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| Shored-up house (Annie Smith/USC Union), 1850 Dawkins slave schedule; interior door (Picket photo) |
A course that debuted Aug. 18 at the University of South Carolina Union won’t be like the
campus classes I attended back in the day. There will be no lecture hall, study
sessions or a professor regurgitating set material.
Rather, “HIST 480-701 -- Internship in Public History”
will turn students into investigators, digging up little-known facts about the
Thomas and Mary Poulton Dawkins House in Union and the people – free and
enslaved – who lived there before, during and after the Civil War.
The timing of
the class is perfect. The once dilapidated home is slowly being rehabilitated
into a new campus facility.
“Everything
we are doing is bottom up,” said Andrew Kettler, assistant professor of history
at the two-year campus (right). He will work with a small, but he believes mighty, group. So
far, three students have signed up for the assignment, which includes building
an archival history.
Kettler hopes
a few students more will join the inaugural effort. He expects a bigger class
in the spring once the work and documentation takes shape.
Union, which is south of Spartanburg, briefly served as the
Civil War capital of the state after Columbia fell to Union forces in 1865 and
Gov. Andrew Magrath fled to Union.
From about Feb. 15, 1865, until
early April, Magrath ran the state from the Dawkins House. He
apparently worked in an informal library near the drawing room, which survives
today.
According to histories and local legend, Magrath and his
subordinates burned possibly incriminating documents and correspondence in
the home’s fireplaces. (The building served as South
Carolina's capitol while the city was briefly is capital.)
The 1850 federal slave schedule indicates Thomas Dawkins (left) enslaved about 20 persons, but there may have been more elsewhere. Some likely worked at other locations
besides the home, which was called “The Shrubs.” (The project has not yet found
an 1860 slave schedule)
Over the years, residents came and went from the Dawkins
House, which is located on the small USC-Union campus. But there had been one
constant: The deterioration of the building into near ruin.
Now the nonprofit Preservation South Carolina is working with
the campus and local leaders to rehabilitate the house into an alumni and corporate
center for the college. Raising money for the effort has taken time, but
officials continue to make progress.
“This is the
first time for PSC to have a class that is going on at the same time as one of
its preservation projects,” said Kettler.
There’s a lot at stake. Supporters say it’s important the
full history of the home and its occupants be told, warts and all. But they
also want the building to be aimed at the future and bring new attention to USC
Union, which has a growing enrollment. Currently, it has about 1,400 students; many are affiliated with the athletics programs.
Union County has a long segregation history and the area was
known for Ku Klux Klan activity and postwar lynchings. There have been recent
efforts, however, to acknowledge that history. Kettler said there is much more
to learn.
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| 2021 markers details part of the county's lynching history (Picket photo) |
Annie Smith, director of development on the campus, said the
course also will seek to identify those individuals who lived in the original
structure between 1765 and the early 1800s, before Thomas Dawkins bought and
expanded the residence.
The class research will include library, courthouse and
genealogical records. Kettler previously told the Picket the aim is less about
assigning blame for slavery than moving toward acknowledgement and
reconciliation
“We don’t
know what we are going to find. It just has to be an honest investigation,”
said the professor, who showed the students the outside of the home after the class began.
So far, they have possible names for 2 enslaved
A large focus of the class is finding out about the enslaved
persons, most of whose names are not know. Names were not included in old
census records.
“Focusing
searches on that specific population will also allow for uncovering connections
to the later history of Black citizens in Union County,” says the class
syllabus.
Kettler (right, Picket photo) and a couple students conducted some research over
the summer, including at the South Caroliniana Library at the main University of South Carolina campus in
Columbia. “We’re digging
constantly,” he said.
Kettler, 42,
said they have learned the possible names of two of the enslaved. He is not
identifying them at this point until he can confirm accounts. One was mentioned
in a postwar newspaper article saying the bride was a Dawkins servant (slave).
The second may have been a lynching victim in the 1870s, said the professor.
He expects
students will glean more names from county-by-county agricultural censuses.
“Tracing
formerly enslaved people is very difficult because of name changes,” said Kettler.
Others may have moved north decades later during the Great Migration.
The students,
working like detectives, will dig up records from myriad sources, such as death
schedules and wills. If they can find a Dawkins will, it may list enslaved
persons and what they may have received upon Thomas’s death. That could help
the effort to find out more about those individuals.
College hopes for an archives open to the public
The public
history course outline includes this overview:
“Students
will be engaging with archival documents to gain respect for the application
and relevance of historical knowledge, as well as support the broader goals of
the university and its environs. With the work in this course, USC Union
students can begin to explore documents that are to be organized into a
“Dawkins House Archive” that will be housed at the future Alumni and Corporate
Sponsor Center in the Dawkins House. Our focus on the course will be on
answering: What were the historical experiences of those who resided at the
Dawkins House?”
Kettler
envisions binders of documents at a location ”where people can see the actual
letters.” (At left, part of 1867 correspondence by Thomas Dawkins)
Students will
share extensive readings during the semester. Topics will include the Dawkins
House, memory, the antebellum period, slavery, Reconstruction, “historic sites
as powerful institutions,” contemporary Union and modern public history.
The class is half education on the topic and half
working through the methods of public history. Students will analyze documents, said the professor.
“They will do the work of the historian.”
Resources include census records, newspapers, the Union Country Museum, Rose Hill Plantation State Historic
Site, diaries and other papers. Kettler wants to see if the
county clerk has deeds to property owned Thomas Dawkins. That might help the
researchers go back to those who lived in the house way back in 1765.
One goal of
the endeavor is to get local folks involved in uncovering the area’s history
and make the Dawkins House a destination of sorts. Kettler, who believes a book
may result from the project, is available to speak to groups about the Dawkins
House as part of South Carolina Humanities’ speaker’s bureau.
For white citizens, a world turned upside down
When it comes
to the Civil War period, recorded experiences have almost exclusively been of
white people.
Mary Poulton Dawkins was many things in her 86 years, the majority of
which were ensconced in the home that was dubbed “The Shrubs” in honor of a
family estate by the same name in her native England.Dawkins (right), who
in 1845 married Thomas, a prominent South Carolina judge 14 years her senior,
was described by relatives as headstrong and proud of her imported furniture
and Queen Victoria.
There was another side of the
Englishwoman, however, that doesn’t project well these days.
While of the “highest culture,”
Mary had a tendency toward bigotry, an observer wrote, and a paternalistic view
of slavery.
Enslaved people had become a majority in Union County during the 1840s.
Following the South’s loss in
the Civil War, and the Dawkins’ fortune largely gone, Mary lamented
Reconstruction and the brief political power accorded to Black people.
“The negroes on
the plantation had really no ill feeling, but poor ignorant creatures, they were intoxicated with the
idea of power and always fond of
idleness; began to steal and destroy property, scarcely a night without a
burning,” Mary wrote in a memoir penned late in life. “There was no redress, no
law, and the ‘Ku Klux’ was formed to
frighten the negroes, so sensational, superstitious.”
Kettler said Thomas
Dawkins lived in a world based on the idea the patriarch is nearly above the
law on his own property, a theme popular on Southern plantations.“Dawkins
basically had one square mile that defined his life.There are four large
Southern homes within a few blocks of the Dawkins House, one we date to 1850
and another to 1857. Those would have been his direct neighbors less than a
mile away, he said.
”A half mile up the road is the church he paid to build.
And just up Main Street would have been the courthouse where he practiced as a
lawyer and then a judge. (At left, Episcopal Church of the Nativity,
Wikipedia).
“This was a
figure who exemplified the Southern ideal of Pater Familias, and used
Greco-Roman architecture to signify that in a Greek Revival-esque home,” the
professor added.
Group is raising more money for work on house
Some 120 years after Mary’s death, Preservation South Carolina is
raising money for the next phase of the
restoration of the residence.
Bill Comer, a Union native who is heading up the DawkinsHouse rehab project for PSC, previously said the refurbished site will provide
lessons from the past once it reopens.
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| Early rendering of what the house will look like when completed (PSC) |
The $300,000 state-funded Phase 1 of the work, which
concluded more than a year ago, shored up the
building. Phase 2 will be much more extensive and expensive.
PSC said they need at least $845,000 for the next phase of
work. About $284,000 has been raised or been committed, including a $100,000 award from the
Timken Foundation and a $25,000 grant from the SC Department of Archives and
History, said Comer.
Donations to the project can be made here.
“We hope to finalize other significant funding
arrangements within the next several weeks. Fundraising efforts will be ongoing
until the house is fully renovated and ready for use,” Comer said in an email.
It is
anticipated Bennett Preservation Engineering of Charleston will begin updating
and preparing design specifications for Phase 2 in early October and that
construction will begin in January 2027. “Phase 2 will take the building well
beyond stabilization to the point that it is ready to accommodate the Final
Phase of mechanical, electrical and plumbing construction,” Comer said.
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| USC Union offers associate degrees in arts and science and a bachelor's in nursing |
After that,
the house will be owned by the Union Laurens Commission for Higher Education.
“PSC will
continue to work collaboratively with USC Union and the commission via a
memorandum of understanding to help secure funding and to provide historical
preservation counsel until it is completely finished,” Comer added.
Juggling myths and the real stories
The Dawkins
House rehabilitation and the university course are coming at a fortuitous time
in South Carolina.
Gov. Henry
McMaster has championed commemoration, including the state’s importance in the
American Revolution. That awareness includes the complex history of slavery and
its legacy, said Kettler.
“The base of
the Freedmen’s Bureau was in Beaufort, South Carolina,” he said, arguing that’s
where emancipation really began.
There are a
lot of stories about the Dawkins House, he argued. “School kids know about the
myth of McGrath’s silver.”
Upon learning of Rebel Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at
Appomattox in early April 1865, Magrath and his staff raced away from Union as
Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's Federal troops moved in.
Magrath apparently hid a silver tea set at the Dawkins' home
while he was based there. Mary Dawkins wrote the couple took the set to
Mills House in Charleston after Magrath was released and they gave it to him.
The silver tea set story is covered in the book "South Carolina's English Lady,"
compiled and edited by the late Sarah Porter Carroll in the 1980s. You can read
the text on Family Search (right).
Letters and accounts written by relatives of Mary Dawkins --
and included in Carroll's book -- suggest slaves at “The Shrubs” and any other
land owned by Thomas were treated more kindly than at other plantations. But
that view belies the fact the institution was inherently cruel and violent.
For Kettler and students, this will be in intense exercise in
public history, a
movement that marries academic with engagement in the community.
Kettler hopes
uncovering the history of the house and 19th century Union will
better inform the community of its rich, complex history.
There is a “mythic, shrouded history we are going to
uncover.”
READ MORE:
https://civil-war-picket.blogspot.com/2026/04/as-fundraising-intensifies-to-fix-up.html
https://civil-war-picket.blogspot.com/2026/01/scs-civil-war-governor-slept-and-likely.html
https://civil-war-picket.blogspot.com/2025/09/craftsman-has-window-to-history-of-home.html
https://civil-war-picket.blogspot.com/2025/02/s-carolinas-governor-fled-to-this-house.html
https://civil-war-picket.blogspot.com/2024/07/south-carolina-community-gets-into-game.html
