Tara Redux

from Preservation Magazine, Nov/Dec 2004

My great-aunt Florence spent 94 years in my family’s 14-room plantation house in Darlington, S.C., surviving her mother and father, three sisters and three brothers. She'd seen the sprawling grounds on Edwards Avenue whittled down to a three-acre lot bordered by a funeral home and a Piggly Wiggly. She'd seen a canopy of oaks rise up over the lane named for the family, and later seen those trees felled by city workers to widen the road. At the proud age of 99, Florence had no intention of leaving that house, but with the roof sagging and plaster crumbling from the walls, she consented to the urgings of my mother and my uncle, and packed up to the Baptist home. The week before she moved, I drove down from West Virginia to see her. That was almost ten years ago.

The house had been a local landmark since long before Florence's time. In 1855, planter Samuel Wilds commissioned a New York architect named J.L. Clickner to draw up the plans for a suitable house for his 1,700-acre spread. No expense was spared. The house was, in its heyday, the grandest thing around, a proud Italianate manor built on 12-inch beams of heart-pine lumber, with 5,700 square feet of living space and another 1,450 of covered porches. Panes of colored glass and pilasters topped with iron Corinthian capitals flanked the entryways. Fireplaces heated ten rooms, and a tall man standing on another tall man's shoulders might not have reached the ceiling's molded plaster medallions.

But just as the mansion was completed, the Civil War erupted. Wilds was commissioned as a Confederate colonel, injured, sent to prison, and died shortly thereafter. His house fared better. In March of 1865, the Union Army stormed Darlington, burning crops and buildings. Local tradition has it that one of the soldiers who marched onto Col. Wilds' plantation was J.L. Clickner, the architect himself. As the legend goes, Clickner convinced his commander to postpone the destruction, and that night the Yankees were run out of town by the Confederate cavalry.

In 1870, the house was bought by my great-great-grandfather and state senator Berryman Wheeler Edwards. His son moved in at the turn of the century, installing indoor plumbing and electricity, and selling off much of the surrounding acreage. There he raised his seven children, including great-aunt Florence and my grandfather. But after his death in 1932, my family—with its old-fashioned belief that renovations were "showy"—made virtually no improvements to the house, and its splendor began to fade.

Seven decades later, with Florence on the verge of moving out, she asked me to take her up to the second floor, which she hadn't seen in years. Her wheelchair didn't fit in the tiny elevator (one of the few changes made since the Depression), so I carried it up the walnut staircase and met her at the top. As I pushed her from room to room, I found wiring and plumbing that had not been upgraded since Theodore Roosevelt was president, and she told me about the ancient furnishings. I asked her about a chest of drawers, and she studied it.

"That one's not an antique," she announced. "We just bought that."

"Who do you mean by 'we'?" I said.

"My mother and father."

After Florence moved out, my mother and my uncle put the house on the market. It sat vacant for three years, the only offer coming from the owners of the Piggly Wiggly, who wanted to expand their parking lot. Then, in October of 1999, Kevin Earney and Jeffrey Kimbrell happened upon the scene. The two had already restored two turn-of-the-20th-century homes in St. Louis, Missouri and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and were searching for what realtors told them they probably couldn't find: an unrestored antebellum home in a good location. By chance they passed through Darlington, turned onto Edwards Avenue, and saw the weathered manor, a lonely for sale sign plunked in the overgrown yard. One month later, they owned the house.

Last summer I returned to Darlington with my mother, who grew up just three doors down on Edwards Avenue, to take the grand tour of our former family manor. After four years of continuous renovation, Jeff and Kevin had turned the house into something lavish. They'd begun the transformation with a new roof and a major repair of the crumbling brick-and-stucco foundation. The two men, along with a local carpenter, did most of the work. While Kevin spent most of his time indoors replacing the wiring and plumbing, Jeff worked on the exterior, stripping away more than a century's worth of paint with a hand-held heat gun—a task that took two years. Along the way Jeff listened to every book on tape in the Darlington library—including the 50-hour unabridged Gone With the Wind—and made some revealing discoveries about my family. Turns out that when it came time to paint—every 25 years or so—the frugal Edwardses would paint only the walls visible from the street. In the grand dining room, which in all of my life had been closed off and cluttered with boxes of old bills and canceled checks, my family had applied only two coats of paint in 13 decades.

Jeff and Kevin buried all the utility lines ("I don't do overhead lines," Jeff insisted), installed central air conditioning, refinished the floors, restored the shutters, and removed, sanded, and re-hung every window. The pilasters and mantles were faux finished to look like marble—a style popular in the 19th century. Jeff and Kevin also restored the greenhouse, the carriage house where a shiny Jaguar is now parked (license plate: ANTEBLM), and a small outbuilding that Florence referred to as the "old kitchen," but which Jeff calls the slave cabin. The men’s work has won preservation awards from the governor's office, the Palmetto Trust, and the Victorian Society, and in 2001 the state and the county placed a South Carolina Historical Marker on the property. Now Kimbrell and Earney have put the house up for sale as they look for another place to transform.

Outside under the pecan trees, as my mother and I took a final walk around the now immaculate grounds, I watched her crack a pecan under her shoe and pick out the meat and eat it. Even though she has lived twice as many years in Los Angeles as she did in Darlington, the motion came to her as if second nature. At that moment I caught a glimpse of the little girl who'd grown up on the street bearing her own last name, and she seemed to belong to this place in a way nobody else ever would.