42 www.ReadMPM.com | www.MountPleasantMagazine.com | www.MountPleasantPodcast.com our town flooding the rice fields with salt water and damaging the riverbanks beyond repair (“Sunset Lodge,” page 24). With little hope and scarce options, former planters listed their properties for sale. In the meantime, the brackish rice fields of Georgetown County became a haven for so many species of ducks, legend says the skies were often darkened by the multitudes migrating along the Atlantic Flyway, a busy thoroughfare for waterfowl traveling from Greenland and passing by our shores on the way down to the Gulf of Mexico (“Sunset Lodge,” page 23). In 1894, when President Grover Cleveland learned of Georgetown’s overflowing duck population, he traveled to the Santee Gun Club with high expectations for a successful hunting excursion. According to Mary Boyd, volunteer at the Georgetown County Museum, he was not disappointed: in a single day, the president and his group shot 401 waterfowl. Of equal newsworthiness, while enjoying his time in the Lowcountry, the president, a large man of considerable girth, plopped out of a boat and into the pluff mud. Fortunately he was rescued, but the quagmire ate his boots. As the president was traveling with journalists, these stories quickly circulated throughout various news outlets, and word of Georgetown’s wellstocked waters broke the proverbial dam. When our elite neighbors to the north heard about Georgetown County’s world-class duck hunting, wealthy investors descended upon the region and began buying up the very same plantations that their contemporaries’ fathers and grandfathers once exploited, transforming them into grand hunting lodges or winter vacation homes in which to entertain friends. This time, because these landowners hired struggling local whites and Blacks to rebuild and rehab the manors and clean up the land and bought their supplies from shop owners on Front Street, South Carolinians were grateful for this second invasion from the north (“Sunset Lodge,” page 25). To this day, Georgetonians revere the investors of bygone decades who pumped money into the broken economy. As George Rogers notes in his book “The History of Georgetown County South Carolina,” “Without these northern plantation owners, Georgetown County might not have survived the Depression.” THE BARUCHS One such venture capitalist was Bernard Baruch. Originally from Camden, South Carolina, Baruch moved to New York with his family when he was a child and went on to become the king of Wall Street and advisor to presidents. In 1905, Baruch purchased Hobcaw Barony, a 16,000-acre tract of land in Georgetown County. Mary Miller, author of “Baroness of Hobcaw,” related that the property was once home to 11 plantations and boasted “90 miles of roads, four bridges [sic], the church, two schools, the dispensary, docks and water towers, boat landings and stables.” According to Richard Camlin, director of education at Hobcaw Barony, there were at least five former slave villages at the time the Baruchs made their purchase. Several homes for white employees were also built on the property (page 116) because, according to Miller, “The Baruchs employed over 100 people: cooks and domestics, farmers, mechanics, drivers, hunting guides, gardeners and general laborers” (page 117). Most resided on the self-sufficient estate. Of note, the word “Barony” was not in reference to the title of a nobleman, rather it was the measure of 12,000 acres granted by King George I to one of eight Lords Proprietors to the Carolinas in 1718, according to Hobcaw Barony’s website. Baruch’s daughter Belle, who spent much of her childhood at Hobcaw Barony, was enchanted by the magical world of forests and swamps, the plants and flowers that grew in them and the wild hogs, bobcats, alligators, snakes, foxes, deer, coyotes, birds, ducks and fish that resided in the brush and murky waters. As a result, over her lifetime, Belle developed a deep passion for the ecology of the land and had the foresight before she died to put the property into a conservation trust so that it can never be developed. Belle went on to become a world class sailor and equestrienne who amassed an impressive collection of trophies. Also, she was a hunting enthusiast and, according to Camlin, a pilot of her own two planes for which she installed a runway and a hangar on the property. THE LUCES When in residence at Hobcaw Barony, Baruch and Belle invited a number of luminaries to stay at Hobcaw House and Bellefield, two respective mansions that they Bernard and Belle Baruch
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