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.
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.
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.
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.
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