THE PROPERTY

 

Tanglewood Plantation is comprised of almost 24 acres and is just 15 minutes south of Florence, SC.  Ten of the acres surrounding the main house are beautifully landscaped and irrigated, creating a park-like setting.  Old magnolias, live oaks, pecan trees, camellias, dogwoods, azaleas, cedars and hanging Spanish moss make this a true southern landscape rich in history.

Outbuildings include a butler's house (now a studio with fireplace), an old one-room schoolhouse, barn, tack house, car barn for 4+ cars, large workshop, and equipment shed.  The original round-cut log "smokehouse" is thought to be the oldest structure in Lee County.  The land is lush and level, and a regulation-sized Bocce court, metal gazebo and fountain provide finishing touches.

 

The main house was built in the early 1800’s and belonged to the Smith family.  The home and gardens were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.  The home has been completely restored to its original grandeur, with great sensitivity to preservation while integrating modern comfort.  

 

The two and a half story plantation home features 5 or 6 bedrooms, 5 and 1/2 baths, double parlor, den, formal dining room, modern gourmet kitchen, family room off kitchen, master bedroom suite with sitting room and master bath, ten fireplaces, two staircases, double verandas, screened porch and a walk-up attic. 

The entrance from the first floor front veranda leads into an 11-foot wide center hallway.  Ten foot ceilings grace the entire home. The 16x16 formal dining room has a built-in china closet and fireplace with gas logs.

The gourmet kitchen includes handmade cabinets, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, six-burner range, stainless range hood, two convection ovens, built-in microwave, dishwasher, two refrigerators, two sinks, large island, pantry and fireplace with antique mantel.  There is a family room off of the kitchen with a staircase leading to the master bedroom suite.

All main rooms have their own fireplace.  There are gas logs in the dining room, den, and front parlor.  All five and a half bathrooms are new or renovated with ceramic tile and new fixtures.  Master bathroom has marble flooring, jetted soaking tub, large walk in shower, and a bidet.  Antique heart pine flooring and period architectural details run throughout the house.

This is a wonderful family home or weekend getaway plantation, with plenty of room for stables and horses.

Its proximity to I-95 & I-20 also makes Tanglewood Plantation very accessible.

 

This is a very special property with a fascinating history

 

                                                                      TANGLEWOOD'S HISTORY

 

This unique plantation is the birthplace and home of a six-term U.S. Senator, prominent religious leaders, an award-winning author and educational vanguard… and has played host to President Teddy Roosevelt and a countless number of distinguished guests.

 

Tanglewood, previously known as Smith’s Grove, has its roots decades before the nation was even founded.  In 1747, King George II granted the land to Arthur Smith, who moved here from Smith Island, NC.  On its 4,500 acres, cotton flourished during the Antebellum Era.  

 

The cotton theme continued when Arthur’s great-grandson, Ellison DuRant Smith, was born here in 1864, toward the end of the Civil War.  After attending USC and graduating from Wofford, he grew steadily in position and fame, helping to organize the Farmer’s Protective Association and the Southern Cotton Association.  He served a stint in the SC House of Representatives, then was elected to the United States Senate in 1908.  He held the office until 1944  -  the longest anyone had ever served continuously in the U.S. Senate up to that point in history  -  and became known as Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith.  There he chaired the Interstate Commerce and the Agricultural & Forestry Committees and sponsored the Muscle Shoals project, a forerunner of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

 

Though he commuted to Washington for almost 36 years, Tanglewood was forever his home, and he brought countless dignitaries here to escape to the country, hunt and fish.  Among them was President Teddy Roosevelt, who reveled in the natural bounty Tanglewood had to offer. 

 

Teddy Roosevelt’s time in South Carolina in general and at Tanglewood in particular were very meaningful for him, especially considering his own roots in the Palmetto State.  Teddy’s mother Martha, or “Mittie,” as she was called, was a Bulloch, a prominent family who first immigrated to South Carolina from Scotland before settling on a large cotton plantation in Georgia.  Mittie grew up on a plantation much like Tanglewood, with acres of cotton fields and a large estate home.  She came to South Carolina to study as a pupil at Barhamville Seminary near Columbia, an elite academy for girls from wealthy planter families.  Here she spent her formative days, before she married a New Yorker and became known as Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, living in the midst of Manhattan. 

 

Mittie was a true southern belle, beautiful and spirited, and is believed to have been one of the inspirations for Scarlett O’Hara.  In his 1913 autobiography, Teddy described his mother this way: "My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely 'unreconstructed' (sympathetic to the Southern Confederate cause) to the day of her death."  Staying at Tanglewood reminded him of his beloved mother, who tragically had passed away of typhoid fever in New York in 1884 at the age of just 48.

 

Also born at Tanglewood was Cotton Ed’s older brother, Alexander Coke Smith.  Coke graduated from Wofford and became a prominent Methodist minister, serving at Washington Street Church in Columbia, Buncombe Street Church in Greenville, and Trinity in Charleston.   He returned to Wofford to join its board of trustees and serve as the college’s treasurer.  He later became a professor of theology at Vanderbilt’s Divinity School, then ultimately served churches in Virginia before becoming Bishop of the Methodist Conference, from 1902 until his death in 1906.  Rev. Smith was, according to historian A. D. Betts, “a brilliant preacher and leader of men.”  As the Columbia State wrote upon his passing, “The secret of Dr. Smith’s pulpit power was in his sympathetic soul.  He loved his fellowman and shared his sorrows and his joys with a depth that one rarely finds.  In the social circle Dr. Smith had few equals, being unaffected in manner and possessing a sense of humor and a resource of anecdote that made him the centre of attraction wherever he went.”

 

Their sister Fannie Smith married Reverend J. W. Koger, Superintendent of the Methodist Brazil Mission.  After his death, she continued as a missionary to Brazil.

 

 

Continuing the theme of fascinating people born at Tanglewood…

 

Another Smith sister, Annabelle, married John Andrew Rice, Sr., a Methodist minister and a past president of Columbia College.  Their son, John Andrew Rice, Jr., would turn out to be yet another luminary born at Tanglewood. 

 

Young Rice graduated from Tulane and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University, one of the earliest to do so.  After further graduate study, in 1933 he founded the world-renowned Black Mountain College, a progressive and visionary institution that promoted the arts, self-government, and a broad, well-rounded education which included a work program.  The school drew a who’s-who of global VIPS as lecturers and mentors, among them John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers (from the Bauhaus in Germany), Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Creeley and Franz Kline.  Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome at the college. 

 

Rice later became a prize winning author, writing extensively for The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s and Collier’s.

 

His critically acclaimed 1942 autobiography, I Came out of the Eighteenth Century, includes a chapter about his years at Tanglewood.  The book has just been republished by the University of South Carolina Press as part of its Southern Classics series, with a new introduction by Mark Bauerlein and afterword by William Craig Rice.  It is, as USCP calls it, “a rich first-person account of race and class in the Jim Crow South… recounted with relentless and unsentimental discernment.  Rice combines a sociologist's eye with a dramatist's flair in a unique voice.”

 

 

More of Tanglewood’s interesting historical connections…

 

Rev. William H. Smith, a Methodist minister and father to Cotton Ed, Coke, Fannie and Annabelle, built the current Tanglewood Plantation home.  His wife was Isabella McLeod, known as “Miss Bella.”  Her nephew was South Carolina Governor Thomas McLeod.  Thus Cotton Ed (Ellison) and his siblings were first cousins to Governor McLeod. 

Ellison married Annie Brunson Farley in 1906.  Annie’s uncle was Lieutenant Henry S. Farley, who fired the first shot of the Civil War  -  firing on Fort Sumter at 4:30 a.m. on Friday, April 12, 1861 from James Island.   Serving under J.E.B. Stewart, Farley eventually died fighting for the Confederacy.

 

Ellison and Annie had four children, two girls and two boys.  Their oldest daughter, Anna, married L.L. Smith, vice president of Kohler Plumbing Co. of Wisconsin.  Isobel Smith Lawton moved to Florence, SC, when she married.  Ellison DuRant, Jr. married Vivian Manning, daughter of South Carolina Governor Richard Manning.  Son Charles Saxon Farley Smith, who later served the SC House of Representatives from Lee County, married Laura Maxim Douglas.  Laura was the daughter of Oscar Douglas of the F.W. Woolworth empire.  The young couple met in Washington DC at the annual “Gingham Ball,” while Laura and her mother were residing in the palatial Massachusetts Avenue building where Andrew Mellon lived while serving as Secretary of the Treasury.  They were married by Rev. Barney Phillips, chaplain of the Senate.
 

 

HISTORY & ARCHITECTURE OF THE HOME

 

The first plantation home, a two-story structure of cypress logs, burned in the early 1800’s.  It was replaced by the current structure, built by Reverend William H. Smith sometime between 1830 and 1850. 

 

The home, also known as Ellison DuRant Smith House, is Greek Revival in style.  Its façade features a two-story pedimented front portico supported by four square columns, with a symmetrical bay on each side.  The portico has both an upper and lower gallery with identical entrances – double doors with side windows and rectangular transoms.  The home was designed with two interior and two exterior chimneys.

 

On September 22, 1977, The United States Department of the Interior placed it on The National Register of Historic Places.  The original nomination was made by Mrs. Anna S. Smith and Isobel Smith Stewart, daughter and granddaughter of Cotton Ed Smith.  They first had it placed on the Inventory of Historic Places in South Carolina in 1973, registered by the SC Department of Archives and History in Columbia.

 

The home serves as the setting for the novel, All Things Sacred, by B. R. Jones and appears on the book’s cover.