Thomson Hutchinson gardens Abbeville, SC Jehu Foster Marshall

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Tour of Gardens

The Garden Tours are Saturday April 12th from 1:00 PM until 5:00 PM.

Jehu Foster Marshall

Robertson-Hutchinson Garden

509 North Main Street

Mrs. May Hutchinson’s Garden will be on tour Saturday from 1 until 5 during the Abbeville French Heritage Festival. The 15 ft fountain built in the early 1800’s was restored recently. The garden is filled with flowering azaleas, magnolias and dogwoods. The redwood tree is a site to see. It is over 115 ft tall. Do not miss the small head stone marking the special family cats resting place.

Soon after J. Foster Marshall purchased 12 acres of land on North Main Street c. 1846, the front garden fountain began to take shape. Marshall was considered a sophisticated landscaper with plants, both exotic and otherwise, that were becoming readily available from Pomaria Nurseries near Newberry, South Carolina. Marshall's landscaping efforts were interrupted by the Mexican War as he served in the Palmetto Regiment.

Upon his return from the war, the landscaping started up again in earnest. It was during this period that we must assume, that the giant redwood [Sequoia Sempervirens] was planted. Boxwoods were planted in neat parterres, as well as magnolias, both bays and grandifloras.

By 1857, Marshall had the assistance of the Rev. Benjamin Johnson, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Abbeville who was also a landscaper.Existing records of the nursery show that Marshall ordered plants frequently. It was in these years that a 15 foot fountain [now being restored] was added to the south garden. Marshall's wife Elizabeth DeBruhl Marshall designed 
many of the geometric walkways.  After Col Marshall's death in 1862 she managed their vast holdings, plantations, and the house and gardens until her death in 1868.  Elizabeth was the daughter of Jesse DeBruhl who built the DeBruhl Marshall House in Columbia. 

This property came into the Robertson family in 1872 and additions were made to the garden at that time. Eugenia Robertson Baskin added azaleas and tended the garden lovingly until her death.Her daughter, May Robertson Baskin Hutchinson, the present owner, is now the caretaker and her daughters Jean Robertson Hutchinson and Ann Hutchinson Waigand who played in the garden on summer visits now carry on the tradition of coming home to work in the garden.

Jehu Marshall landscaping Abbeville Grounds

From Abbeville, South Carolina to the U.S. Capitol:
Discovering, and Authenticating, an Historic Treasure Trove in Your (Front) Yard
Themes:
Recognizing: Documenting Local History and National Relevance Protecting: Restoration and Long-Term Stewardship
This session explores the discovery of the largest-known private collection of Janes, Beebe and Company cast iron garden ornaments still in existence, and the research that led to its authentication. Janes, Beebe and Company is significant as the foundry that cast the dome of the U.S. Capitol building. The 14-foot-tall cast iron fountain in the yard of the Robertson-Hutchinson House, Abbeville, South Carolina is only the fifth extant Janes-Beebe fountain to be found in the United States and shares the distinction, with the Forsyth Park fountain in Savannah, of being the oldest remaining example of the company’s decorative fountains.
The grounds of the Robertson-Hutchinson house in Abbeville, South Carolina were landscaped between 1848 and 1861 by Colonel Jehu Foster Marshall. Marshall purchased 12 acres in the middle of the village of Abbeville in late 1847, built a house, and began arranging for the landscaping of the gardens, a process that continued throughout the 1850s. The decorative cast iron he purchased, and which remains on the grounds, includes: Two greyhound dogs, two large urns, a settee (which bears the Janes, Beebe mark), a chair and the bottom halves of two additional chairs, and the basin from an additional smaller fountain.The design of the sculpture on top of the fountain (two distinctive figures with dragon heads, voluptuous female bodies, wings, and entwined mermaid or fish tails) has been traced to the French foundry of J.J. Ducel. Janes, Beebe is known to have sent a representative to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, to get ideas and patterns for decorative ironwork, and Ducel exhibited his decorative ironwork there.
The gardens--which were described in a reminiscence: “In all my travels throughout the world, not excepting the famous gardens of Versailles, have I seen anything to equal it" --were planted with specimens purchased from Summers Nursery in Pomaria, South Carolina. Still standing beside the fountain is the redwood tree Marshall planted, now recorded as the oldest and tallest redwood tree in South Carolina (and, possibly, the oldest and tallest east of the Mississippi).
This is a tale of dogged research that travels from the little village of Abbeville in the 1850s to the contentious political seas in Washington, DC in the decade prior to the Civil War to London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to the iron foundry in France that cast the Bartholdi Fountain (U.S. Botanic Garden) to the White House, New York’s Central Park, and Cusco, Peru. Along the way, there are: A serendipitous meeting in the streets of Capitol Hill (Washington, DC), a box of unexplored documents, and the stitching together of a family history which ends up connecting Abbeville to Starbucks, the Paris Metro, and the very origins of decorative cast ironwork.

The session is enhanced by archival photos of the fountain (1885 to the present), as well as photos documenting the restoration process; images from the 1855/58 catalogs of Janes, Beebe and Company and the 1850 catalog of the French foundry of J.J. Ducel; copies of historical documents relating to the ironwork and gardens; and a bibliography of sources.
The presenter is Ann Hutchinson Waigand, whose great-grandmother purchased the house (with cast iron garden ornaments) from the estate of J. Foster Marshall and whose mother is the fourth generation of her family to live in the house. The presentation will also discuss the long-term stewardship of the house and grounds by the Robertson family and its descendants as well as the house’s tradition of passing down through the female line (a tradition that will continue through Waigand and her sister, Jean Robertson Hutchinson, and on to Waigand’s two daughters).
Ann Hutchinson Waigand is an independent researcher, editor, and freelance writer who contributed a column to the New York Times Syndicate for five years. She has worked as a developmental editor with The Teaching Company, coaching professors in presenting recorded courses, and spent 20 years in the field of educational and cultural tourism, working with a diverse range of clients including the Smithsonian Institution and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
May Robertson Baskin Hutchinson will participate in the question-and-answer session. The fourth generation of her family to live on the property in Abbeville (she sleeps in the bedroom in which she was born), she is responsible for the restoration of the house and fountain. She served on the Executive Council of the Confederation of South Carolina Historical Societies and as Vice Chairman on the Commission to Implement Abbeville”s Historic Properties Protection Ordinance at its inception; co-founded HATS, the Historic Abbeville Tour Service; wrote the Fitness Walk Tour of Historic Abbeville; was Project Manager for two grants to restore the McGowan-Barksdale-Bundy House; was curator for the Abbeville Historical Society’s headquarters for nine years; originated and led Erskine College’s/Abbeville’s Elderhostel (1987-94) focusing on Abbeville County history and Victorian decorative arts; and is Curator for the Abbeville County Museum.
Research sources include:
Carol Grissom, Smithsonian expert and author of Zinc Sculpture in America,
1850-1950
Susan Brizzolara Wojcik, art historian and author of Thomas U. Walter and Iron
in the United States Capitol: An Alliance of Architecture, Engineering, and Industry
Barbara Israel, author of Antique Garden Ornament: Two Centuries of American Taste
Barbara Wolanin, Curator of the U.S. Capitol
William Creech, National Archives
Lydia Tedrick, Office of the Curator of the White House

Margot Gayle (founder, Friends of Cast Iron Architecture) Papers, University of Maryland Special Collections
c. 1858 Janes, Beebe and Company catalog, New York Public Library
c. 1855 Janes, Beebe and Company catalog, Athenaeum of Philadelphia 1870 Janes, Kirtland & Co. catalog (reprinted 1971 by Pyne Press)
c. 1850 catalog of J.J. Ducel, Réseau international de la fonte d’art (RIFA) c. 1892 catalog of Val d’Osne, Athenaeum of Philadelphia
Dominique Perchet, RIFA 


Transcribed by Norman DeBruhl December 17, 2014

Jehu Foster Marshall and wife Elizabeth DeBruhl Marshall

Southern Sentinel  Jehu Foster Marshall

E. C. Sanford

Jehu Foster Marshall of Ocala was a supplier of goods, including

whiskey and sugar to the Confederacy.  His plantation was a major supplier of sugar until the end of the war when Federal troops overran the plantation and burned or destroyed the sugar mill and all the production.  Marshall shipped his goods by way of Col. Hubbart I Hart’s  HARTLINE STEAMBOAT LINE, on Hart’s, James Burt, and Capt. Richard J Adams Silver Springs plantation.   Marshall’s plantation was raided on March 10, 1865 by the 3^rd Union Colored Infantry, led by Sgt. Major Henry James.  The raid was repelled by Capt. J J Dickinson (“Florida’s Swamp Fox”), which ended all Union presence in Marion County Florida, and along the Oklawaha River. April 2, 1865, Richmond fell Jefferson Davis and his wife’s property was seized, May 1865, at David Yulee’s Cottonwood Plantation near Gainesville at a place called Irwinville, Ga. Lola Sanchez, Confederate spy, was a resident of Union occupied Palatka, who provided information to both Hart and Dickinson during the war and was paid in Mexican silver dollars in May 1865.  Elizabeth DeBruhl Marshall operated the sugar plantation until it was destroyed in 1865.  Elizabeth DeBruhl Marshall

lost her 17 year old brother William Jesse to a hunting accident, her father

Jesse DeBruhl was killed when a tree fell on him in 1860 in Columbia County Florida where he was clearing land on another of his several plantations. Her husband Jehu Foster Marshall was killed in 1863 at the battle of Second Manasses.  Her father- in- law Dr. Marshall of Abbeville owner of White Hall plantation died soon after the end of the war.  He divided up his 3,760 acre plantation among his slaves.  Many of their descendants still live on the land. When Jefferson Davis's party was fleeing south with the Confederate cabinet and the treasury they stopped twice in Abbeville once at White Hall plantation.  The treasury then went to Washington Ga, from there into legend.  It has never been found or recovered.  Jefferson Davis and his party were captured by Union cavalry but they only had a few dollars in gold on them.  Jehu Foster Marshall had a sugar plantation in Ocala

Florida where he shipped goods by steamboat.  It was rumored that Breckenridge hired a boat and took the remaining treasury to Cuba.

Judah P. Benjamin was rumored to have taken a large portion of the treasury

to England.  He lived out his life in England.

All that is really known is it was loaded on a train in Richmond guarded
by a detachment of the Confederate Navy.  The Federal government
owned the contents the moment Lee surrendered.  Nobody guarding
the treasury had any incentive to turn it over to the Feds. As long as
they were on the train the weight of the gold and coins weren't a
problem
but when they de- trained with all that weight then they needed wagons
and horses which were at a premium.  The only "friends" were recently
paroled
Confederate Calvary roaming throughout.  The Federal Calvary was hot on
the trail looking for old Jeff Davis.  If the Feds took the treasury they found
with Jeff Davis's party then they weren't talking.  If the treasury was robbed
by bands of ex confederate Calvary they weren't talking either. This leaves
the "honest" ex navy guards who could have simply drove the wagons away
never to be seen and divided up the spoils.  The interesting part of the flight
was the return to the Marshall plantation the second time when the Federal
Calvary was pressing too close.  It is probably buried under lake Norman
or Lake Marion or some Interstate highway fill. 

William Ashley DeBruhl age 17 only son of William Jesse DeBruhl

Light went out so did a life. Another instance of what proved to be a forerunner of
death occurs to me.

William Ashley DeBruhl age 17, the only son of Mr. Jesse DeBruhl by his first wife, Eliza Donovan was killed while shooting bull-bats received a load of small shot in the head from a 
gun in the hands of a young man named Bird, a very gentlemanly appearing stranger, (Mr. Bird introduced family painted oil-cloth table covers here-something new.)  It was clearly an accident, but poor Bird was completely broken down by it. I was present when the shooting
occurred.  We were boarding at the time at the Globe Hotel, kept by Mr. William Reeder and his wife, where the post office now stands.  Fearful of worrying young DeBruhl's relatives by his appearing at the house , he engaged me to go twice a day to inquire about the wounded youngster.  The patient seemed to be doing very well, although the physicians could see no hopes for his recovery.  This was in the oil lamp days.  One night while the solitary lamp in the sick room was apparently burning all right, it suddenly went out.  Young DeBruhl noticed it,
turned to his mother and said quietly, " I know what that sign means-- goodbye", and died before the lamp could be relighted.  Dr Samuel Fair, of Newberry SC who had graduated in Paris and lately begun the practice of medicine in Columbia, attended the young man, and afterwards married his sister.  The grave is unmarked in the Presbyterian Church yard.

Jullian Selby South Carolina Gazeteer
Transcribed by Norman DeBruhl
December 8, 2014