Living with antiques: Millford Plantation in South Carolina

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Thomas Gordon Smith

During the lite 1830s and early 1840s the extraordinary dwelling called Millford in central South Carolina was built and furnished by John Laurence Manning and his wife Susan Frances Hampton Manning (see Pl. XI). The house and its contents comprise one of the best surviving examples of the taste Americans called Grecian during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Legends abound about how Millford was spared during the Civil War. In fact it came close to being destroyed ten days after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee. This news was not known locally, and on April 19, 1865, a contingent of black soldiers from the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Infantry raided Millford's storehouse - a common practice of Major General William Sherman's Union soldiers.(1) However, in defiance of official policy a number of soldiers entered the house and a sergeant threatened to kill John Manning, but backed down with the arrival of Brigadier General Edward E. Potter of the Union army. The exchange between Manning and Potter is recorded:

Potter: This is a fine structure.

Manning: Yes, it was built by a man from New England by the name of Potter, and I suppose a man by the name of Potter from New York will destroy it!

Potter: No, sir. That is not my intention. Your house shall be protected.(2)

After genteel, if strained, socializing with the Mannings and their neighbors, Potter left Millford late in the afternoon of April 19. Shortly thereafter news spread throughout the region that the Civil War was over.(3)

A century and a quarter after this event, Richard Hampton Jenrette (a collateral descendant of Susan Hampton Manning) added Millford to his remarkable collection of historical dwellings.(4) Since 1991 he has restored the house, its interiors, and its outbuildings, and reassembled a great deal of the original Manning furniture. The restoration has given us the opportunity to understand Millford's Grecian ensemble as well as a great deal about design between the 1820s and 1850s, a period that has been largely neglected.

Thanks to the preservation of family letters, bills, and other papers by Manning's descendants, Millford's construction and furnishing can be followed with remarkable precision.(5) Manning's papers include letters, specifications, and drawings from the builder, Nathaniel F. Potter, and letters and a bill of lading from Duncan Phyfe and Son of New York City. In 1841 and 1842 the famous firm delivered an enormous quantity of furniture to Manning's factor in Charleston, South Carolina. Because a large number of surviving pieces can be associated with the documents, Millford's furniture is the Rosetta stone for understanding the final decade of Phyfe's production, which is arguably the least known and appreciated phase of his career.

John/Manning was born in 1816 at Hickory Hill Plantation in Clarendon County, South Carolina. His father, Richard Irvine Manning (1789-1836), was the governor of South Carolina between 1824 and 1826,(6) and his mother, Elizabeth Peyre Richardson Manning (1794-1875), was the sister, niece, mother, and grandmother of other governors of South Carolina.(7) John Manning attended Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was so impressed at how the winter cold was relieved by basement furnaces that he later had one installed in Millford. He returned home on the death of his father in 1856 and graduated from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina in Columbia) in 1837.

Susan Frances Hampton was also born in 1816, the youngest child of Mary Cantey and General Wade Hampton I (1751 or 1752-1835), the Hamptons being a family of even greater influence than the Mannings. Her irritable, solitary, and hard-driving father amassed such a large fortune that when he died he was acclaimed the wealthiest planter in the United States. Susan Hampton's half brother, Wade Hampton II (1791-1858), having inherited everything, broke the will and shared two thirds of the estate with Susan and their sister Caroline Preston.(8) Susans share included a one-half interest in Houmas plantation in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, which produced an abundance of sugar cane.(9)

John Manning and Susan Hampton were married in 1838 and planned to build a house near what is today Pinewood in Clarendon County. In May 1839 they received floor plans [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] and handwritten specifications from Nathaniel Potter, a builder from Providence, Rhode Island, who was working on Hampton family projects in Charleston.(10) Construction began in November 1839 and Millford was completed in late May 1841.(11) The first shipment of furniture from Phyfe and Son was delivered in early June 1841.(12) In October 1845 Susan Manning died giving birth to her third child, Wade Hampton Manning (1845-1911).(13) Three years later John Manning married Sally Bland Clarke, who raised his three children and gave birth to four more.

John Manning was the governor of South Carolina between 1852 and 1854. In the early controversies that led to the Civil War he had been a Unionist, but after the South seceded he served the Confederacy on General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard's staff. Manning was considerably impoverished by the politics of Reconstruction but continued to live at Millford until the late 1880s, when he moved to Sarsfield, his daughter's house near Camden, South Carolina, where he died on October 29, 1889.(14)