Cheesy Grits: "The Two Black Kings of Edisto Island"—What Happened to John Thorne's "kingdom"?

The 1900 federal census finds John Thorne, his wife Sarah Ann, and their two daughters, ten-year-old Rhea and eight-year-old Sadie at home on Edisto Island. When the next census was taken in 1910, however, the Thorne family had disappeared completely from Edisto Island.

What happened? And where did all the properties go?

Cheesy Grits: A Visit with the Bard of Edisto

Jane is always on the lookout for interesting places to run, and wouldn't you know it: she found a 5K Run on Edisto Island. I of course was always up for a return trip to Charleston—especially if going on down to Edisto was sure to be in the mix.

Part of the reason I was eager to return was that the previous time Jane and I visited Edisto, I had wanted to call on the Bard of Edisto, Nick Lindsay, but was too shy. Ever since then, I had deeply regretted not looking him up to introduce Jane to him, as I doubted that he ever thought he would meet a living relative of Johnny Thorne, one of the two Black kings of Edisto. Perhaps this time, I could fix that—after all, nobody in my part of the world—or his—is getting younger.

Cheesy Grits: "The Two Black Kings of Edisto Island"—John Thorne's Real Estate

According to Charles Spencer's history of Edisto, there were sixty-two full-fledged plantations on Edisto Island in 1850, and most if not all of them were growing Edisto's most famous crop: Sea Island Cotton. Comes now the Civil War: all the plantation owners and their families left the island in 1861 and the now-former slaves left in 1862. Edisto Island was mainly left empty aside from a few Union troops.

Cheesy Grits: Going Down to Edisto Island—Main's Market; Thorne's house

Jane and I first visited Edisto Island in May, 2012. We were on the trail of her great-great-granduncle, John S. Thorne, one of the two "Black Kings of Edisto Island." It was Sam Gadsden who named him so in Nick Lindsay's And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island, and the reason Sam had done so was because John Thorne had engineered the purchase of a former plantation, Baynard's "Seaside," and then resold plots (at reasonable prices) to the now-freed slaves who lived on Edisto and had worked this land. Thorne had kept some land for himself and had built a house, a store, and several cotton gins to process the famous Sea Island cotton that was being grown on Edisto.

Sam Gadsden had further remarked that John Thorne's house and store were still standing, so that was where we were going to start.

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—Who was John Thorne?

One of the challenging puzzles of doing family history is tracking down adult children. The federal and state censuses are great for snapshots of families on a given date. But after a family starts to disperse, locating the children can be a challenge—especially the daughters who many times have married and abandoned their birth names in favor of their husbands' family names.

With John Thorne, however, the problem was reversed: how do we establish that someone is the adult son of (relatively) distant parents? More specifically, can we tie John Thorne, our Black King of Edisto Island, to Philip and Elizabeth Weston Thorne of 7 Henrietta Street in Charleston?

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—His name was Thorn

From Nick Lindsay's And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island:

"There was another man who came here from Charleston during Reconstruction. He was half-Spanish, but he passed for a Black man. His name was Thorn.

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—Edisto Gumption

Nick says in And I'm Glad that living on Edisto requires a special kind of resourcefulness and determination. He calls it "gumption." Listen:

"There are all kinds of gumptions on Edisto, big ones and little ones...Anytime you can't get a nail, you use a black locust peg instead and it lasts a hundred years—that's wood-peg gumption. Or, you chop your leg and you know it will take you a half a day at the very least to get to a doctor and the wound will have got cold and won't knit so you sew it up yourself—that's needle-and-thread gumption. You load your pulpwood truck so heavy that the front wheels rise up off the ground and you can't steer so you pile sand bags on the front bumper to bring them back down—that's sandbag gumption.

Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—A Collision of Worlds

Edisto Island near Botany Bay
Taken by GCM, May 2012

When I first met Nick Lindsay, I had no idea that some forty years later, I would be sitting with him and his wife Dubose in their house on Edisto Island, forty-odd miles southwest of Charleston, talking about one of the two "Black Kings of Edisto Island." I wonder, too, if he ever imagined he would meet a great-great-grandniece of one of those two black kings of Edisto Island, which would of course be my wife, Jane. A descendant of Amish Mennonite bishop Jacob Hertzler, a relative of Edisto royalty, and the Bard of Edisto and his wife, chatting in the living room while Spring freshens up her frock outdoors on a March afternoon on Edisto. Talk about a collision of worlds.