The Once Upon a Time Village

Gillisonville Baptist Church and Cemetery, Gillisonville, South Carolina

Gillisonville can be called [a] “once-upon-a-time” village. Once it was a summer resort; once it was a bustling government seat; once it had thriving churches; once it was destroyed, almost utterly; once it seemed doomed to age, neglect and oblivion. But Gillisonville, against all odds, has simply refused to die.

Grace Fox Perry, Moving Finger of Jasper (Ridgeland SC, n.p. 1952)

Gillisonville, 1850

Gillisonville, South Carolina was named for Derry Gillison (1744-1818), a local shoe manufacturer and rice planter. The Beaufort District Court was moved from Beaufort to the more central town of Coosawhatchie in 1790. When Coosawhatchie’s summer climate proved virulent, the district court was moved in 1840 to the higher elevation summer resort of Gillisonville six miles further inland. The Gillisonville town square hosted a courthouse, jail, and gallows with a green for militia musters and drills. A large brick hotel and tavern, a Masonic lodge, an Episcopalian chapel, a Baptist church, a boys and girls academy, and a number of businesses and town homes existed or grew up nearby. Farmland and pine forests surrounded the busy town.

Some of our ancestors were landowners in the area as early as the 1730s. Our maternal 3rd great-grandparents James G. Patterson (1819-1876) and Catharine Wall Patterson (ca. 1819-1865) both seem to have been born and grown up in Gillisonville. The 1850 census reports their occupation as “farmer” (distinct from the more aristocratic “planter”). Numerous Wall relations (farmers) lived nearby. Their neighbors included laborers, a coach maker, a carpenter, a teacher, clerks, merchants, a wheel right, clergy, physicians, a blacksmith, and an attorney. Cate and James’s five children were all born in Gillisonville including our 2nd great-grandmother Laura Amanda Patterson Grayson (1847-1916). The Pattersons moved to Georgia prior to the 1860 census.

Civil War South Carolina

Beaufort and its surrounding sea islands were occupied by Federal troops in November 1861, very early in U.S. Civil War. Those troops periodically threatened towns including Coosawhatchie along the then-new Charleston & Savannah Railroad. A number of our ancestors served in defense of that railroad for almost the entire war. Gillisonville, however, was unmolested.

That peace was shattered early in 1865 when approximately 60,000 Federal troops facing little opposition cut swaths north through freezing swamps from Savannah into South Carolina, often applying the torch with minimal constraint. It was South Carolina, after all, that had led the Confederacy into secession. It is unclear exactly when and by what portion of Gen. William T. Sherman‘s army Gillisonville was approached, but it was almost certainly in late January or very early February at the very beginning of the Carolinas Campaign. Most likely, it was a large detachment of Gen. Judson Kilpatrick‘s cavalry. Grace Fox Perry writes:¹

The cataclysm came, which swept all former things away. The fires of Sherman’s army leveled the village square, including all surrounding residences except one…. Thereby hangs a tale. Two Federal officers entered the home one night. The grandmother, haughtily ignoring the intruders’ conversation with other members of the family, continued her rocking and knitting. It was a bitterly cold night. One of the officers, touching a finished sock by [her] chair, remarked it must be warm indeed. “Would you like a pair?” the old lady asked, speaking for the first time. “Indeed I would,” the man replied promptly. The next day a pair was ready for him. The [Moore] home was not burned.

It is also unclear if the Beaufort District records were burned with the courthouse or if they were sent ahead to the state capital at Columbia, only to be lost when that city was sacked and burned two weeks later. The district government was returned to its original seat of Beaufort in 1868. Large mounds of bricks, overgrown with time, were all that remained of the Gillisonville town square for 50 or 60 years. Even these were eventually dug out and repurposed. A law office survived for a time, as did a post office and the Episcopal Chapel, which was dismantled and rebuilt in the nearby town of Robertville. The Moore home fell into disuse and was subsequently destroyed in a forest fire, leaving only one pre-war structure remaining.

Gillisonville Today

There’s not much to Gillisonville today. The town still appears on local maps, a dot alongside two-lane U.S. Route 278 about 10 miles north of Ridgeland/Interstate 95 and 30 miles northwest of Beaufort. Gillisonville joined Hampton County when it was formed in 1878, then Jasper County upon its incorporation in 1912. A recent visit revealed an empty former town square surrounded by scattered residential homes, farmland, and no visible commercial establishments. The only structure remaining from “once upon a time” is the ca. 1838 Gillisonville Baptist Church. “All that comes through here now are log trucks,” a church pastor lamented. “But this place has so much history.” ²

The Church

The church sits nobly about 75 yards off the highway, and about 200 yards past a gently curving road south of the now-empty town square. It is a lovely white clapboard building with four impressive columns supporting a gabled roof, framing a broad portico. A flat-roofed open bell tower caps the structure. One source claims the church steeple was toppled by a Union cannonball. If so, it has not been replaced. An antique silver communion paten reportedly still exists with the scratched inscription, “War of 1861-2-3-4. Feb. 1865. This is done by a Yankee soldier.” The church served as housing for Union troops, then as a temporary courthouse, and has since been continually used for worship.

The Cemetery

Behind the church is a modest, still-active cemetery. Perhaps 500 headstones lie within, those legible bearing primarily 20th and 21st century birth and death dates. 19th century names include Moore, Pope, Ulmer, and Wall. Derry Gillison is buried in Coosawhatchie. James, Cate, and Laura are buried in Savannah. Hampton Cook Wall Jr. (1854-1943) and Catharine Ann Wall Peal (1850-1929), Cate’s nephew and niece, both lived, died, and are buried in Gillisonville. Other relatives are surely buried there as well.

¹ Charleston (SC) News and Courier, “Gillisonville is Jasper’s ‘Once-Upon-a-Time’ Village,” Feb 1, 1948, pg 7

² Quoted in the Beaufort (SC) Gazette, June 5, 2005 via https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=4674