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Armistead’s Much Ado
Written By: Stuart Ferguson - Shakespeare and Company | Issue: July 2023 | Photograph By: Susan Renfro
A dizzying array of incidents and characters swirled around the singular Mr. Armistead Burt.
“In Abbeville, we don’t want to hear about your illnesses or grandchildren!” the late director of the Burt-Stark Historic Mansion (and local social arbiter) told people who ventured onto those topics.
Margaret Bowie was still going strong in her 90s when her tenant (she lived next door to the mansion in her own 19th-century showplace) heard her lay down the law to friends.
R. Douglas White’s “Kiss the Magnolia Tree” is an affectionate memoir of his 12 years living with his friend and landlady “Miss Margaret” (though she was a widow and in fact a grandmother who loved to discuss her own grandchildren). It’s also an account of Abbeville in the 1990s, a charming and historic town in upstate South Carolina, which was the subject of two fine articles in The Laurel by Cashiers historian Jane Nardy after she led a group of CHS members and friends on an overnight trip there in 2007.
Why all this ink for Abbeville in our magazine? Because it was the home of Armistead Burt (1802-1883) for whom the historic mansion there is partially named. But Stark was also an owner of the Zachary-Tolbert House (now owned and operated by the Cashiers Historical Society and without his name even though he was famous in his day) and spent summers there from 1873 until 1881, hosting people like Thomas Clemson and visiting his friend Wade Hampton III just down the road at his hunting lodge (today’s High Hampton resort). Stark, a whiz-bang lawyer (“many a culprit went free” due to his abilities, as his buddy Gov. Perry put it) and U.S. Congressman and married to a niece of Vice President John C. Calhoun, is today best known for hosting Jefferson and Varina Davis on their flight from Richmond in the spring of 1865.
Mr. White is a Presbyterian minister who frequently visits Highlands with his wife. His charming rendering of Abbeville’s denizens – including Miss Margaret’s mutt named Possum who bit most everyone and may have returned as a ghost to bite some more – in “Kiss the Magnolia Tree” is both very funny and very moving.
Dr. S. Robert Lathan (whose great book on Wade Hampton in Cashiers I wrote about last year) was on that Abbeville tour with Jane and became intrigued with Burt. His easy and informative “Who Was Armistead Burt” is the satisfying result of that historical fascination. We will talk more about McDuffie in next month’s issue, as Burt was his second in a series of duels *with the same man* and you don’t want to miss it.
