![]() We watched from the house as they threw out chains and ropes and finally dragged the boat back to the wharf. The wind started blowing, and it got so rough that the boat was turning around and around as they just couldn’t handle it. They arrived from the island, all 19 trains of them, just in time to catch the 5 pm ferry. That day there was a large excursion here from Augusta, Georgia. It really was just so much trouble to pack up and move into town every summer. We had screens at Snee Farm, so this was the last summer I spent in town. People also said the water was bad and so was the country air, so everyone had beach homes where they spent the summer months. No one stayed on the plantations in the summer because of the mosquitoes. We were spending the summer at the Hamlin Beach House, which was right by the ferry wharf. I remember the hurricane of 1911 very well. Julia Welch Hamlin farmed 800 acres on Snee Farm Plantation with her husband Osgood Darby Hamlin, and she recalled losing their first crop of Sea Island Cotton “to the big storm.” The Hamlins were not on the plantation during the hurricane. He had to spend the night in the Custom House. My father got stranded in Charleston and my mother was sick with worry about him. When she returned to Charleston she sent me a pretty sewing basket as a thank you gift. There were many people from the islands and Charleston stranded here and the local people took them into their homes. According to the stories recorded by Johnson, the storm raised water to hip level, brought down trees, blew down houses, and destroyed Friendship AME Church. In 1911, the severe hurricane destroyed crops, farmland, and fishing facilities. One storm landed ashore 11 years after the century’s turn and the other hit 11 years before the era closed. The twentieth century began and ended with hurricanes. Julia Royall, Mount Pleasant: The Victorian Village (Mount In the same publication, Julia Brown Horlback remembered raising beans, okra, corn, potatoes, and flowers as well as making baskets for sale at the Charleston market that ran from Meeting Street to East Bay Street. In hot weather, we’d cool watermelons in that tank.” Local residents raised cotton, peas, beans, rice (in small ponds), sugar cane, hogs, turtles, and chickens for food. The tank has been gone for a long time but the stand it was on is still at the Bennett Street house. This was also connected to a large storage tank that furnished water for seven families. we had a spring in our yard that fed our well. We kept cows and chickens and we had a big vegetable garden. In Betty Lee Johnson’s published newspaper series of oral histories "As I Remember It: An Oral History of the East Cooper Area," Farmer described early twentieth century village life: “We raised our own food right there in the village. In the early 1900s, Elise Tiencken Farmer lived at 216 Bennett Street in the Old Village. Mount Pleasant experienced little economic expansion or population growth in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
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