Alice Bailey Stevens’ Edisto roots go back to 1720. She was born at Blue House Plantation, where she lived until 1929, when the family moved to Brookland Plantation. In 1945, she married Johnson Stevens of Lambs Bluff Plantation on Yonges Island. They had three children. She attended high school on Edisto, graduated from Winthrop, and did advanced studies in South Carolina history at the Citadel. She taught primary school for 26 years in Charlotte, Charleston, and Yonges Island. Asked to speak about the history of transportation on Edisto, Alice noted that every facet of life was affected by transportation or the lack thereof. She detailed the early modes: long boats owned by the plantation owners that could make their way to Charleston from North Edisto through a series of cuts. Those on the south end side had a much longer way to row. Lack of transportation also affected early Islanders’ opportunities for worship; they had to travel by boat to Church Flats on Dixie Plantation until they successfully petitioned to have their own church. It limited romantic opportunities as well, as travel between islands was challenging: ‘Some just had to marry the local girls,’ Alice noted. ‘They're still doing it.’ By 1910 the Stevens Line Company began providing daily service to Edisto. Alice gave a snapshot of her lineage: In the early 1800s, her great-grandmother married Ephraim Mikell and moved to Blue House, which his son, Ephraim Jr., inherited. It began as an indigo plantation, but also grew rice, some cotton, and had an orchard. After the boll weevil destroyed the cotton industry, truck farming took over (beans, cabbage, and seed potatoes that came from Prince Edward Island). The black women would sit in a circle, cutting potatoes, and singing spirituals, some 60 years after the Civil War had ended. She also talked about other African American traditions that endured: in cooking, in the language, and in agriculture. Other reminiscences: riding horses at Sea Cloud plantation, the bounty of Blue House, Brookland’s devastation, the practices of people from the Burrough, She ended her talk with a dramatic recounting of two catastrophic events on the Island (the 1886 earthquake and the 1893 hurricane), the first of which involved a crack in the earth in which water bubbled up as if it had ‘come straight up from hell,’ the second of which told of a tragedy that left a lone family survivor ‘fierce,’ and determined never to set her foot in water again.
Marian Calhoun Murray was born in Evanston, Illinois, and later moved with her family to Asheville, where she attended high school. While at Agnes Scott College, she was invited to a house party at Edisto, where she met her future husband, J.G. Murray, a native Edistonian. They married in 1935, in Asheville; she was henceforth known on Edisto as ‘the girl from off.’ The couple moved to the Island after a brief stay in Mt. Pleasant, where J.G. worked with Micah Jenkins at Boone Hall. Coming from the city, Marian had much to get used to when they moved to Edisto: the smell of pluff mud, no electricity, water delivered by a pump, and a wood stove to cook on. J.G. had gotten a job as landscape architect for the Edisto Beach State Park, being built by CCC workers. Marian and a friend tried to teach the young CCC workers to read and write—her first foray into teaching. Marian spoke briefly about the economy on Edisto in those early days, mentioning a repair shop, an oyster factory, several stores (Perry’s, Bailey’s, Posner’s), and farming, the backbone of the economy. By the mid-1940s, J.G. was managing the farm at Cypress Trees Plantation. Farming was done with mules, carts, and wagon, using the task system developed in the plantation days. Major crops were cabbages and potatoes. She also recounted memories of the hurricanes of 1940 and 1959 on Edisto, as well as wartime rationing. In 1941, when a vacancy came up at the Edisto Island School, Marian got a job teaching English, Latin, science, and biology. Parker Connor was the principal; other teachers during her time there included Sally Pope, Arlene Jenkins, Sarah Hopkinson, Lena Armstrong, Florence Park, and Clytie Sayer. Marian spoke of the strong support from the parent organization and from churches—only two at that time, she said, Presbyterian and Episcopalian—which put on annual holiday parties, operettas, and minstrel shows. The school underwent many changes during her 30-yeare tenure, including consolidation with mainland schools. The Edisto Island School closed in 1971, and Marian went on to teach at St. Paul’s Academy through 1976, serving in 1977 as headmistress. But she mourned the loss to Edisto: ‘We were sorry to see the school close,’ she said, ‘because that ended the main community spirit that held us together.’
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