Wavering Place Katharine Allen, Historic Columbia Ownership of Joel Adams I Joel Adams I (1750-1830), a North Carolinian born of a Virginia family, arrived in Richland District in 1768 at the age of 18. In 1773, he married Grace Weston (1752-1832), the daughter of a neighboring planter, and established a 565-acre plantation east of Cedar Creek called Homestead.1 Over the next 60 years, he acquired the moniker “Joel of All,” based in part on his reputed 25,000 acres of land, which stretched in all directions from Homestead, most notably to the banks of the Congaree River.2 Upon these lands, Adams and his sons oversaw large-scale logging, agricultural, livestock, and transportation endeavors, all facilitated by the work of hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children. Upon Adams’ death in 1830, his four surviving sons and numerous grandchildren continued to act as stewards of the Adams family’s ancestral lands, ensuring that land, slaves, and profits all passed from one generation to the next.3 In 1792, Adams purchased the tract of land known today as Wavering Place from William Heatley, likely because it shared its southern border with Homestead. Adams incorporated the Heatley tract into his Homestead Plantation, and managed the lands together until 1811, when he allowed his son, Dr. William Weston Adams, to establish a separate residence here. Dr. Adams named his new domain Green Tree.4 After Joel Adams I’s death in 1830, his four surviving sons and numerous grandchildren continued to act as stewards of the Adams family’s ancestral lands, ensuring that land, profits, and an ever-growing number of enslaved individuals all passed from one generation to the next. As Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut later wrote, the Adams, along with the Hamptons and the Taylors, became the dynastic planter families of Richland District---“the big fish [who] ate up all the little ones.”5 1 Virginia Meynard, History of Lower Richland County and Its Early Planters (Columbia, SC: R.L. Bryan and Co., 2010), 215-6. The residential structure known as Homestead was completed in 1790 on the present site of St. John’s Episcopal Church. It burned in 1865. 2 Mark Kinzer, Nature’s Return (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 74, 205. According to Kinzer, at the time of Joel Adams I’s death in 1840, he still owned over 4,000 acres in what is today Congaree National Park. 3 "South Carolina Wills and Probate Records, 1670-1980," Richland County, South Carolina, Probate Box 1, Package [4], Joel Adams (1830), images 115-132, Ancestry.com accessed March 27, 2020. Hereafter “Will and Probate, Joel Adams (1830).” 4 Meynard, History of Lower Richland County, 15. “Conveyance of land from James P. Adams to Glenn H. Kaminer, April 8, 1881,” Richland County Deed Office. Agreement includes survey of property and origins of each tract. 5 C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 249. !1 From their grandfather, Dr. Adams’ children inherited Green Tree, an adjoining tract once owned by John Price, and the northern half of the original Homestead tract. Since then, it has been owned by a series of Joel Adams I’s direct descendants from four different family lines: the heirs of Dr. Adams (as Green Tree); Frances Tucker Hopkins and her descendants (as Magnolia); Col. James Pickett Adams and his descendants (as Wavering Place); and the Robert Adams II line, who continue to own it today. What follows is a recounting of those who have called this place home.6 Occupation and Management under Dr. William Weston Adams and his Heirs Joel Adams’ third son, William Weston Adams (1786-1831), graduated from Yale University in 1807 and completed his medical training the following year at South Carolina College (University of South Carolina). Upon returning to lower Richland County, Dr. William Weston Adams (hereafter Dr. Adams) lived with his parents and two of his brothers at Homestead. By then, Homestead Plantation included the parcel of land known today as Wavering Place, although Joel Adams I’s own home was located nearly a mile to the south of this parcel. (Although no longer standing, the site of Adams’ original home lies to the southeast of St. John’s Episcopal Church and is owned by that entity.) According to the 1810 US Census, Joel Adams I enslaved 75 people of unknown age and gender across Homestead and several other sites; at least some of these men and women would have been among the last Africans to arrive before the close of the Atlantic Slave Trade on January 1, 1808. A few were likely gifted to Dr. Adams once he established his own homestead here, perhaps even those who were already working this tract of land for Joel Adams I.7 On November 6, 1811, Dr. Adams married Sarah Eppes Goodwyn (b. 1791)8. The couple assumed management of this tract, which they called Green Tree, although it remained under the ownership of Joel Adams I. They may have initially lived in the one-story frame dwelling located on the northeastern corner of the property’s main clearing, although it is possible that this structure predates their time here. Sometime in the 1810s, they had a new residence, of unknown style, built on the site of the current Greek Revival mansion, as well as a pair of one-story, brick structures that flanked the rear of the main residence. The western structure stands today; the eastern structure was rebuilt in the nineteenth century, upon the original structure’s brick foundation, and physical evidence points to its use as a smokehouse. At least 6 Meynard, History of Lower Richland County, 217-20. 7 Yale University, Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, 1701-1904 (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor Co., 1905), 70. "1810 U.S. Federal Census," Richland County, South Carolina, page 319, Joel Adams, Sen., image 5, Ancestry.com accessed March 27, 2020. 8 Sarah Goodwyn was the niece of Col. Thomas Taylor, one of Columbia’s founders. See Meynard, History of Lower Richland County, 56, 88. !2 one of these buildings functioned as a kitchen. The other may have been used for other domestic chores or to house enslaved people working in the main residence.9 By 1820, Dr. Adams’ household included 41 people, 34 of whom were enslaved. Twenty-two of these men and women labored in the fields. Others performed domestic chores, took care of livestock, and kept the mansion and its environs well- manicured.10 Although no narratives survive that describe what life was like at Green Tree, it may have been similar to the setting Charles Ball described in his memoir, Slavery in the United States. Ball was sold by slave traders to a plantation in lower Richland County around 1806. Here he describes his first night: After it was quite dark, the slaves came in from the cotton-field, and taking little notice of us, went into the kitchen, and each taking thence a pint of corn, proceeded to a little mill, which was nailed to a post in the yard, and there commenced the operation of grinding meal for their suppers, which were afterwards to be prepared by baking the meal into cakes at the fire. The woman who was the mother of the three small children, was permitted to grind her allowance of corn first, and after her came the old man, and the others in succession. After the corn was converted into meal, each one kneaded it up with cold water into a thick dough, and raking away the ashes from a small space on the kitchen hearth, placed the dough, rolled up in green leaves, in the hollow, and covering it with hot embers, left it to be baked into bread, which was done in about half an hour. These loaves constituted the only supper of the slaves belonging to this family; for I observed that the two women who had waited at the table, after the supper of the white people was disposed of, also came with their corn to the mill on the post, and ground their allowance like the others. They had not been permitted to taste even the fragments of the meal that they had cooked for their masters and mistresses. It was eleven o'clock before these people had finished their supper of cakes, and several of them, especially the younger of the two lads, were so overpowered with toil and sleep, that they had to be roused from their slumbers when their cakes were done, to devour them. We had for our supper to-night, a pint of boiled rice to each person, and a small quantity of stale and very rancid butter, from the bottom of an old keg, or firkin, which contained about two pounds, the remnant of that which once filled it. We boiled the rice ourselves, in a large iron kettle; and, as our master now informed us that we were to remain here some time, many of us determined to avail ourselves of this season of respite from our toils, to wash our clothes, and free our persons from the vermin which had appeared amongst our party several weeks before, and now begun to be extremely tormenting. As we were not allowed any soap, we were obliged to resort to the use of a very fine and unctuous kind of clay, resembling fullers' earth, but of a yellow colour, which was found on the margin of a small swamp near the house.