If you get asked to deliver a Revolutionary War swivel gun, the answer is yes.

The Cradle and the Grave: The Extraordinary Story of Abbeville, South Carolina

There are towns in South Carolina with good history.

And then there's Abbeville.

Abbeville was settled in 1758 by a group of French Huguenots (Protestant refugees who had been fleeing religious persecution in France for generations), working their way across the Atlantic and eventually into the South Carolina backcountry. The town's name was given by a Huguenot settler named Dr. John de la Howe, who named it in honor of his hometown in France. So right from the start, this place carried the memory of somewhere else and people who had crossed an ocean to carve out a home out of the Carolina wilderness.

The land they settled had just been cleared by treaty. A 1755 Cherokee land cession had opened up territory between the Wateree and Savannah Rivers, and it was this land that drew in the French Huguenots along with waves of Scots-Irish Protestants coming down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania. Two very different peoples, same frontier, same hardships.

The town itself grew up around a spring used to supply a blockhouse built by Andrew Pickens in the late 1760s as a refuge against Cherokee raids. In 1767. It was later used as a fort during the Revolutionary War, known as Fort Pickens. The man who would become one of the most celebrated militia generals of the entire Southern Campaign built the foundation, literally, of what became the city of Abbeville. The village grew up around a freshwater spring that Pickens donated as a public source of water, which is now located behind the present-day courthouse. That spring still exists today.

Then came a young lawyer named John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun was born in Abbeville District on March 18, 1782, the fourth child of Irish-born Patrick Calhoun and his wife Martha Caldwell. He grew up on a backcountry farm, went north to Yale, studied law at the nation's first independent law school in Connecticut, and then came right back home. He began his law practice in Abbeville and made his maiden political speech there in 1807. From that courthouse square, he went on to serve as a congressman, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and two-term Vice President of the United States. He was one of the most powerful political voices in antebellum America.

Although Calhoun died a decade before the Civil War, his ideas on states' rights and nullification lived on in the minds of Southerners as they drifted toward secession. His likeness even appeared on Confederate currency. In a very real sense, the ideology that broke the country apart was forged right here in Abbeville.

Which is exactly why what happened next fits so suitably.

On November 22, 1860, citizens gathered on what is now known as Secession Hill to hear speeches from leaders of South Carolina's secession movement and elect local delegates to the state's secession convention. One month later, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. The war that Calhoun's ideas had helped set in motion was now inevitable.

Abbeville had lit the match.

And four and a half years later, Abbeville is where the fire went out. Which is why it's known today as "The birthplace, and deathbed, of the Civil War".

The most noted events in Abbeville's Civil War history began when Varina Davis, wife of the Confederate president, arrived on April 18, 1865, followed shortly by a wagon train carrying the remainder of the Confederate treasury. For twelve days she was a guest of former congressman Armistead Burt, a family friend. Then, on May 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis arrived at the Burt home with his remaining cabinet members and elements of five brigades of cavalry. In the front parlor of what is now known as the Burt-Stark Mansion, Davis officially acknowledged the dissolution of the Confederate government in the last official cabinet meeting of the Confederacy.

During that meeting, Davis was advised by his generals that any attempt to continue the war would only inflict more misery on the South. His options were exhausted. The Confederacy was over.

It began in Abbeville. It ended in Abbeville.

That's why the town carries the title no other place on earth can claim: the cradle and the grave of the Confederacy.

But Abbeville isn't just a Civil War time capsule. Walk the square today and you'll find the Abbeville Opera House, built in 1908, which once hosted traveling theater companies and performers including Sarah Bernhardt and Jimmy Durante. It closed in the 1950s, was fully restored in 1968, and still puts on live performances today. The Belmont Inn sits right across the street. The courthouse anchors the square. The whole downtown looks like someone hit pause in 1910 and just kept maintaining things.

Some places just carry more weight than others.

I'm David Cole, The Realtorian

- Your Tour Guide in Real Estate.

LocalRealtorian.com

#Realtorian #AbbevilleSC #SCHistory #SC250