Ashley Hall
Ashley Hall, a plantation on the Ashley River near Charleston, was home to the politically prominent Bull family for two hundred years. Its elaborate landscape and gardens were developed by successive generations of the family.
Overview
Site Dates: 1675-1865
Site Owner: Stephen Bull; William Bull; William Bull II; William Stephen Bull; William Izard Bull
Site Designer(s): Stephen Bull, Mark Catesby, William Bull, II
Location: Ashley River, West Ashley, St. Andrew's Parish, Charleston
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History
The origins of Ashley Hall date to 1670, when Stephen Bull (d. 1706) arrived in America to serve as deputy to Lord Ashley (1621-1683), one of the eight Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina. Among the earliest English settlers in the colony, Bull assisted in selecting the site of Charles Town (later, Charleston), and helped found the first permanent European settlement there. Appointed surveyor of South Carolina in 1673, he laid out new fortification lines around Charleston in 1674 and was appointed surveyor general in 1684. [1] In 1676 Bull received a grant of 400 acres of land a few miles miles west of peninsular Charleston along a wide river, later named the Ashley. He received an additional 100 acres of adjoining property in 1694. [2] A pioneer in the cultivation of rice, Bull developed a highly lucrative rice plantation, and also conducted some of the earliest agricultural experiments in growing tobacco, indigo, ginger, and potatoes. [3] The small, one-story, tabby-walled house that he built on the property ca. 1675 — one of the oldest extant buildings in South Carolina — was superseded in 1704 by a larger, two-story brick house. [4] Bull was prominent in many aspects of Carolina government and military affairs, establishing a precedent followed by subsequent generations of his family. He also paved the way for them in his enthusiastic pursuit of science, engineering, agriculture, exploration, and diplomacy with the native Indian population. [5]
Bull’s son William (1683-1755) resembled his father in serving in a number of important official capacities, including Lord Proprietor’s deputy, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and lieutenant governor from 1737 to 1755. A trained surveyor, he assisted General James Edward Oglethorpe (1696 -1784) in settling Georgia and selecting the site of Savannah. [6] In 1722 the English naturalist Mark Catesby visited him at Ashley Hall, and, according to the Charleston artist Charles Fraser, Catesby “planted by his hand” an avenue of live oaks leading up to the house. [7] In the first volume of his Natural History, Catesby illustrated the evergreen dahoon holly (illex Cassine L.), which he described as “a very uncommon Plant in Carolina, I having never seen it but at Col. Bull’s Plantation on Ashley River, where it grows in a Bog.” [8]
In 1770 William Bull’s son, William Bull II (1710-1719), laid out formal gardens at Ashley Hall. Catesby’s oak-lined avenue now led from a pear orchard through an extensive lawn to the plantation house. Gardens laced with serpentine paths framed a second avenue at the back of the house affording a vista of the river and city of Charleston beyond. A long lake with a pool surrounded by cypress trees lay to one side of the house, abutting an open park and elk and deer parks. The property also featured a statue of Diana atop a prehistoric Indian mound. [9] William Bull II probably developed his keen interest in plants and gardens in Europe. In the early 1730s he had studied at Leiden with the Dutch botanist and physician Herman Boerhave (1668-1738), becoming the first native-born American to graduate with a medical degree from the university in 1735. [10] Thereafter, Bull corresponded with the English botanist and plant and seed merchant Peter Collinson, and amassed a substantial personal library of books on botany and natural history. He introduced the works of Linnaeus to the Scottish physician Dr. Alexander Garden in 1752, lending him Classes plantarum and Fundamenta Botanica, as well as John Clayton’s Flora Virginica. Bull also helped familiarize Garden with plants local to South Carolina. [11] For many years Bull served as president of the Charles Town Library Society, a group notable for its enthusiasm for natural history as well as its extravagant purchases of rare and luxurious botanical folios. [12] In 1773 he proposed the formation of a special committee "for collecting materials for promoting a Natural History of this Province," which resulted in the establishment of the Charleston Museum, one of the earliest museums in America. [13]
William Bull II was the last Royal governor of South Carolina, serving as lieutenant-governor from 1759 to 1775, and as acting governor on five separate occasions between 1760 and 1775. An ardent Loyalist, he fled to England in 1777 and was still there two years later when errant British troops "plundered and greatly damaged" his plantation at Ashley Hall, destroying a fish dam, scattering Bull’s private papers “over the pasture and garden,” and smashing his “china glass & other crockray.” In addition, he reported, "my library was scattered and mostly carried away." [14] In March 1782 Ashley Hall served as the headquarters of the Continental Army general Nathaneal Greene (1742-1786). [15] William Bull had returned to Charleston in February 1781, but made a final departure for England with evacuating British troops in 1782. [16] Following his death in London in 1791, Bull’s widow, Hannah Beale Bull, erected an obelisk honoring his memory on the grounds of Ashley Hall. The monument bears a portrait of the governor in relief and a commemorative plaque with a lengthy inscription reading in part: "This obelisk was erected, sacred to his virtues and her grief, with duty and affection by his disconsolate widow." [17]
The last member of the Bull family to own Ashley Hall plantation, Col. William Izard Bull, added a piazza and circular red stone steps to the house in 1853. [18] An English visitor reported spending “a delightful day” with Col. Bull at Ashley Hall in 1863, “roaming over cotton-fields and rice plantations, woods, and 'park-like meadows,' studded with the most magnificent live oaks,” and sampling the indigenous Scuppernong grapes that grew in the garden. [19] Bull intentionally set the house on fire during the winter of 1865, destroying the building and all of its contents, rather than allow his ancestral home to be ransacked by approaching Union troops. [20]
--Robyn Asleson
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References
Notes
- ↑ B. H. Levy, "Savannah’s Bull Street: The Man Behind Its Name," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 71 (summer 1987): 287-88, view on Zotero; Ashley Hall Plantation (Columbia, S.C.: United States Department of the Interior National Park Service, 1975), view on Zotero; Thomas Gamble, "Colonel William Bull--His Part in the Founding of Savannah," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 17 (June 1933): 113, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Bull's son, William Bull, would acquire an additional 500 acres in 1707, as well as properties in nearby Granville County, which yielded his principal source of income. See Henry A. M. Smith, "The Upper Ashley; and the Mutations of Families," The South Carolina Historical and Geneaological Magazine, 20 (July 1919): 193, view on Zotero; Henry DeSaussure Bull, "Ashley Hall Plantation," The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 53 (April 1952): 61, view on Zotero. S. Salley, Jr., "The Bull Family of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 1 (January 1900): 76-77, view on Zotero.
- ↑ "Ashley Hall," 1975, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Bull, 1952: 61-62 view on Zotero; "Ashley Hall," 1975, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Kinloch Bull, Jr., The Oligarchs in Colonial and Revolutionary Charleston: Lieutenant Governor William Bull II and His Family (Columbia, S. C. : University of South Carolina Press, 1991), passim, view on Zotero; Levy, 1987: 286-96, view on Zotero; Gamble, 1933: 112-13, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Salley, 1900: 77-78 view on Zotero.
- ↑ Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: J. Russell, 1854), 68, view on Zotero
- ↑ Mark Laird, "From Callicarpa to Catalpa: The Impact of Mark Catesby’s Plant Introductions on English Gardens of the Eighteenth Century," in Empire’s Vision: Mark Catesby's New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 207, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Bull, 1952: 62, view on Zotero; Loutrel Winslow Briggs, Charleston Gardens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), ___, view on Zotero
- ↑ James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 172, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Dr. Alexander Garden of Charles Town (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 35, view on Zotero; Raven, 2002, 73, 223, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Raven, 2002, 73, 169-70,view on Zotero.
- ↑ Albert E. Sanders and William Dewey Anderson, Jr., Natural History Investigations in South Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 18-19, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Bull, 1952: 63,view on Zotero; Stephen Conway, A Short History of the American Revolutionary War (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 126, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Henry Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Revolution in the South (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), 56, view on Zotero; C. Harrison Dwight, "Count Rumford: His Majesty’s Colonel in Carolina," The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 57 (January 1956): 27, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Geraldine M. Meroney, "William Bull’s First Exile from South Carolina, 1777-1781," The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 80 (April 1979): 91-104, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Bull, 1952: 66, view on Zotero.
- ↑ ”Ashley Hall”, 1975, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Fitzgerald Ross, "A Visit to the Cities and Camps of the Confederate States, 1863-65," Blackwood’s Magazine, 97 (January 1865): 31, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Bull, 1952: 66, view on Zotero.
