in front of the house, in the late 19th century, is the Hutchinson family. Successful, respected, self-sufficient.

Out here, in this isolated place, life was not easy, but it was made manageable because of the family business and a commitment to community. “The house is a symbol of resilience, a symbol of independence, and it’s also a symbol of economic empowerment for the African American community on Edisto Island,” said Greg Estevez, the greatgreat-grandson of Henry Hutchinson, the man who built it in 1885.

The Edisto Island Open Land Trust now is starting the final phase of preservation, thanks to a nearly million-dollar grant it received recently from the Mellon Foundation.

The money will allow the Trust to add the porch, restore the interior, create appropriate landscaping around the structure and devise a master plan for public access and historical interpretation.

The Trust won’t do it all alone. The team wants to engage nearby Black residents to help tell the story of this part of Edisto Island during the Reconstruction period and the difficult years that followed when Jim Crow took hold.

Creating space

Members of the Hutchinson family lived in the house until 1974. In 2016, the property, badly deteriorated, was put on the market. Two years earlier, its owner, Myrtle Hutchinson Esteves Singleton, made it known before she died that she wanted the house preserved. The property soon ended up in the hands of Steve Esteves, great-grandson of Henry Hutchinson. Esteves, in turn, sold it to the Edisto Island Open Land Trust in 2016 for $100,000.

In 2018, the Trust purchased a 10-acre adjacent parcel, using Charleston County Greenbelt Program funds.

For years, the Trust chipped away at the restoration project, raising nearly $500,000 and collaborating with students and faculty at the American College of the Building Arts, according to Executive Director John Girault. It stabilized the house, trimmed away dangerous tree boughs, replaced rotted wood framing, added sister beams as reinforcement, replaced the lost windowpanes with pieces of donated period glass, repointed the brick support pillars, fixed the roof, and painted the exterior.

It also created a small parking lot and information kiosk for passersby interested in having a look from a distance at the work in progress and reading about the history of the place.

Then came the gamechanger: A just-intime Mellon Foundation grant worth $950,000. Now the Trust can restore the interior of the house, which features original beadboard paneling and shiplap. It can also erect the porch, using freshly acquired local cedar support posts and install an access ramp behind the house for disabled visitors. And it can develop programming and a plan for public access.

Justin Garrett Moore, who runs the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program, said his team is eager to support efforts that bring the history of the Gullah-Geechee coast to the fore. Humanities in Place, established in 2020 (the first new Mellon Foundation program in more than 30 years), so far has made 120 grants worth $112 million. It’s meant to broaden the foundation’s reach to include not only larger cultural institutions but community-based organizations, too, Moore said.

“When you look at the full spectrum of people doing this type of work, some people have been getting the resources, and some people have not, historically,” he said.

The Hutchinson House project is a good example. It encompasses preservation and interpretation of an important physical asset with historical value. The house helps tell the story of Reconstruction and its collapse, of the rural Sea Islands, of Black independence and uplift — of “a formerly enslaved person creating space for himself and his family,”

Moore said.

The Mellon Foundation recently awarded the We- GOJA Foundation $750,000, paid over two years, to help the organization identify and preserve African American historic sites.

It announced last week a three-year $500,000 grant to help the International African American Museum create media content that enhances the visitor experience. (The Mellon Foundation already had provided grants to IAAM totaling more than $2 million to support building construction and establish a curatorial department.)

Late last year, the foundation’s Higher Learning Program awarded $2 million to the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center, money Avery will use to improve its archival holdings and organize exhibitions.

‘A savvy businessman’

Edisto Island once was home to indigenous communities. Spanish settlers arrived in the middle of the 1500s, and the English took control in 1674 when the Carolina island was deeded to the Lords Proprietors. Almost right away, enslaved Africans were present, cultivating first indigo, then sea island cotton. (The area’s salty wetlands could not support rice production.)

The Hutchinson family traces its lineage to this period, back seven generations, according to Greg Estevez.

James “Jim” Hutchinson, born enslaved on Peter’s Point Plantation on Edisto Island, the child of White planter Isaac Jenkins Mikell and his servant Maria. During much of the Civil War, Jim Hutchinson served in the Union Army, which maintained a presence on Edisto Island.

He and his first wife, Nancy, had two children together, Lewis and Henry, both born before emancipation.

After the war, Jim Hutchinson became a noted political leader and, later, a trial judge, according to research done by Christina Butler, a professor of historic preservation at the College of the Building Arts. That made him a target of white supremacists striving to disenfranchise African Americans and regain control of the state’s politics and economy.

In 1885, while he was visiting his son Lewis, Jim Hutchinson was shot dead by Frederick Barth, a White man on horseback who showed up unannounced and looking for conflict. Barth claimed self-defense, and the White jury acquitted him, Estevez said.

By the 1880s, gains achieved during Reconstruction were eroding. Nevertheless, many African Americans on Edisto Island managed to retain control of the land they were farming. By 1900, about 43 percent of Black farmers in Charleston County owned their land, versus 22 percent statewide, Butler found.

The reasons included creative approaches to securing property, especially cooperative land purchases. Before he was killed, Jim Hutchinson arranged just such a purchase. “Thirteen freedmen including himself purchased 234 acres of Seaside Plantation to divide amongst themselves,” Butler writes.

“A savvy businessman, Jim started a black-owned ferry company on Edisto and organized a second land cooperative in 1875 to purchase 404 acres of Shell House Plantation (once owned by the Grimball and Clark families), of which he received 90 acres of marsh and 74 high acres; part of this site is where his son Henry would later build Hutchinson House.”

Henry Hutchinson mostly grew cotton, but also Indian corn and potatoes. He owned two horses. He kept chickens. And he operated a cotton gin on his property. In 1885, he married Rosa and built the house as a wedding present, according to family lore.

The house is significant for two main reasons, its distinctive architecture and construction, and its age, Butler said.

The architect was John Pearson Hutchinson, perhaps best known for designing Central Baptist Church on Radcliffe Street downtown. The builders used salvaged materials, hand-decorated wood trim, hand-hewn beams and glass doorknobs.

The house is one of the oldest left on the island constructed by formerly enslaved people, and it was distinctive for the time, with its extra room at the back, wraparound porch and numerous windows. Plus it sat on an unusually large piece of property.

In 1987, the Hutchinson House was part of a grouping of Edisto Island structures listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Now, Butler has submitted a new application to the National Park Service to ensure the house is independently listed. It qualifies under two criteria: ethnic heritage and architecture. The application, filed on behalf of the Edisto Island Open Land Trust, currently is under review.

A partnership

At the site, Dean and Barbara Habhegger point out the flared roof, eave returns, door knobs and other decorative features. Dean is on the Trust’s board of directors. Barbara is a volunteer grant writer.

John Girault discusses the careful choice of paint color (“Myrtle Green”) and the plan to restore the interior (using hand tools only) and the idea of using the house as an exhibition space where artists can show work and the history of the Hutchinson family can be told.

Maybe, Girault said, the Trust can arrange for summer entertainment on site, highlighting Gullah culture. Surely the house will lure vacationers who can learn about Reconstruction on the sea islands, cotton cultivation and the fortitude of African Americans determined to provide the next generation with something more.

Estevez said the whole project has been rewarding.

“(Girault) doesn’t make any decision without consulting the family first,” Estevez said. “It’s almost as though the Land Trust and the family have a partnership.”

The collaboration is essential, he added.

“The Land Trust can’t tell the story of the Hutchinson House without the Hutchinson family,” Estevez said. “On the flip side, we can’t do it without the Land Trust.”

It’s reminiscent of the informal social contract honored by Black families on Edisto Island.

When someone in community caught fish or crabs in the creek, or killed hog, he would call his neighbors, he said. When cotton was ginned, much of it went to market in Charleston, but some was reserved for the people in the neighborhood.

“That’s how the community was,” Estevez said. “They looked out for one another.”

The Hutchinson House

The Edisto Island Open Land Trust is finishing a multiyear restoration project and soon will provide public access and historical interpretation of the site.

SOURCE: ESRI BRANDON LOCKETT/STAFF