Unpacking History

Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2018/12 - December

Twenty enthusiastic people attended the October 16, 2018, Cashiers Historical Society’s Historic Sites Ramble #2 with speakers Ann McKee Austin, Carol Bryson, and Jane Nardy telling the stories at each stop along the way. 

Coffee and cookies were served at the Village Hound visit while ramblers heard the ghost story unique to that building.  At least three of the historic sites had once functioned as a grocery store with the owners living in the back.  At the highly successful women’s dress shop, Sashay Around, the ramblers learned of the many well-known national celebrities like Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields who shopped there whenever they were in town.  A surprise “treat” was a close up look at the famous Cosmopolitan magazine 1972 centerfold of a nude Burt Reynolds stretched out on his side on a bear skin rug. [laughter and applause].  Years later, Reynolds said he regretted that centerfold because it detracted from his serious acting role in the 1972 movie “Deliverance.”

The bittersweet story was told of the Childers brothers, Paul and Ham [short for Hamilton] and their orphaned teenage niece.  Paul and Ham, in the early 1940s, ran a woodworking business in a building across Highway 64 East from Alexander Gardens they called the Woodpecker Shop.  In most of the homes in Cashiers there was at least one piece of the Childers furniture and the guest rooms at High Hampton Inn, Cottage Inn, Cashiers Hotel, and Oakmont Lodge were furnished with the well-made furniture from the Woodpecker Shop.  When the Childers’ sister died, leaving behind her 13-year-old daughter, the daughter’s stepfather said he would gladly take care of his step-daughter.  A good man, everyone thought, until the Childers brothers noticed their niece’s stomach growing large.  The police were called, the step-father taken away, put in jail, and was never seen again in Cashiers. The teenage niece gave birth to a baby boy who was raised with much love, received a college education, and mother and son remained devoted to each other throughout the rest of her life.  She could have worn a #Me Too tee-shirt.

The picture that accompanies this article shows the 1890 Hampton School House being moved last August from its original site to the grounds of the Cashiers Historical Society campus.  This school for the children of Cashiers was the brainchild of General Wade Hampton III’s three old-maid sisters, who spent many of their summers in Cashiers. 

The reason these three sisters had never married was discovered by Carol Bryson’s research.  While teenagers, the sisters were sexually molested by a former governor of South Carolina who was their aunt’s husband, James Henry Hammond.  In his diaries, Hammond wrote details of the girls intimate cuddling with him.

“9 December 1846…lovely creatures from the tender but precocious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19…permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them.”

When one of the girls told their father, Wade Hampton II, what their uncle was doing, their father exposed Hammond’s unthinkable actions to the world.  Unfortunately, no man wanted to marry a tainted woman, so the Hampton sisters remained old maids—candidates for today’s #MeToo movement!