Middleton Place: A Phoenix Still Rising

by Charles Duell

Editorial and research assistance of Barbara Doyle and Tracey Todd

Middleton Place Foundation, 2011; paper, 80 pages, 141 images; ISBN: 978-1-4507-9829-7; list price $19.95

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

There can be few, if any, members of the Southern Garden History Society who have not visited Middleton Place and reveled in a landscape that has gained international acclaim. Incorporating the scenic flow of the Ashley River and man-made fresh-water pools in a remarkable harmony seen nowhere else in this country, the Middleton Place gardens reflect the particular genius—and enterprise—of two owners, Henry Middleton in the mid-eighteenth century and John Julius Pringle Smith in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the stewardship of the Middleton family throughout its existence.

Henry Middleton (1717-1784) came to the place that now bears his surname in 1741 when he married Mary Williams (1721-1761), the only daughter and heir of John Williams, who had built the great brick mansion, destroyed in the Civil War, around which the gardens were developed. Henry Middleton represented the third generation of his family in South Carolina. The Williams mansion and its new gardens were one indication of the great state in which the family lived: another was that Henry Middleton sat for a portrait by Benjamin West who also, in 1771, painted the iconic group portrait of his son Arthur Middleton (1742-1787), his wife Mary Izard, and their infant son Henry (1770-1846). Henry Middleton was the second president of the First Continental Congress, Arthur Middleton was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the young Henry Middleton, the namesake of his grandfather and his third-great-grandfather, was a governor of South Carolina. All lived at Middleton Place as did the governor's son, Williams Middleton (1809-1883), who signed his state's Ordinance of Secession in 1860.

Following Williams Middleton's death in 1883, ownership of Middleton Place descended through his daughter, Elizabeth Middleton Heyward, and a series of surnames. Mrs. Heyward, the wife of Julius Henry Heyward, bequeathed Middleton Place, subject to Mr. Heyward's life estate, to a cousin, John Julius Pringle Smith, a son of Judge Henry Augustus Middleton Smith (1853-1924). Mr. Smith (1887-1969) came into full ownership of Middleton Place in 1924. In 1925 he and his wife, Heningham Lyons Ellett Smith (b. 1888), who he married in 1913, undertook the renewal of the plantation and its gardens. Their works were acknowledged in the extensive coverage (pp. 243-60) given the estate in volume two of Gardens of Colony and State for which Arthur A. Shurcliff prepared in 1931 the first known completed plan of the gardens. In 1941 the Garden Club of America recognized the renewed, enhanced gardens with the award of its Bulkley Medal. Middleton Place was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972. The Middleton Place Foundation, established in 1974, owns and operates the estate to the present.

Middleton Place: A Phoenix Still Rising, written by Charles Duell, is the newly published guidebook for Middleton Place that features essays on its history, gardens, and the family furnishings displayed in the house museum rooms. All are illustrated with handsome color photographs: the splendid, aerial landscape views are especially welcome. So too are the ca. 1875 documentary views of the mansion ruins, which fell a decade later in the great earthquake of 1886: they call to mind those of another great colonial plantation seat, the Page family's Rosewell, in Gloucester County, Virginia.

The guidebook addresses the interests of the general, yet knowledgeable visitor. Mr. Duell's garden essay is both descriptive and analytical. It introduces George Newman, an English gardener who is thought to have assisted Henry Middleton in the design of the original gardens, and repeats the tradition of André Michaux's association with Middleton Place. Seedlings of later eighteenth-century camellia plantings at Middleton Place survive, as noted, owing in large part to the propagations by Josephine Heningham Pringle Smith Duell Busck (1913-1954) in the 1940s and 1950s; however, the pictured "Reine des Fleurs," a synonym of Camellia japonica 'Commensa,' introduced in Belgium in 1843, bespeaks another, later era in the Middleton family's generations-long cultivation of the genus Camellia.