Old Sheldon Church

My dad made sure my brothers and I were aware of Old Sheldon Church from an early age, just as his father had made him and his sister aware of it when they were kids. So, Sheldon Church has always had a special place in our hearts, and I would always nod respectfully whenever I passed the road sign for Sheldon Church on the highway between Charleston and Hilton Head. 

Click on images to enlarge them.

But when I saw the sign in August 2007, I realized I hadn’t been there in probably twenty years and I decided to pay a visit to the old girl. It was really the first time I’d been there as an adult, and for the first time I wondered, “Who built this place? Who worshipped here? Who’s buried in those tombs?” 

For the following few months I immersed myself in the history and learned a lot of cool stuff. As ever, I had ideas of writing an article, or a book or maybe even a screenplay, but in the end nothing came of it. I recently found my notes and a walking tour transcript that I had devised on an old flash drive, and I thought I’d share some of the things I learned.

Sheldon Church was built in the early 1750s by William Bull. Bull was a plantation owner in Charleston; his town house still stands at 35 Meeting Street. He was lieutenant governor of South Carolina from 1738 until his death in 1755 and served as interim governor from 1737 to 1743. His plantation outside of Charleston, which he inherited from his father, was called Ashley Hall. The house is gone, but the site on the Ashley River is still there, as is the avenue of oaks, now called Ashley Hall Plantation Road. 

After the Yemassee War, many Charleston planters added plantations south of the Combahee River in St. Helena’s Parish, in what is now largely Beaufort, Jasper and Hampton Counties. When Bull and his fellow settlers grew tired of having to cross the Whale Branch to attend church and do business in Beaufort, he established Prince William’s Parish—ostensibly named for King George II’s son William, Duke of Cumberland, but, you know, Bull probably felt he was naming it after himself as well. The proper name of the church was Prince William’s Church, but everybody called it Sheldon Church, after the name of Bull’s southern plantation. 

The perfectly proportioned neoclassical structure was considered one of the prettiest churches in the Low Country. It probably did not have a steeple/bell tower; these were only useful in town, where the congregation was close enough to hear the bells tolling, calling them to worship. The building was not stuccoed, but the Flemish bond brickwork featured glazed headers. (Full-sized bricks turned inward in Flemish bond are called headers; those whose long sides face outward are called stretchers.) On the west façade, glazed headers form diamond shapes. On the east façade, on either side of the apse, glazed headers form the numerals 17 and 51, indicating the date construction of the church began. 

17

51

I have it somewhere in my notes that the church was authorized to start selling pews in 1753, and by 1755 it held what was surely one of its first big services, the funeral of the church’s founder. One can imagine this service being attended by folks from all over the Low Country, from Georgetown to Beaufort and probably even Savannah, which Bull, as a surveyor, had helped Oglethorpe lay out. (Bull Streets in Savannah, Charleston and Columbia are all named for William Bull.)

Bull was probably buried under the floor tiles right in front of the altar. I say probably, because the slab that is there now is clearly modern—relatively modern, probably early twentieth century, but definitely not eighteenth century, as attested by the sharpness and modern style of the engraving. In 1917 the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine published an inventory of the grave markers at Sheldon, and Bull’s grave was not among them.  So this modern marker was placed sometime after 1917. Still, it’s an impressive epitaph, stating that Bull was the son of Stephen Bull (“The Immigrant”), listing his accomplishments, and ending with a resounding HIS BODY LIES BURIED HERE.

Of course, the most notable graves are the above-ground tombs on the east side of the church. (Like most old churches, Sheldon is oriented—literally—with the altar facing the East, the direction of the Holy Land. Holy Apostles in Barnwell is oriented. St. Helena’s is oriented. Most of the major churches in Charleston, including St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s, are oriented.) 

One of the tombs belongs to William Bull’s younger brother, John, and his wife Mary. John Bull had a plantation in St. Bartholomew’s Parish, modern-day Colleton County. Interestingly, Mary was not his first wife. His first wife’s name is lost to history, but she comes down to us in the family lore as having been “carried off by the Indians.” 

Next to this one is what I consider the prettiest of the tombs, featuring, among other details, lion’s feet. This is the tomb of John and Mary’s daughter, Mary Middleton, who died at the age of 37 in 1760. Her parents followed her in death seven and eleven years later: John Bull died in 1767, and his wife Mary died in 1771. When I was doing all this research, I entertained the idea of writing a Jane Austen-like screenplay based on some of the people I was learning about. I thought about calling it Over Mary Middleton’s Dead Body. (I would just note that the bodies would have been interred in the ground below the tombs, not in the tombs themselves.)

The third above-ground tomb (and the homeliest, alas) was for Ann Betts Drayton, who died in 1766 at age 27.

It’s no stretch to say that for one season I was completely obsessed with this project. I’ve got a hand-written genealogy chart of all—and I mean all!—the personages involved in this story. And I drove all over the Low Country exploring all the extant colonial and antebellum churches, from St. James Santee up near McClellanvile to St. James Goose Creek to Strawberry Chapel and Biggin Church near Moncks Corner to Pompion Hill near Huger to Pon-Pon Chapel near Jacksonboro to Old St. Andrew’s in West Ashley. I’d been to Old St. Andrew’s before—the first All Youth Get Together that I attended was held there in 1979—but this time I noticed an above-ground tomb that was identical to John and Mary Bull’s at Sheldon. (There’s also a tomb of the same design at Middleton Plantation.) 

As might be expected, all of William Bull’s daughters married well. Elizabeth married Thomas Drayton of Magnolia Plantation, Charlotta married John Drayton of Drayton Hall, and Henrietta married Henry Middleton of Middleton Plantation. So it was one of those wonderful moments that doing history sometimes affords one when I walked up to the tomb at Old St. Andrew’s and saw that it was the tomb of Charlotta Bull Drayton. My spirits leapt and I remember saying out loud, “Hello, Charlotta,” like I knew her. Charlotta died quite young, at the age of 23 in 1743. St. Andrew’s is just down the road from the above-mentioned plantations and just up the road from Ashley Hall Plantation, and would have been the church where Charlotta and her sisters all worshipped. 

Ann Betts Drayton, of the homely tomb at Sheldon, was the wife of Stephen Drayton, who was one of Elizabeth Bull and Thomas Drayton’s sons. It all sounds like a Jane Austen novel, where all the sons and daughters of the prominent families in the neighborhood marry amongst themselves. Mary Middleton was married to Henry Middleton’s brother, Thomas. I mention Jane Austen because this is precisely the social class that these Low Country families descended from and still belonged to. 

There’s one last group of gravestones that I’d like to tell you about. These were the ones that inspired the possible screenplay. To the right as you approach the church building, before you get to the tombs, there are three little gravestones, one on the ground and two still upright. The man on the ground is Henry Middleton Fuller (1835-1890). The larger of the two standing stones is the grave marker for Henry’s brother, Dr. William Hazzard Fuller (1829-1902). 

The smaller standing stone is inscribed “In memory of Anna W. / wife of Dr. W. Fuller / who died / June 2d 1887. / Aged 56 years. / And her two sons/W. H. and Jno. Steele / who died in 1867.” Obviously, this last detail intrigued me, and I imagined a story of sibling rivalry, competing girlfriends, Civil War and murder! Alas, the two boys died between the ages of 7 and 10. I’ve got the whole genealogy, which I won’t bore you with here. 

Okay, maybe I will bore you with it! Remember Thomas Middleton? The widower of Mary Middleton? He remarries, to a daughter of another prominent Low Country family, the Barnwells. The leader of the militia that William and John Bull had served in during the Yemassee War had been John Barnwell, nicknamed “Tuscorora Jack,” of Beaufort. One of this man’s sons, Nathaniel, had many children. One of his children was General John Barnwell of the Revolutionary War, for whom my hometown of Barnwell is named. Another of these children was Anne Barnwell. After the death of his first wife (Mary Middleton), Thomas Middleton marries Anne Barnwell. (After Thomas Middleton dies, Anne Barnwell marries General Stephen Bull, grandson of William Bull, but that's another story!) 

Anyway, one of Thomas and Anne Barnwell Middleton’s daughters, Elizabeth, marries Thomas Fuller of Beaufort. Thomas and Elizabeth Fuller have many children, one of whom is the Rev. Richard Fuller, who was a major evangelical figure in the nineteenth century, who worked with his cousins Robert W. Barnwell and Robert Barnwell Rhett in defending slavery in the years before the Civil War, but who has now been largely forgotten. In short, the two men buried here are the children of Rev. Richard Fuller’s brother, William and his wife Margaret Guerard. They are grandchildren of Thomas and Elizabeth Fuller, great-grandchildren of Thomas and Anne Barnwell Middleton, and great-great-great-grandchildren of Tuscorora Jack. I never learned what family William Fuller’s wife, Anna W., came from. And I’d still like to find out exactly what happened to the little boys.

A couple of weeks after that first visit in 2007, I drove down to Hilton Head to buy some weed and visited Sheldon again. I rolled a joint on top of Mary Middleton’s tomb, and when some people showed up I stashed the half-burned joint in the crook of the cross on top of William Fuller’s grave, knowing that the chances of these people happening upon it were pretty small. It was this day that I dreamed up the ideas for the screenplay. 

I also saw that a tree had fallen between William and Anna’s graves. It was way too big for me to move by myself. So I contacted the sexton at St. Helena’s and asked him if he could open the side gate to the site, used primarily for maintenance vehicles, so Dad and I could move the tree trunk. He said yes! So Dad and I drove from Barnwell to Sheldon one day in his blue Expedition with the wench on the front and drove onto the site and moved that log! On the drive down, Dad took a long dirt road from around Broxton Bridge to Yemassee that I would probably be unable to find today. Dad knew all the back roads in that area. Once when he and Gus and I went to Columbia to see a van Gogh exhibition, Dad took a route between Elko and maybe Swansea that I’d never been down, and I’m not talking about the route that goes through Springfield. Coming back from a family reunion in Danburg, Georgia, one year he took another route that only he knew about.

Sheldon Church was burned by the British in 1779, rebuilt in 1826 and then burned by Sherman in 1865. By the early twentieth century the ruins were almost completely overgrown, but they have been nicely cleared out, and a church service is held there every spring, two weeks after Easter.

Ernest Ferguson

This post is based on a lecture I gave at the Staunton Public Library on March 20, 2025, for the urban sketchers group Sketch Staunton, of which I am a member. 

This all began during the Christmas season of 2021, when I sent a series of postcards to my nieces detailing a road trip my family had taken in the summer of 1976. I hit upon the idea of telling a story through a series of postcards. It was a bicentennial tour, so coming up from South Carolina we went to Williamsburg, Washington, Philadelphia, New York. We didn’t go to Boston. We went to Niagara Falls and came back down through Gettysburg, Harper’s Ferry and Monticello. So I bought vintage postcards of each stop along the way, and on the backs I wrote a microstory about what we had seen at each place.

I got my first postcards at Staunton Antiques on Beverley Street, and most of these postcards were linen postcards. This isn’t really a story about the history of postcards, but I have learned some things about postcards over the last three years. I've learned that postcards really became popular in the first decade of the twentieth century and that basically for the first half of the twentieth century the standard format was what are called linen cards—“hand-painted” linen cards. And then in the postwar period the dominant format became what are called chrome cards—as in Kodachrome and Ektachrome—which are postcards made from color photographs.

After finding my first postcards at Staunton Antiques, I found a vendor at the Factory Antique Mall in Verona who must have 10,000 postcards for sale. He’s got bin after bin after bin of postcards. The bins are divided into states (for Virginia they’re divided into cities and towns) and, being from South Carolina, I naturally checked out the South Carolina section and found these two beautiful chrome postcards of Church Street and the Battery, which I bought just to have, not for the bicentennial tour series.

Click on images to enlarge them.

The following February it occurred to me that my nieces don’t really know anything about their Uncle Ned from before they were born, and I decided to send them another series of postcards as a sort of  postcard autobiography. Not that my life is anything special, but they’re my nieces, and long after I’m gone, when they’re telling stories about their Uncle Ned, it would be nice if they knew some of the more interesting details from my early life.

This stretch of Church Street, showing the Dock Street Theater and St. Philip’s Church, is like ground zero of my adult life. In the summer of 1982, after graduating from high school, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I had met a girl at camp and I went to Charleston to visit her for the weekend. She and her parents asked what my future plans were, and I said I had no idea. They suggested that I stay with them for a while and see what happens.

Shortly after I got there, there were auditions for The Sound of Music at the Dock Street and I won the role of Rolf! One of my nieces is a singer, the other is an art historian, and they are both thespians, so I felt they should know that their Uncle Ned once sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” at the venerable Dock Street Theater in Charleston. (At the audition I sang “Vincent,” by Don McLean.) 

One of the fun things about these projects is carefully composing the texts that go on the cards. Obviously, there is limited space, and sometimes you have to go over to the right-hand side of the back of the card, the address side, but it is a gratifying challenge to tell a little story in this small space. And, of course, all of the cards add up to a larger narrative. 

I sent the cards at three- or four-day intervals, hoping the postal service would get them there in sequence. There were 12 cards in this series, giving some highlights of my years in Charleston, Charlottesville and New York. I sent a second postcard autobiography to my nieces that summer and have now sent over 400 postcards to friends and family over the last three years, usually in dedicated series. (In the winter of 2023 I sent a series of postcards to the curator of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art detailing my theory of The Starry Night.)

Going back to 2022, in April I said to myself, “You know what I want? I want the official Museum of Modern Art postcard for The Starry Night.” But I found that museums don’t sell postcards online; it’s just not worth it to them. But one day I woke up from my nap and my brain was, like, “Ebay, dummy.” So I found Starry Night postcards on Ebay. And then a couple of weeks later I was watching the Heritage golf tournament on TV and I thought, “Man, I’ll bet I could find some really cool vintage postcards of Harbour Town on Ebay.” 

Harbour Town has a special place in my heart. Growing up in Barnwell, we went to the Heritage every year, and Harbour Town, this world-class resort in our own backyard, was just about the coolest thing in the world. I went my last two years of high school on Hilton Head and tended bar at the Crazy Crab in Harbour Town during the summers of my graduate school years. 

In my search for Hilton Head postcards I found a couple of cards that made me chuckle a little. The top one is St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Now, this was my church in high school and my aunt still goes there and it’s a cool modernist church, but I thought, “Why would anybody want a postcard of the new Episcopal church on Hilton Head.” I mean, it’s not like it’s a historic church.

And then I found a postcard of the entrance to Shipyard Plantation. (The gated communities in Hilton Head are called “plantations,” which is obviously problematic, but that’s not what I'm talking about here.) I can talk bad about Shipyard because we lived in Shipyard. Shipyard is nice, but it isn’t Sea Pines. Sea Pines, which is where Harbour Town is, was the gold standard on Hilton Head. And this postcard is not even of the resort hotel in Shipyard or the racquet club or anything but simply of the entrance.

These postcards seemed humorously mundane to me, and I sent them to my aunt and an old friend from high school, writing on the back of the second one, “I find it hilarious that somebody would think anybody would want a postcard of the Shipyard entrance!”

The kicker was this postcard of what we call the “new bridge.” It was built in 1982 to replace the old swing bridge from the 1950s. Again, why would anybody want a postcard of this plain, concrete bridge, not even from an interesting angle? And this is when I started to recognize that these postcards were all by the same person, somebody named Ernest Ferguson. And so I sent two copies of this card to my aunt and my high school friend, writing, “This Ernest Ferguson certainly had an eye for the mundane. Still, all man-made objects are works of art, and from an archaeological point of view this may turn out to be a valuable record of a representative artifact from the twentieth century.”

I was kind of needling him a little bit, being a little ironic. But I had started to think of him as a twentieth-century South Carolina equivalent of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris are prized for their aesthetic value today but who was essentially a documentary photographer in his time. I was starting to give Ernest Ferguson a little more credit, thinking even if he wasn’t a great “artist,” a great eye, at least maybe he had some historical significance. 

Back in December and January, when I had been buying postcards from the vendor in Verona, I had found a couple of other cards that I thought were humorously mundane. The top one I have to say doesn’t appear to me to be as mundane now as it did the first time I saw it. Part of my bias is that this is Edisto Gardens in Orangeburg, and if you grew up in Barnwell you really had a lot of disdain for Orangeburg, as a kid anyway. So this one’s on me. 

The bottom one is the naval hospital outside of Beaufort on the way to Parris Island. I had bought these cards months before I had any idea who Ernest Ferguson was but, again, a couple of months later, I woke up from my nap and my brain was, like, “I wonder if those mundane cards are Fergusons.” And they were!

And finally, a couple of days later, I wondered if the Church Street and Battery cards might be Fergusons. I had already mailed these to my nieces, but I make photocopies of all the cards I send—it’s an art project, and I want to have a record of it—and indeed these two were also by Ernest Ferguson. Note the photo credit on each of the cards.

Now I began searching Ebay for Ernest Fergusons. It’s fun! If you enter “south carolina postcards” in the search box, you’ll get over 50,000 results! I don’t go through all of them, but I’ll scroll through quite a few results pages, and the fun thing is that I got pretty good at identifying Fergusons. What you see on the results page is just the obverse of the cards, and you have to click on each card to see what's on the back. And I started to find some nice-looking cards.

The top card is the old bridge to Hilton Head. It’s still utilitarian (though it’s got a little bit of character), but the colors and the composition are really nice—the green and blue and the overhanging palmetto trees. The bottom card to this day is absolutely one of my favorite Ferguson cards. This is Trinity Church in Ridgeland, which is just outside of Hilton Head, and I think the image is absolutely gorgeous. The azaleas, the Spanish moss, the dappled sunlight on the façade of the church. And that sandy yard is like sacred ground for anyone who grew up in the Low Country.

I started to recognize recurring themes in Ferguson's works. One of these is historic churches. We’ve already seen Trinity Church in Ridgeland. This is Old Sheldon Church, one of the great South Carolina landmarks. It's in the middle of nowhere, outside of Beaufort, actually closer to Yemassee, which is basically a train depot. But my father, as his father had before him, made sure that we as kids were aware of this remarkable ruin. Whenever we drove to Beaufort or Hilton Head or Fripp Island, what have you, we’d always stop on the way and visit Old Sheldon Church. 

Built in the 1750s by William Bull, the church was burned twice. It was burned by the British. Then, after it was restored, it was burned by Sherman, and they did not rebuild it after that. I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to Ferguson’s work is because I, too, used to drive around the Low Country taking pictures of historic churches.

Here are St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s, basically the two flagship Episcopal churches in downtown Charleston. 

These cards give you an idea of something else I learned about postcards. There are two sizes of postcards. There’s what’s called the standard size, which is three and a half by five and a half inches, and there’s the continental size, which is four by six. St. Philip's here is on a standard card, and St. Michael's is on a continental card. And you can see the classic scalloped edges that occur on many continental cards.

One of the ways that we date these photographs is by the cars, so the St. Michael’s card is clearly from the 1960s. 

Back to recurring themes, here is Old St. Andrew’s outside of Charleston. Actually, one of William Bull’s daughters, Charlotta, is buried here. This card leads to another recurring theme in Ferguson’s work, which is foreground flowers. 

Here’s the State House. I love how in South Carolina we call it the State House, not the state capitol. Some of the other states do as well, but most of them call it their capitol. These foreground flowers just made it into the frame. Ferguson could have backed up, I guess, but I feel like he cut off the top of the capitol to make sure he got the flowers in the frame. This is actually a good thing because at that time the Confederate battle flag flew above the State House.

This is a house on Sullivan’s Island, with wildflowers in the foreground. The cool thing about this house is it’s underneath a mound of earth. I don’t think it’s there anymore.

Talk about foreground flowers! This is Ashley Hall, the exclusive girls’ school in Charleston, alma mater of Barbara Bush and Madeleine L’Engle, among others. In fact, that summer of ’82 I went to the commencement exercise at Ashley Hall because a lot of my friends who were my age were graduating that year, and the commencement speaker was L’Engle.

This is the Caroliniana Library at USC in Columbia, which is basically the special collections library at USC. This library actually has 179 Ernest Ferguson postcards in its permanent collection. (I myself have identified over 700 cards by Ferguson.)

Again, the cars are fantastic. The yellow car on the right appears to be a T-Bird. And then there’s the iconic car of the counterculture Sixties, the VW Beetle, or Bug. And this leads to another recurring theme in Ferguson’s work, probably unintentional: the green Beetle. 

This is Senate Plaza, an apartment building in Columbia. I love this card; I love the way the shape of the building echoes the format of the card. And I love mid-century modernist architecture; this building dates from 1965. Note the green Beetle at right.

This is an old hospital in Florence called the McLeod Infirmary, and way down in the right-hand corner is a green Beetle. 

And there is a green Beetle parked on East Bay Street in front of Rainbow Row. So, one wonders if this was Ferguson’s car. I have to admit, the Beetles in front of the Caroliniana Library and the one in front of Rainbow Row look more gray than green.

In fact, when the Rainbow Row card was reissued, he retouched the Beetle to make it red. When I was a kid we played a car-spotting game called Spud, where you competed to call out “Spud!” upon spying a Volkswagen Beetle. A red Beetle was a “Spud Magoo” and counted for two points. So when they reissued this card, they made the Beetle a Spud Magoo.

On the topic of reissues, there are a couple of interesting things that I’ve found. When he first issued the Church Street card, the caption read, “The Dock Street Theater, on left, opened in 1736, is the first building in America designed solely for theatrical purposes and is still in use today. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in background, erected 1835, is one of the most famous landmarks of the city.” 

Well, the original Dock Street Theater is famous for being one of the first buildings in the Colonies built expressly for theatrical performances. But that building is long gone. The present building was built in 1806 and was originally a hotel, the Planter’s Hotel. By the 1930s it was empty and the WPA restored it and turned it into a theater. So, in subsequent reprints of this card, Ferguson amended the caption to read, “The Dock Street Theater, on left, opened in 1736, is the first building in America designed solely for theatrical purposes. The present building represents a restoration of the old Planter’s Hotel façade plus a re-creation of an early Georgian playhouse on the site of the old theatre. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in background, erected 1835, is one of the most famous landmarks of the city.”

The first title of the Battery card was “East of High Battery.” However, this view isn’t east of High Battery, this is the High Battery. Or East Battery. This is East Battery Street. East Bay Street is on the east side of the peninsula of Charleston—Rainbow Row is on East Bay Street—and when East Bay bends and goes down into this area that used to be marshland it becomes East Battery Street, and this seawall is the High Battery. So, in a subsequent printing of this card, Ferguson had the printers create some sort of patch to change “of” to “or,” making the title "East or High Battery."

While we’re looking at the backs of these cards, I would note that most of Ferguson’s cards were printed by Dexter Press in West Nyack, New York. And his business was Photo Arts, in Winnsboro, where he lived.

Military bases are also a recurring theme in Ferguson’s work. There are a lot cards of Fort Jackson, outside of Columbia. And there are a lot of cards of Parris Island, where the above picture was taken. 

This card is titled “Guidon Ceremony,” the presentation of the colors, also at Parris Island. I love this postcard. I love these women in their shirtwaist dresses and their bluchers. During the lecture, the mostly female audience remarked upon the gloves, which I had overlooked, and I said I wasn’t surprised that women would notice the gloves. 

Another recurring theme is small-town Main Streets. I think this is another reason why I’m drawn to Ferguson’s work: nostalgia. Growing up in the postwar period, this is what small towns in the South looked like when I was a kid, and these cards are records of what these small-town business districts looked like before Walmart killed them.

One of my regrets in my study of Ernest Ferguson is not having found a card of the central business district of Barnwell, which we call the Circle. There are postcards of Barnwell’s famous upright sundial in front of the courthouse, but I haven’t found any cards of the Circle. Also, there is a lovely Episcopal church in Barnwell which I feel certain Ferguson would have known about. He was an Episcopalian and most of the churches he photographed were Episcopal churches. (All of the churches in this essay are Episcopal churches.) So I hold out hope of one day finding a postcard of Holy Apostles in Barnwell, where I was christened and in whose churchyard my parents and grandparents are buried.

But Batesburg in the above postcard has a lot of the same stores that the Barnwell of my youth had. We had a Mack's, which my father actually built (not as the developer but as the contractor). That place was like mecca to me. It had everything a kid in the Seventies needed: model cars, record albums and singles, novelty T-shirts, Icees. I used to run around that place unattended and I’m sure I let everyone know that my daddy built it.

You can see the signs for a Western Auto store, which Barnwell also had, and Cato, a women’s apparel store, and possibly Belk. 

In this card of Main Street in Sumter you can see the Home Furniture Company, the S. H. Kress five and dime, Belk and a movie theater marquee, the Carolina. Top billing that week went to La Dolce Vita. A quick internet search reveals that while this film came out in 1960, it was also re-released in 1966, so unfortunately it doesn't help us precisely date this card. But it is cool to know that Fellini was playing in Sumter, South Carolina.

Here is an old linen card of Sumter that I have to believe Ferguson would have been aware of, as a professional postcard artist. He has photographed the same stretch of Main Street from the exact same perspective. The old post office building on the right is still there. And Ferguson’s card even has a green vehicle in the lower left-hand corner, this one a VW Microbus.

Looking at all of these postwar small-town business districts has given me the idea of turning a town like Batesburg or Barnwell into a living history museum, like Colonial Williamsburg, only instead of taking it back to the colonial period, we take it back to the postwar period, restoring the buildings, restoring the signage and having people dressed in period outfits, working the stores, the soda fountains, etc. All these pictures make me think about what I’m starting to think about as the “before times,” and I think there would be a nostalgia to go back in time and walk a city square like it was in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. 

During the lecture, one audience member reminded me that Williamsburg was restored with Rockefeller money and I said, “That’s right. So if anybody knows of any foundations that want to get involved, let me know.”

Now we’re just scrolling through some of my favorites. This is Main Street in Columbia. Note the State House at the end of the street.

This is Folly Beach. Judging by the cars, it’s probably the ’50s, maybe early ’60s. The cool thing about this one is that sometime in the 1980s they built a big Holiday Inn at the end of the street, blocking the view of the ocean, so this card allows us to see what it looked like before. Two of the buildings on the left are recognizable as still standing today.

The Cooper River Bridge leads to another recurring theme: Charleston. This is the first Coope River Bridge, the Grace Bridge, crossing the Cooper River from Charleston to Mt. Pleasant. This was one of the first cards that I started to think of as an arty card. It’s a neat composition, an interesting angle. Of course, he might have just had to take it from this angle to get the whole bridge in.

We can date the first Cooper River Bridge card to before 1966, because the second Cooper River Bridge, the Pearman Bridge, was completed in that year. The second two cards picturing both bridges are good-looking images. My whole impression of Ferguson’s work as humorously mundane is long gone by now.

Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse. 

Drayton Hall. 

Peacock at Middleton Plantation. 

This is the old Charleston Museum. When I first moved to Charleston in the early Eighties all that was left of this building was the four columns. Kind of like Sheldon Church. The site is now a public park with the four columns standing at the entrance to the park on Rutledge Avenue, almost like modernist sculptures. (The brown patch in the grass shows up on every iteration of this card, so I’m thinking it was a flaw on the slide.) 

It is notable that there is a person in this card, a rare occurrence in Ferguson’s body of work. 

I feel like the woman leaning against the palmetto tree in the Charleston Museum card is quite possibly the same woman in this picture of Colonial Lake, which is just a couple of blocks down Rutledge Avenue from the museum. Maybe it was even the same day. Could this be Ferguson’s wife?

This one definitely falls in the mundane category. This is the interior of the then-brand new Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Same lady?

And then there’s this picture! If this is his wife, I’m thinking, “What a trouper!” Can you imagine the conversation that occurs before this picture is taken? The image itself is almost surreal. When I sent this card to my friend from high school, I wrote, “Ferguson dabbles in surrealism!”

There isn’t a whole lot on the internet about Ernest Ferguson. There’s a video of him, produced by South Carolina Educational Television in 2014, in his den, demonstrating the various cameras he used over the years. But I haven’t found any articles on him. I really need to go down to Columbia and Charleston and do some old-school research, going through the archives of The State newspaper, the Columbia Record, the old News and Courier, to see if I can find articles that were written about him back in the day that haven’t been digitized. 

But I have found his obituary. He was born in Richmond in 1924, and he died in 2016 in Winnsboro. So he lived to be 92 years old. I also learned from his obituary that he was survived by his wife, Betty. 

And there is a website for Ferguson’s old business, Photo Arts. There’s a phone number on the website, but it never occurred to me to call it because I just assumed that this postcard business was defunct, with the demise of its founder and the demise in the popularity and use of postcards. But last summer I went back to the website and I saw that Ferguson’s daughter, Louise Deahl, was listed as the president of the company and I decided to give her a call.

I dialed the number on the webpage and a woman answered the phone. I identified myself, told her I was an art historian researching Ernest Ferguson’s work, and asked to speak to Louise. The woman asked if I wanted Photo Arts, and I said I guess I did. She said, “Let me get that number.” As she was looking around for the number I realized she must be speaking on a land line and, given the elderly sound of her voice, I thought, “Oh my god, am I talking to Betty?” When she came back and gave me the number, I said thank you and asked, “May I ask who I am speaking to?” And she said, “This is Betty. I’m Ernest Ferguson’s wife.”

I almost started crying. I really felt like I was in a portal to the past. I had assumed Betty had passed away by now, but here I was presumably talking to the woman in these pictures. She was so gracious. We spoke for about twenty minutes. I told her I was an art historian and that I admired her husband’s work very much. She made a point of telling me that she still lived independently in her and her husband’s house and that her daughter comes up to visit her from Columbia once a week or so.

I said, “I know a gentleman’s not supposed to ask how old a lady is—” and she answered before I had finished the question, saying, “I don’t mind. I turn 93 in September.” 

Betty told me that Ernest was born in Richmond but that his father had died when he was a teenager and his mother moved back to her hometown of Winnsboro. Ernest finished high school in Richmond, went to college at Randolph-Macon and then returned to Winnsboro, where he lived for the rest of his life. Betty said that she was born in a small town between Winnsboro and Rock Hill called Richburg and moved to Winnsboro in 1953 to teach school. 

I asked if her husband had a green Beetle. She said, no, he had a red Microbus! (Not the green one in the Sumter card, alas.) Then I said, “There’s a picture of the Charleston Museum with a woman leaning against a palmetto tree.” She said, “That’s me.” I asked her about the Colonial Lake image but she said she didn’t recall that one. Then I asked her about the one with the alligator. She said that was not her. She said, “I don’t know who that woman is.” Which sounds like a whole ’nother story!

Here's another picture of a woman with an alligator, adding to our recurring themes. This woman looks younger, so I thought maybe this was Ferguson’s daughter.

But then there is this photo. Before I did the math I wondered if this was Ferguson’s granddaughter, since the photo credit reads “Photo by Louise Ferguson.” But Ferguson would have only been in his forties when this picture was likely taken. So I asked Betty, “What about the girl in the cotton patch?” And she said this was their daughter, Louise, who was born in 1960 and was four years old when this picture was taken. They also had a son, Ernest III, born in 1964.

The title of this card is “White Gold of Dixie.” Now, “white gold” is what they called cotton in the antebellum period, because it made a fortune for the white slave owners. But I also like to think that Ferguson might have felt that his little blonde daughter was white gold of Dixie as well. 

The photo credit on the version of this card that I currently own says “Photo of Louise Ferguson,” but other iterations of this card say “Photo by Louise Ferguson.” After doing the math and realizing the photo couldn’t have been taken by Louise, I felt like this was just a doting father giving his little girl the photo credit, to make her feel like she was part of the process. It would be interesting to know which credit, “by” or “of,” was first. I asked Betty about this but she said she didn’t know. 

I called Louise that same Sunday afternoon. I got her voice mail and told her who I was and that I had just had a delightful phone conversation with her mother and asked if she would call me back so we could talk about her father. She did not call me back.