... Long after this Southern winter of mine, in 1897, I got a letter from Gouv Wilkins, whom I knew so well then, speaking of the sad fate of Kelvin [Grove plantation] and all those other fine old country places.
"When you visited Kelvin in 1853," he writes, "you made a painting of the residence, and if it lacked the element of beauty it was the fault of the house for you certainly portrayed it correctly. I do not think we have met since and what changes have taken place! My last visit to New York was in 1858 and since then what changes there — Fourteenth Street was almost out of town!
"Mr. Lowndes, my father-in-law, died penniless. In 1855 he bought Kelvin [Grove] from my mother and also the Haskell plantation above it, and added them to his property below, the whole costing him near fifty thousand dollars, which he paid in cash. All of them together were sold in 1886 to pay his debts and brought at public sale only $7500. This, with the loss of two hundred negroes, explains his insolvency. He had a dwelling house on each of the four plantations, and all were burned by the Federal troops, after the evacuation of Charleston and the coast by the Confederates. The brick house at his home place, which you will remember, was occupied for several weeks as headquarters by Colonel Beecher (brother to Henry
Ward Beecher). On leaving he set fire to it and it and all its contents were burned to the ground, leaving only the chimneys standing, which the earthquake shook down. At Kelvin they made a clean sweep, even the negro houses were burned, and when I went there in the fall of 1865 there could not have been found enough plank to make a soap box. ...
