Leigh Richmond Miner (1864 – 1935), Photographer
The theme this week is “This Old House – a Photo.” In my week 12 and week 15 articles, I described the Sams Tabby Complex, with an emphasis on the B.B. Sams house, the most distinctive element of the ruins on Dataw Island. One of the world’s foremost experts on tabby construction, Colin Brooker, has just published the definitive book on tabby architecture in Beaufort, South Carolina and the Sea Islands [Brooker]. The Dataw Historic Foundation will be writing a book review soon, but in anticipation of that, I thought you might be interested in seeing the earliest image ever taken of the BB Sams house.
The Shell Builders
Colin Brooker’s The Shell Builders is the first book to acknowledge the contributions of your Dataw Historic Foundation to the history of our area. He mentions us as a source that has provided support and encouragement to his efforts to uncover the many secrets of tabby use.
While this book is primarily about the history of tabby architecture in Beaufort, he explains it from a world perspective. Tabby is a practical and hardy material when used by knowledgable architects and artisans, and when correctly maintained. It’s one of the reasons the book traces the origins and craft of tabby construction from around the western hemisphere to the Sea Islands. Colin explains both why and how so many local 18th and 19th-century structures, from military forts to privies, were made of tabby.
Face of an Island
The “William Sams House” features prominently in The Shell Builders. Colin studied the house and other outbuildings extensively beginning in the early 1980s [Brooker.] His new book adds several more layers to the story of how and who built our tabby structures. After reading it, I reflected on another book I had seen about a year ago, Face of an Island, by Edith Dabbs.
Edith Mitchell Dabbs (1906 – 1991) was a civil rights activist and author from South Carolina. She first visited Saint Helena Island and the Penn Center in the 1960s. Sometime later, a treasure trove of glass plate photo negatives was discovered in the attic of a building at Penn Center. A Professor of Photography at USC, John H. McGrail, was able to clean and restore many of the plates. Historians recognized that these photos were from the travels of photographer Leigh Richmond Miner to Saint Helena Island between 1900 and 1923.
Leigh Richmond Miner was a gifted artist who held several teaching positions at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University in Virginia). His talents included photography, block-printing, ceramics, copper work, landscape gardening, poetry, and painting. He made several trips to Penn Center starting around 1900 to visit his former students, then teaching at Penn. He became fascinated with the people of Saint Helena Island.
After the Miner photos were rediscovered, it was Edith Dabbs who persevered to publish a compendium of these early 20th-century photos. As Edith puts it in the foreword of her book,
these photos “..give rare insights into the isolated life of a time-forgotten island.”
Below is the earliest know photograph of any structure in the Sams Tabby Complex. This photo is of the west wing of the Dr. Berners Barnwell and Elizabeth Sams house, taken sometime before 1923 by L.R. Miner. For comparison, I took a picture on September 10, 2020, with a very similar point of view.
Preservation
The importance of comparing these two photos, taken about 100 years apart, is how well preserved this tabby structure is. As I mentioned in my earlier article, the home had burned down about 1876, several decades before Miner took the picture. But in the last 25 years, the preservation efforts of the Dataw Historic Foundation have kept what remains intact for future generations to appreciate.
Here are a few historically interesting points about Dataw Island from Colin’s book. We’ll be telling you more in our upcoming book review.
- The Lewis Reeve Sams house (only a few ruins remain up on the north edge of Dataw Island on the Morgan River) was not built by him.
- The William Sams House, once B.B. Sams raised it and added the wings, had a functioning basement.
Sources
Brooker, Colin and Lepionka, Larry – Tabby Architecture: Origins and Culmination, 1984
Brooker, Colin – The Shell Builders, Tabby Architecture of Beaufort, South Carolina and the Sea Islands, 2020.
Dabbs, Edith – Face of an Island: Leigh Richmond Miner’s Photographs of Saint Helena Island, 1970
#52Sams Week 37 – This Old House – a Photo
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