Chronicles of Chicora Wood

I asked Daddy Ancrum to come some day and tell me all he could remember about the past, and this morning while I was reading the lessons to Clarinda in the front piazza we saw h...

That evening reality returned heavily when the two mothers, widows and managers of large estates and property, returned. The day had been very trying. The oath was taken as the...

We returned to Charleston, January the 15th, in the midst of the gay season. Of course, I went back to school and had little to do with the gaiety, except to see Della dress for...

Having brought things up to this point by telling what I heard from my dear mother, who had a wonderful memory, as well as a most dramatic power of speech, I must try now to put...

We are now well on in the second year of the school, and it is no longer an experiment but a great success. Mamma’s methods and judgment have been fully justified. The “young La...

It seems too wonderful to be at home again in my own dear low country after being refugees so long. It is a delight to be alive, and know most of those we love are alive too aft...

The cultivation of rice necessitated keeping the fields flooded with river water until it became stagnant, and the whole atmosphere was polluted by the dreadful smell. No white...

These tragic memories all have as a background our summer home on Pawley’s Island, which we always spoke of as “the beach,” as though this were the only beach in the world. My n...

When the spring came papa made us a little longer visit than usual. He was not feeling well, his heart was giving him trouble. I only knew this afterward from mamma, for papa ne...

My holiday, the months of December, 1863, and January, 1864, were passed with my father on the coast, where he had planting, salt boiling, and freighting up the rivers, to look...

We went to our summer home on Pawley’s Island in June, and oh! the delight of the freedom of the life on the sea-beach after the city, and the happiness of being at home. The ba...

The next winter, in February, mamma’s first child, a son, named Benjamin, after papa’s father, was born. She was desperately ill, and her beautiful hair was cut as short as poss...

Now I must go back to my father’s early life, for I left him just married, and bringing his beautiful bride from the gay life of the city to the intense quiet, as far as social...

One spring, when the little Louise was about three, I think, Adèle five, Fanny seven, Robert nine, Ben eleven, a neighbor wrote from Charleston to mamma, asking if she would rec...

After the mother’s death the home seemed very desolate; and when the eldest brother’s, James L. Petigru’s, wife proposed most generously to take the younger girls to live with t...

Then one day, to our amazement, Sam Galant came with two horses which he had brought back safe all the way from Virginia! They were thin and so was he, but it was a wonderful fe...

This was a very happy year to me and to mamma. My little sister made her début, and she was so pretty and so charming that she was greatly admired and had a great many adorers....

As everything would be seized by the enemy when they came, we lived very high, and the things which had been preciously hoarded until the men of the family should come home were...

My mother, Adèle Petigru, was the granddaughter of Jean Louis Gibert, one of the Pasteurs du Desert, who brought the last colony of Huguenots to South Carolina in April, 1764, a...

Only a few days after Daddy Aleck’s and Nelson’s return, Brutus came from Loch Adèle, bearing a piece of paper with hieroglyphics on it in pencil. After much studying over it by...

While we were at boarding-school we had not gone into the country for the short Christmas holidays; but now we went a week before Christmas with all the household, and did not r...

I am holding on to every moment of my full happy life, for this is to be our last year in Charleston. Mamma has applied for her dower, and when it is assigned her, we will move...

John Allston, of St. John’s, Berkeley, was born in England in 1666, and came to this country between 1685 and 1694. He was descended from the ancient family of Allstone, through...

My niece is too fascinating, tiny, red, squirming! I have never been on intimate terms with so young a baby before, and cannot be content to hold her but a little while. I want...

As soon as war was declared Madame Togno moved her school from Charleston to Columbia, as every one knew it was only a question of time as to when the city would be shelled. She...

Preparations for the school are going on apace. We have moved into our house and it is too beautiful. I had forgotten how lovely it was. Fortunately, the beautiful paper in the...

After my aunt and cousins left we began to bury every treasure we had. All the silver which had not been sent to Morven was packed in a wooden chest, and Mr. William Evans, our...

Crowley Hill, the place to which we went, was a quaint old-fashioned house set in a great grove of oak-trees, not the big live oaks we were accustomed to, but Spanish oaks and r...

I left school on my birthday, May 29, 1863, and returned to my home in Charleston. There great activity and excitement reigned, for my sister was to be married June 24 and I was...

Soon after we returned to Crowley Hill she determined to go to the North Carolina farms and see the people, so as to reassure them as to her taking care of them fully.

The farms of the up-country as a rule required few hands, and so each farmer owned only a few negroes, and, of course, the relations between master and slave were different from...

Just as we were leaving for Church the paper came and there in it was the dreadful intelligence that my cousin Gen’l Johnston Pettigrew, who was wounded on the 17th had died of...

After this things are vague in my mind, only an impression of distress and gloom. I got a letter from my cousin and friend, Hal Lesesne, telling of the successive falling back w...