Lowcountry Hurricanes Read online

  When Dr. Wardie reluctantly opened his door, Tom announced that he had come to take care of him. Over the young doctor’s somewhat feeble objections, Tom began to set the neglected household in order. From that day on, Tom cooked and cleaned for Dr. Wardie. He chopped wood, carried water, and made the long trek into town for supplies. Tom even moved his wife and family to a nearby cabin so he could be closer to his self-imposed charge.

  The young doctor remained isolated in his small house for many months. Some say he took to drink, with Tom nursing him through long, sad days and nights. Whether from drink or from grief, at times Dr. Wardie seemed to be reliving incidents of those long hours in the water. He would cry out to his doomed family, one by one, begging them not to slip away.

  Plantation workers began to avoid the lonely cottage and the withdrawn man they had once loved and respected. Dr. Wardie rarely left his house and depended on Tom to bring him whatever he needed.

  ~

  Like any great tragedy, the Flagg Flood inspired stories. Down at Pawley’s Island, the old tale of the ghostly Gray Man who warned residents of impending disaster gained new life.

  Local folk here at Brookgreen began telling tales of an imprisoned mermaid who caused the storm. Strangely enough, the gentle and kindhearted Dr. Wardie appeared in one version of the story as the villain responsible for the storm that killed so many of his own family. That story claimed he had brought the tragedy on himself by capturing a mermaid.

  Perhaps these folks were trying to explain Dr. Wardie’s extreme response to the loss of his family. If he felt guilty for causing their deaths, his extended grief and isolation would make more sense. Maybe the story also helped explain his lifelong avoidance of society, especially that of the female kind.

  Now, Dr. Wardie had always shied away from the company of young ladies. Unlike his brothers, he showed little interest in chasing after girls. The young man always preferred his books or long walks on the beach to the carefully arranged—and carefully chaperoned—social gatherings of his day.

  Perhaps it was something he said, or maybe it was something his teenage brothers made up to tease him, but the story began circulating that Dr. Wardie ignored young women because he had been enchanted by a beautiful mermaid. His long walks on the beach were really rendezvous with his true love from the deep.

  Over and over—the story went—Dr. Wardie tried to convince the mystical creature to abandon her watery home, to come ashore and become his bride. He begged her to exchange her graceful tail and silvery scales for the form of a land-dwelling maiden. But the lovely enchantress would only laugh at his pleas and continue playing with the beautiful golden globe she always carried, then dive back into the splashing surf.

  Finally, Dr. Wardie determined to capture his love and keep her on land until she consented to marry him. Early one morning he carried out his plan. When time came for their usual parting kiss, he seized her firmly in his strong arms and carried her to the secret alcove he had prepared in one of the outbuildings behind his father’s beach house. Over the next few days, the infatuated young man tried desperately to convince the mermaid to remain with him forever. He did not wish to harm her. He just wanted her to give up her watery ways and become his wife.

  The mermaid grew quieter each day, spending more and more time spinning her golden globe. Dr. Wardie remained besotted, convinced he could win her over. Little did he know that her spinning globe was summoning mighty forces.

  Of course, keeping something like an imprisoned mermaid hidden from curious eyes was impossible. Dr. Wardie’s family rarely ventured out to the buildings behind the beach house but family servants had frequent business there. When they discovered the supernatural creature, they pleaded with the young man to turn her loose. Of course, they dared not take such a liberty themselves. One after another, they warned him of the dire consequences of crossing this magical being.

  Dr. Wardie would not be moved. He remained convinced his plan just needed a few more days. Even when torrential rains began to fall and angry winds lashed a rising ocean, he held fast to his hopes. He only recognized the folly of his dreams when he awoke to find himself and his family engulfed in a mighty hurricane. By then, it was too late. Once summoned, such a storm cannot easily be dismissed.

  So, as crashing waves demolished Flagg beach houses, they released the beautiful mermaid from her prison. Perhaps Dr. Wardie saw her swim free as he clutched his storm-battered beach cedar. He certainly thought of her as grief overwhelmed him, grief that would haunt him for the rest of his years, grief for his lost family and for his lost love, his beautiful mermaid.

  ~

  Dr. Wardie’s isolation in his cottage at Brookgreen continued month after month. Then an epidemic broke out among local children. With no other relief in sight, plantation workers begged the young physician to help them with medicine and doctoring their sick young ones.

  Finally, Dr. Wardie’s concern for others reawakened. He began to provide needed medical services again to the local people, both black and white. He would go out at any hour of the day or night to take care of a patient. Although the local people kept him supplied with food, he rarely charged anyone for his care and often bought medicine with his own money for those who could not afford it.

  Tom Duncan continued to take care of Dr. Wardie’s needs. Together they moved family portraits from the big plantation house into Dr. Wardie’s small cottage. There, the paintings, including a lovely oil of Dr. Wardie’s Aunt Alice, the White Lady of the Hermitage, painted by his uncle, George Whiting Flagg, kept him company throughout his long remaining years.

  It was fortunate that they moved the portraits for shortly after the turn of the century, the big deserted plantation house caught fire and burned to the ground. That treasured painting of Alice still survives in the family somewhere today, most likely out in Washington.

  Dr. Wardie lived in the small house on Brookgreen Plantation for the rest of his days, even though the plantation itself changed hands several times. Commercial rice growing ended in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. After that, plantation lands served as hunting retreats for wealthy businessmen. For a while, Brookgreen belonged to Dr. Julian Mood whose daughter, Julia Peterkin, wrote Scarlet Sister Mary, a novel about local Gullah people. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929.

  In the 1930s, millionaire philanthropist Archer Huntington and his sculptor wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, bought the historic rice plantation, along with three adjoining ones, combining them to create Brookgreen Gardens as a showplace for her sculpture. When Mr. Huntington developed Brookgreen Gardens, he built the lovely Alligator Bender Pool where the old plantation home once stood. It still serves as the central reservoir for the irrigation system today.

  The Huntingtons also built their own home at the beach across the Kings Highway from Brookgreen Gardens. They called this sturdy brick structure “Atalya,” which means “watchtower” in Spanish. They patterned it after similar medieval structures along the coast of Spain. Wisely, they heeded the lesson of the Flagg Flood and set their home far enough back from the ocean to avoid any threat from our fall storms.

  Cousin Corrie added …

  Dr. Wardie continued to live in that small house, even after Mr. Huntington created Brookgreen Gardens. He never married and never went out into society, but he welcomed the occasional visitor who stopped into his home.

  From time to time, my sister Mamie would carry our mother and me down from Murrells Inlet in her car to visit Dr. Wardie. He loved the figs my mother always brought him from a tree in our yard.

  Dr. Wardie looked like a hermit in his later years, with long white hair and a white beard, just like in the photograph. However, he spoke readily and pleasantly with visitors. I remember him as a kindly man who liked to tell stories of the past.

  Miss Genevieve concluded the story …

  In 1938, Dr. Wardie passed away at the age of 77. He was buried with other family members in the cemetery at All Saints Episcopal Church. You can
visit their graves there today, along with memorial stones for the ones whose bodies were never recovered.

  Dr. Wardie had a funeral like none ever seen here before. At the family’s request, Dr. Wardie’s “good and faithful servant,” Tom Duncan, led the long and impressive funeral procession. Several hundred people, including our governor, attended the service. A large group of local people remained around the grave long into the night, singing spiritual after spiritual to honor their long time friend and physician.

  Dr. Wardie had gone at last to join those loved ones he lost forty five years earlier on Friday, the thirteenth of October, 1893, the day of The Flagg Flood.

  Every Sixty Years

  In the years after Hurricane Hazel hit the Carolina Lowcountry in 1954, visitors to Brookgreen Gardens often asked about hurricanes and the experiences of those who had lived through them. Cousin Corrie served as the expert on hurricanes and other natural disasters. She could talk at length about big storms from first hand experience.

  My father used to say, “Every sixty years. A bad storm hits here every sixty years.” Of course, along our coast we have so many bad storms that it is certainly true we have a bad one every sixty years, with plenty of others in between for good measure!

  In my younger years, some of my elderly aunts still remembered the terrible Storm of 1822. Waters swept away hundreds of people when they covered North Island at the lower tip of the Waccamaw Neck. Survivors told of seeing whole houses floating out to sea with lamps burning brightly in the windows—and some still see them floating along today, but that’s another story.

  Gales and tidal waves have always struck up and down our coast every few years. We call them “hurricanes” today and give them names. Weathermen study them and send out airplanes to track their paths, so we have plenty of warning nowadays. Even so, we are not always prepared for the fury they bring.

  When Hurricane Hazel came not too long ago, 1954 it was, my sister Mamie and our friend Lina—we three live together in our house on the creek through the marsh at Murrells Inlet—had plenty of warning. Our sister Dell had come visiting for the week, so she was there too. We talked about all of us going inland to stay at her place in Florence, but we decided to ride out the hurricane at the Inlet.

  We prepared for the storm as best we could with stocks of food, water, and flashlight batteries. We brought our lawn chairs and hammock inside the house. Our hired man pulled the rowboat as far up on shore as possible and even moved our heavy birdbath into the garage.

  That morning dawned gray and rainy. Brookgreen Gardens had closed in anticipation of the storm, so I stayed home. As the day progressed, wind and rain grew worse and worse. Soon, leaves, branches, and Spanish moss were flying everywhere. Horizontal rain felt like needles pricking my face when I went outside to check on the rowboat.

  As usual, ocean water filled the creek channels throughout the marsh on the rising tide. Then, instead of emptying back out to sea, the water kept rising. Soon seawater covered the mud banks at the base of the marsh grass, just the way it often does when the alignment of sun and moon makes tides especially high. A little later, we could only see a wide expanse of water with just the tips of marsh grass sticking out. Finally, even those tips disappeared! A vast expanse of white-capped rollers extended out to sea as far as we could see through shifting curtains of rain.

  Even then the tide did not turn. Rough waves began surging right up and over banks of oyster shells forming the shore in front of our house. By the time we decided we should leave, water had started running sideways through our yard, front and back, flooding our sandy drive all the way to the highway. We weren’t going anywhere.

  Fortunately, our house stands about four feet off the ground on brick pillars, but we rapidly became an island in the swirling water. Of course, electricity and telephone were long since out. We could do nothing but sit and talk, sit and think, sit and pray, sit and watch water moving ever higher up the brick porch steps that led down into what had once been our front yard. Now, it was the Atlantic Ocean!

  My thoughts went back to the last century, to the last big storm I had known at Murrells Inlet, the one that hit about 60 years earlier—really 61 years earlier—in October 1893. Local folks called that storm the Flagg Flood. Suddenly, I was five years old again. Mamie was nine at the time and my brother Rob was seven. Our baby sister Dell was just three. Big brother Clarence was fourteen.

  We lived across the way at the house called Woodlawn then, not one hundred yards from the house I live in now. Dr. Heriot, a Sandy Island rice planter, long gone by the time we lived there, had built Woodlawn as one of the first summer homes on the Murrells Inlet seashore, back in the 1830s. We young ones loved playing on its large front porch while Mama sat and rocked. That lovely home still overlooks the marsh today.

  Murrells Inlet provided wonderful experiences for children when we were growing up. We all had such grand times there in the creeks and marshes and woods, enjoying the fishing, crabbing, boating, and sea bathing, as well as get togethers with other Inlet families.

  Papa was a wholesale merchant but spent as much time as possible at the Inlet with us. When he needed to attend to his mercantile business, he could ride his horse three miles directly across the Waccamaw Neck to Wachesaw Landing on the Waccamaw River. There, he caught the steamboat headed upriver to Port Harrelson, Bucksville, and Conway, or downriver to Georgetown.

  Mama supervised the household, of course, including the children, the garden, the animals, the local women who helped with cooking and cleaning, and the hired man who did outside chores. Papa left frequently, but usually for only a day or two at a time. Mama got used to being home alone with us children and the household help.

  September and October were always a time for storms. We didn’t call them hurricanes then, but cyclones or tidal waves or just big storms. Nobody knew when they might arrive, so everybody watched for signs. Changes in the clouds and winds or the way birds flew gave some hints. The calling of rain crows—our name for mourning doves—or hogs running around picking up sticks meant a storm was coming, but no one ever knew how severe it would be.

  Down at Pawley’s Island, people say the ghostly Gray Man warns them of bad storms—but that’s definitely another story. Along this part of the coast, we simply had to take our chances and trust to Providence.

  One terrible storm had already hit our coast that year in August but it didn’t bother us much at the Inlet. I do remember being worried about Mama’s sister and her family who lived in Charleston, where hundreds of people died. We finally got word they were safe, however. Surely, we wouldn’t have another bad storm so soon!

  That morning sixty-one years ago also started out gray and rainy, and only got worse. Papa was away on business and our big brother Clarence had a job in Florence that fall. Mama was alone with us four little ones. We were all inside the house tending to morning chores when suddenly the hired man came banging at the back door.

  “The water is over the creek bank, running in the yard!” he cried.

  Mama showed no fear at all, which kept us from being frightened. In her calm but authoritative voice, she directed the hired man, “Set the barrel of flour on the stove top and the lower dresser drawers on the bed.”

  She told us children, “Sit on the stairs going up to the second floor. Pick a stair step not too high and not too low. Mamie, you mind little Dell. Rob and Corrie, sit next to each other.”

  Mamie sat on a step about halfway up with her arm around Dell. Rob and I sat below them and held on to the hound dog between us. Mama stood on a lower step surveying everything. It seemed like hours we sat there, listening to the wind get louder and louder, but I don’t suppose it was really that long.

  Water began swirling around the house. Soon it covered the porch, surging against the door. Mama called to the hired man, “Open the front and back doors, before the water breaks them in.” When he did, dark water rushed through the hall and covered the downstairs floors.

  O
nce we could see outside through the open doors, we children began laughing at the antics of our barnyard animals. Our poor milk cow tumbled every which way in the currents, but always regained her footing.

  My mother’s black and white Plymouth Rock hens flapped and squawked and bobbed around. Currents swept some into the house. Whenever Mama or the hired man could grab one, they would hand her to us children. We would set her above us on the stairs, so we soon had a row of soggy and disgusted old hens clucking down at us.

  The storm must have been letting up by then because I remember the animals’ struggles as being more entertaining than frightening. Perhaps I was just too young to recognize our danger. Or maybe, because Mama kept us all calm, we felt secure. The house trembled occasionally, but held solid.

  The water finally began going down. It drained out of the house and began flowing faster and faster back toward where it belonged, sweeping all sorts of debris with it. By mid-afternoon, our yard had cleared, although puddles and soggy, beaten down vegetation covered everything.

  The Bucks, our neighbors just along the creek, also weathered the storm in their old plantation summer house. Water flooded their downstairs too, and rose almost to the second floor, but their old house also stood firm. When the water retreated, all were safe, including the Beaty family who had joined them from their own lowlying house next door.

  The Bucks did get a humorous story out of the ordeal. After a quick inspection, Buck servants sadly informed the family still inside that, although the house looked sound, all their outbuildings were gone. A workshop with all its tools and the henhouse with all its chickens had simply vanished. When the stunned family finally stepped outside to survey the damage for themselves, cackles and squawks immediately drew their attention to the roof. There sat their missing poultry, lined up along the ridgeline—unhappy but safe!

  In spite of the storm, the riverboat Mitchell C made its way steadily upstream from Georgetown. Papa arrived at Wachesaw Landing that night, sick with worry about us. He had to lead his horse the entire three miles home because of fallen trees and washed out areas, but what a homecoming! We were all safe and together at last.