On my recent trip to the Special Collections and Archives at Clemson University, I visited Fort Hill, the historic house on the Clemson campus that was once the home of John Caldwell Calhoun and wife Floride Bonneau Colhoun, then of their daughter Anna Maria and husband Thomas Green Clemson. Here are some photos I took, focusing on portraits of family members found at Fort Hill:
On my recent research trip to the Special Collections and Archives of Clemson University’s Library, I did research in the “Lander Papers” at Clemson’s archives. This is a collection of material compiled by Ernest McPherson Lander Jr., who was for many years a professor of history at Clemson, and author of the book The Calhoun Family and Thomas Green Clemson: The Decline of a Southern Patriarchy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983). The “Lander Papers” contain Lander’s handwritten manuscript of this book. I copied a number of pages from the manuscript, and then compared these to the published book. I’ve now added the following information from Lander’s book to this previous posting about John Ewing Colhoun (1791-1847), son of John Ewing Colhoun and Floride Bonneau, who inherited his father’s Keowee Heights plantation:
I haven’t posted here in some days because I recently took a research trip to Tuscaloosa, Alabama (I have deep roots there: my mother’s father was born there, with his families’ roots going back to the first days of that county) and to Clemson, South Carolina. I spent a day doing research at the West Alabama Heritage Learning Center in Northport, Alabama, as well as a very productive day doing research in the Special Collections and Archives of Clemson University’s Library, and have gathered a ton of information.
Or, Subtitled: “The eccentric, & wicked, but highly gifted James Edward Calhoun”
3. James Edward Calhoun, the third child of John Ewing Colhoun and Floride Bonneau who lived to adulthood, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 4 July 1798. This date of birth is recorded on his tombstone in Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church cemetery at Pendleton in Anderson County, South Carolina.[1] James Edward chose to use the Calhoun spelling of the surname.
Or, Subtitled: “Tradition recounts that she sometimes locked up ‘every closet, store-room, and smokehouse on the plantation and drove off with the keys’”
As the previous posting states, three of the children of John Ewing Colhoun and wife Floride Bonneau died in infancy and are buried beside their father in the Colhoun family cemetery at his Keowee Heights plantation in Pendleton District, South Carolina, a cemetery now in ruins and located on land of the experimental forest of Clemson University.[1] The posting transcribes the inscription on the tombstone that Floride had placed on John’s grave within the year after his death on 26 October 1802, and which states,
Begats and Bequeathals 