The House That Hutchinson Built

How a GRASSROOTS EFFORT to save a South Carolina freedman's home laid bare the BEAUTY AND RESILIENCE of its family legacy

- JOE SUGARMAN

IN THE LATE 1930s, when Emily Hutchinson Meggett was a young girl growing up on South Carolina's Edisto Island, she would often walk the three-quarters of a mile from her family's house to her granduncle Henry Hutchinson's property. There, she and her siblings and cousins would play hopscotch or hide-and-seek.

Sometimes they'd pull a vine off a tree and use it as a jump rope. The adults, including Henry's wife, Rosa, would sit on the house's big wraparound porch, laughing and talking. The kids weren't allowed to partake in the adults' conversation, recalled Meggett, who passed away in April. "Parents back then, they didn't talk so much in the presence of children," she said. "You couldn't sit in their company. When company comes, you better be scarce."

From that porch, the Hutchinsons could survey their 10 acres of land and the marsh beyond. They raised chickens and hogs and grew fruit and nut trees near the house, but they relied mainly on sea island cotton for their income. On an adjacent plot, Henry, who had been born into slavery in 1860, operated one of the first Black-owned cotton gins on the island. He prospered by selling the refined product to markets in Charleston, about 45 miles to the northeast, until a boll weevil infestation in the 1920s decimated the island's crop.

Around 1885, Henry had built the Folk Victorian-style house using his own hands, with help from family members. The house was said to be a wedding gift for Henry's bride, Rosa Swinton.