Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria

Taking Root

Taking Root

The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria

EDITED BY

James Everett Kibler, Jr.

FOREWORD BY

Wendell Berry

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2017 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-774-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-61117-775-6 (ebook)

Front cover image: Birds of America. Carolina Turtle Dove (Columba Carolinensis), 1838, John James Audubon (1785–1851). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Contents

Foreword

Wendell Berry

Preface

A Note on the Text

Introduction

[A Winter Reverie]

A Wish

The Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus Tuberosus, Linn.)

The Culture of the Sweet Potatoe

The Season: Some Thoughts Grouped after Spending a Day in the Country

Natural Angling, or Riding a Sturgeon

The Season

A Day on the Mohawk

Farm Management; or Practical Hints to a Young Beginner

The Vegetable Shirt-Tail; or, An Excuse for Backing Out

Autumn

Winter Green: A Tale of My School Master

A Chapter on Live Fences

Report on Wheat

The Misletoe

Address Delivered before the Southern Central Agricultural Society at Macon, Georgia, October 4 [20], 1852

The Character of the Pomologist

The Flower Garden [I]

Plants Adapted to Soiling in the South

Plant a Tree

A Plea for the Birds

Southern Architecture—Location of Homes—Rural Adornment, &c

Plant Peas

The Forest Trees of the South.—No. 1

Forest Trees of the South. No. 2.—the Live Oak—(Quercus sempervirens)

Forest Trees of the South. [No. 3.] the Willow Oak. Quercus Phellos

One Hour at the New York Farmer’s Club

Flowers

Satisfactory Results from Systematic Farming—True Farmer-Planter

The Crysanthemum

Saving Seed

Roger Sherman’s Plow

The Earth Is Wearing Out

A Rare Present.—Carolina Oranges

Agricultural Humbugs and Fowl Fancies

A Short Chapter on Milk Cows

A Plea for Broomsedge

A Visit from April

We Cultivate Too Much Land

The Proper Implements for Composting Manures: A Picture in Relief

An Editorial Drive: What We Saw during One Morning

What Should Be the Chief Crops of the South?

Northern Horses in Southern Cities

Scuppernong Wine

A Good Native Hedge Plant for the South

Soap Suds

The Best Mode of Stopping Ditches and Washes

Cherries

Amelanchier: New Southern Fruit

China Berries

Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No I

Chinese Sugar Cane

Cows and Butter: A Delightful Theme

Neglect of Family Cemeteries

The Destruction of Forests and Its Influence upon Climate & Agriculture

New and Rare Trees of Mexico

The United States Patent Office Reports, and Government Impositions

Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No III

The Guardians of the Patent Office

New and Rare Trees and Plants of Mexico. No 2

A Transplanted Pleasure

China Roses and Other Hedge-Plants in the South

Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No IV

Farm Economies

Hill-Side Ditching

Landscape Gardening

New and Cheap Food for Bees

The Profession of Agriculture

Bell Ringing

Spare the Birds

Essay on Reforesting the Country

Spanish Chesnuts, Madeira Nuts, etc.

The Grape: Culture and Pruning

Advantages of Trees

How to Get Up Hill

Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No VI

Sheep Husbandry

Dogs vs. Sheep

Fences

Sweets for the People

Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No VIII

Peeps over the Fence [1]

Beneficial Effects of Flower Culture

Peeps over the Fence [2]

Fortune’s Double Cape Jessamine: (Gardenia Fortunii)

Wood Economy

Peeps over the Fence [3]

Home as a Summer Resort

Frankincense a Humbug and Cure for Saddle Galls

Who Are Our Benefactors?

Peeps over the Fence [4]

Mrs. Rion’s Southern Florist

Dew and Frost

The Flower Garden [II]

Farmer Gripe and the Flowers

Pea Vine Hay

Our Resources

Works Cited and Consulted

Index

Foreword

WENDELL BERRY

Not so long ago, this book would have been seen by almost everybody as work of minor academic interest: peripherally historical and fringily literary. Now I believe it will find many readers who will recognize it for what it is: a collection of observations, judgments, and instructions permanently useful to anybody interested—and to anybody not yet interested—in the right ways of inhabiting, using, and conserving the natural, the given, world.

The authors—the two brothers, Adam and William Summer—were South Carolinians of the Nineteenth Century, but they are not, for that reason, eligible to be stereotyped and dismissed. They were literate and accomplished writers who wrote essays for agricultural journals. They were horticulturists: Pomaria Nurseries, founded by William, offered 1,200 varieties of fruit trees and vines. They were farmers and students of farming, of crops and livestock, their knowledge both scientific and familiar. They were sound critics of farming and of human landscapes, their standards taken properly from the natural world and from Nature, the common mother of all us creatures, the Great Dame herself. By those standards they were strenuously indignant in the presence of any abuse of the land, and they were clearly in love with the works of Nature and of good farmers. The work gathered here was written in the two decades immediately preceding the Civil War. It has a whole-heartedness and a tone of good cheer that seem to have been irrecoverable anywhere in our country since that war and the triumph of industrialism and finance that followed it.

Why should a book so much about farming be called nature writing? To most conservationists of our time, who seem to have read and thought no further than John Muir, the only conservation of interest is wilderness conservation. But of course farming and nature are inseparable. Thinking about one leads necessarily to thinking about the other, and this is obvious to anybody who undertakes to think fully and carefully about either one.

Farming takes place in the natural world. Where else? It depends absolutely upon the natural endowment of topsoil and soil fertility, which were being plundered by bad farming in the Summers’ time, and are being plundered by bad farming still. If nature is to survive in our present world, it must survive in farming, just as in wilderness areas. The only health farming can have is natural health, and the only health we food-eaters can have must come from the health of farms.

And so the Summer brothers, as good naturalists, naturally worried about the health of the land. There was already then too much land abuse, too much rape of Nature. Too much land was in cultivation, as now. Too much was wasted, eroded, neglected, exhausted. And so Adam Summer wrote of the importance of trees, of woodlands. And so he wrote in praise of broomsedge, a weed, which he recognized as necessary to the renewal of fertility in exhausted land.

These essays display the exuberant, practical agrarianism that underpinned the democratic politics of Thomas Jefferson. They substantiate the often abstract or intellectual agrarianism of the authors of I’ll Take My Stand. The Summer brothers, I believe, inherited fully and authentically agrarianism’s ancient tradition. That tradition, which has outcropped discontinuously in the literary record, was enabled to do so by its persistence from earliest times until now in the work and the conversation of the best farmers.

Agrarianism names the culture of farmed landscapes apparently all over the world. This is culture in the profoundest sense, neither folklore nor the urban romanticizing of rural life, but rather the complex knowledge and artistry of local adaptation. Or, to speak more truly, it is the culture of the effort of local adaptation, which has never been perfect and will never be finished. This culture, however confirmed it was by their wide reading, came fundamentally to the Summerses as a birthright. They could not have acquired it from the proto-industrial, and stereotypical, great plantations of the Old South. What they got of it that was most intimately their own, and they got plenty, they heard from their forebears and their neighbors.

Lanes Landing Farm,

Port Royal, Kentucky

Preface

This work had its beginnings in 1972 when I visited Marie Summer Huggins at Pomaria Plantation. Mrs. Huggins, granddaughter of Adam and William Summer’s brother Henry, was still teaching Latin in Newberry County. She was in her eighties and a faithful caretaker of the plantation. Pomaria was the home of Adam and William Summer in their youth, although I did not know it then. After her customary glass of old Madeira at the front door, Mrs. Huggins recollected my grandfather from the 1920s and 1930s as quite an impressive speaker of the old school. He had died before I was born, and this remembrance was very welcome. She then took me on a tour of the old house. She prided herself on keeping the original paint and faux graining from the 1820s. I recall her pointing out the large zigzag crack in the plaster of the north drawing room made by the Charleston earthquake of 1886. She refused to repair it out of homage to her forebears and for those who would come after her.

In the south drawing room she took me to William Summer’s drop-front plantation desk. It was open with a Pomaria Nursery ledger recording plant orders from the 1850s. Beside the ledger were William’s stylus pen, glasses, and brass candlestick, almost as if he had just left them when he stepped from the room. The chair at the desk had gone with William and Adam’s younger brother, Thomas Jefferson Summer, when he traveled to Giessen, Germany, in the 1840s to study plant and agricultural chemistry with Professor Justus von Liebig, the founder of the discipline and an early plant nutritionist. Over the desk hung George Cooke’s 1839 engraving of Charleston Harbor viewed from the Cooper River. On another wall was a tinted engraving of Raphael’s Madonna and Child with a sabre slash left by Judson Kilpatrick’s soldiers in February 1865. She pointed out a section of charred floorboards in this room, set on fire by those men and put out by the servants. During my visit, there was a cheerful fire in the large fireplace. It was Christmas, and the house was fragrant with cedar boughs brought from the near woods.

Mrs. Huggins said that from this south-facing parlor window William could look up from his desk in summer and see several acres of roses spreading down into the nursery’s rows. I later learned that the nursery in the 1850s sold over five hundred varieties of repeat-blooming roses chosen especially for the southern climate by William and Adam and their Scots gardener, James Crammond. These would bloom into the fall. By 1861 the number of his roses offered for sale increased to six hundred varieties. During some rare years, I later found, Pomaria had roses blooming at Christmas time. As a lover of plants and a gardener myself, all this impressed me mightily. Who was this William Summer? What was he like? What led him to devote his life to gardening? Was growing plants, after all, worth a grown man’s time? He must have felt so. Why?

Equally impressive to me, as a lover of books, was Mrs. Huggins’s careful preservation of a very large collection bought by family members in antebellum times. Numbering in the many thousands, they lined from floor to ceiling both walls of the upstairs central hall that ran the length of the house. She noted that with the front double doors open to the upstairs portico, it was a breezy place where the books could breathe. It was an excellent place to sit and read. I recall her pointing out, On this right wall are Mr. Henry’s books, and on the left are Mr. William’s. I noticed in passing five or six volumes by Herman Melville, with their gilt titles shining on the spines of their bindings. There were Omoo, White Jacket, Redburn, Typee, and others. They were in mint condition and obviously had been lovingly cared for. I had just been teaching Typee in an American novel class, and that is probably why I remembered the Melville editions out of all the thousands. I also recalled that there were no new books from after 1865.

Nearly half a century later, I would learn that in the 1840s and 1850s, Henry and Adam Summer made annual visits to Charleston, Boston, and New York to purchase books. They were both bibliophiles of a high order. Even more pertinent, I found that Adam Summer was a part of the Young America Literary Movement in the 1840s and had met Evert Duyckinck, one of its founders and Melville’s best defender and promoter. The Melville volumes have since disappeared, their whereabouts unknown. If I had only opened them! Were they presentation copies? Manners, however, prevailed, and I did not ask to take them from the shelves.

Adam reviewed Melville’s books and other Young America writers such as Hawthorne, Poe, N. P. Willis, and W. G. Simms. He called Duyckinck his friend, met N. P. Willis, and was Simms’s friend, fellow editor, and fellow member of the South Carolina State Agricultural Society. Simms’s presentation copies of his Poems (1853) and Areytos (1860), signed to Henry and his sister, Catherine Parr Summer, were on these shelves and are extant today. The collection I saw on those walls in 1972 was the largest intact personal antebellum library I have seen then or since. I had never found so many books outside a college library. Mrs. Huggins deeply regretted the absence from the collection of the Elephant Folio of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, missing since the 1920s. This had been purchased by Adam, then transferred to Henry in antebellum times. Also missing were Audubon and John Bachman’s Viviparous Quadrupeds. I later learned that Bachman was a close family friend and often stayed at the plantation. He had browsed through some of these same books. Among them were volumes treating the dispute between the racial monogenists and polygenists (in which Bachman played a part as a monogenist) and a heavily annotated copy of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, the book outlining evolution a decade before Charles Darwin.

Miss Marie made no mention of Adam’s volumes. Twenty years later, I found out why. They had gone to his own new plantation, Enterprise, at Summerfield near Ocala in Marion County, Florida in the late 1850s. The remnants of this collection came up for sale at Charlton Hall Galleries in Columbia, South Carolina, in February 1993. By that time I had been researching Adam, William, and the Pomaria Nursery in earnest for over a decade. A Columbia book dealer had salvaged the volumes that were in the best condition from the desolate scene of a library full of Adam’s books in a descendant’s old house in Savannah, Georgia. In 2013 I found out that, regrettably, in this salvaging process books considered unsalable at auction owing to their poor condition were left in the house to be hauled away.

Before the auction I spent a day cataloging the books and their inscriptions. At the sale itself on 13 February 1993, I was accompanied by Mrs. Huggins’s son, John Huggins, who then lived at Pomaria Plantation. His mother had died in 1974, two years after I had visited that Christmas. I bought as many of the significant titles (as I judged at the time) as I could afford. My friend Allen Stokes of the South Caroliniana Library was there as well and purchased Adam’s own copy of a bound volume of the South Carolinian, which he edited in the 1840s. We did not bid against one another, being only concerned that the books would not pass to those who did not appreciate the significance of their provenance. Luckily, I acquired Adam’s own copy of his and his brother William’s periodical, the Southern Agriculturist (1853–54), in which Adam identified some of his and William’s unsigned contributions and made a few corrections to some of his own. The book has contributed much to this edition.

By 1993 the two walls of books at Pomaria Plantation had been dispersed outside the house. Some had been sold, and others were in outbuildings. A large secretary in the house contained fewer than two hundred. In all locations I estimate there were less than half the number of the books I had seen in 1972. John Huggins allowed me to catalog these remaining books, many of them in the outbuildings, which included a large barn. Many were in a corn crib; others were upstairs in the barn’s hay loft and now sadly deteriorated. He told me to salvage what I could, and over a period of several visits in vacations from teaching in a neighboring state, I did. I left nothing, not even rat-eaten shells.

Over the years, I have acquired other volumes bearing the Summer brothers’ signatures from various dealers and book stores. The volumes have informed this present book by providing a record of their owners’ interests. They have helped establish the valuable intellectual context—scientific, agrarian, and botanical—in which the essays were written. The extant literary works also provided an indication of their taste and literary influence.

It was Agrarian poet Allen Tate who wrote in his essay on Ezra Pound that the task of the civilised intelligence is one of perpetual salvage. This salvage is often a life’s work and the life’s work of many converging on a single task. Marie Huggins’s life’s work was one of these, and I thank her for her faithful stewardship and her hospitality in 1972, which inspired me to inquire further and seek to puzzle out the answers to questions that my visit raised. The memory of an intact, albeit battered, civilization was perhaps the greatest abiding encouragement in my scholar’s progress. Fine, ruined things from the past, as for the Romantic poets pondering transience and mutability, continued to be an irresistible draw for me. In the process of my research, I was to learn that I shared Adam Summer’s love for these poets and their understanding of the world.

More indispensable help came from Rosalyn Summer Sease of Wilmington, Delaware. She was Marie Huggins’s sister and thus also Adam and William’s grandniece. We corresponded from 1978 to 1979, and she provided me much information on her great uncles. She wrote that Adam, based on the stories the family told her, had always been her favorite ancestor. She had preserved valuable family material without which this edition would have been nearly impossible. At my suggestion, she donated a large portion of this personal family archive to the South Caroliniana Library. My thanks are due to E. L. Inabinett and Allen Stokes, former directors there, and to Henry Fulmer, current director, and to his staff, Michael Berry, Brian Cuthrell, Graham Duncan, Craig Keeney, and Lorrey Stewart for facilitating my use of these and the library’s general collections over a period of more than three decades. Mrs. Sease’s son, John, also helped me with information and documents in the 1980s and 1990s. These included a Pomaria Nursery ledger account book from 1879 to 1882, kept by William Summer’s nephew, John Adam Summer, when he inherited the nursery from his uncle in 1878.

As a result of Mrs. Sease’s donations, the South Caroliniana Library has the largest collection of Pomaria materials in existence. In 2003 Mrs. Sease’s granddaughter Catherine Sease edited an augmented version of much of the material her grandmother provided me two decades before into a privately printed volume entitled Family Facts and Fantasies. This work has been of great value.

In 1979 Inabinett informed me that in the materials Mrs. Sease donated to the library, there was a manuscript novel written by O. B. Mayer. Mayer was William and Adam’s first cousin and close friend. It was at this time that I began to research in earnest the lives of all three in preparation to edit and publish the novel. Mayer’s work was set in 1846 at an apricot repast held around the well at Pomaria Plantation. The occasion of the gathering was to celebrate the harvest of Moorpark apricots, unusually fine that year, and to spin yarns. The group included both William and Adam Summer. William appeared in the novel as Billy. Adam appeared as the character Vesper Brackett, a pseudonym under which Adam wrote several of the pieces collected in the present volume. Mayer had Adam the master of hospitalities at the plantation at the time. The group of yarn spinners constituted an impromptu Dutch Fork school of writers and storytellers. My research culminated in the publication of Mayer’s John Punterick by Dr. James B. Meriwether’s Southern Studies Program at the University of South Carolina in 1981. This was followed in 1982 by my edition of Mayer’s history, The Dutch Fork, my own cultural history of the area of Adam and William’s birth, A Carolina Dutch Fork Calendar (1988), and my mother’s culinary history, Dutch Fork Cookery (1989).

Scholarship on Adam and William Summer and Pomaria Nursery is thus relatively recent. The first publication on the nursery was my article On Reclaiming a Southern Antebellum Garden Heritage: An Introduction to Pomaria Nurseries in the fall 1993 issue of Magnolia: Journal of the Southern Garden History Society. This appeared nearly a decade after William Howard’s groundbreaking 1984 master’s thesis at the University of South Carolina, William Summer: 19th Century Horticulturist. The Magnolia essay generated interest because no garden history of America had ever mentioned Pomaria or the nature writings of the Summer brothers, despite Pomaria’s larger, earlier influence than that of Fruitlands Nursery, an establishment well known to garden historians. Linda Askey Weathers’s article Digging into Gardens Past in Southern Accents (September 1992) reported on current Pomaria research. This was followed by an article on William and Adam’s natural history legacy, Come, Friends of Beauty, in South Carolina Wildlife in November 2002.

The first biographical profile, my article William Summer: A Man for All Seasons, appeared in the South Carolina Historical Society’s Carologue in Spring 2002. In February 2005, for the annual Johnstone Lecture at the Georgia Botanical Garden, I gave a talk titled Pomaria: First Major Nursery in the Lower and Middle South. The lecture highlighted excerpts from the Summers’s writings on horticulture. To accompany this lecture, the Georgia Botanical Garden mounted the first exhibit on Pomaria, on display from January to March 2005. Garden director Jefferson Lewis III and his staff were instrumental in these accomplishments. I presented the lecture Pomaria and Upcountry Gardens at the Southern Garden Heritage Conference in Athens, Georgia, on 17 February 2006, followed in March 2009 by the first lecture in South Carolina on Pomaria, A Rich and Splendid Assortment: Pomaria’s Antebellum Patrons, at Historic Columbia Foundation’s Annual Garden Symposium; this was followed by Upcountry Garden Sophistication: The Evidence of Pomaria Nurseries at the Southern Garden History Symposium in Camden, South Carolina, on 4 April 2009. Helping here were John Sherrer of the Historic Columbia Foundation and Davyd Foard Hood of the Southern Garden History Society.

This scholarship yielded results when James R. Cothran Jr.’s landmark Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South (2003) featured Pomaria as the first major nursery in the lower and middle South. Cothran, the premier garden historian of the antebellum period, attended the various lectures on Pomaria and championed the Summer brothers’ rediscovery until his death in 2012. He was using the evidence of Pomaria to choose plants in the restoration and design of historic Southern gardens. The University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum’s exhibit Taking Root: The Summer Brothers and the History of Pomaria Nursery was the first exhibit on Pomaria in South Carolina. It was held from June to September 2014. My gallery talk was on the subject of the brothers’ nature writing and thus was prelude to this book. Special thanks go to the museum director, Dr. Jane Przybysz, who made the exhibit possible, and for her continued support of the legacy of Pomaria. Also helping at this time was Mrs. Kajal Ghoshroy of the University of South Carolina, Sumter, Dr. John B. Nelson of the A. C. Moore Herbarium of the University of South Carolina, Mrs. Elizabeth Sudduth of the Thomas Cooper Library, the staff of the South Caroliniana Library, and Thomas McNally, dean of the libraries at the university.

As part of their People You Should Know winter lecture series at the South Carolina Historical Society in January 2015, I spoke on the Summer brothers’ nature writing. Helping me there were Dr. Faye Jensen, Karen Stokes, and Virginia Ellison.

Providing assistance at various times were Alex Moore of the University of South Carolina Press; William Cawthon; Beth and Tom Evers of Pomaria Plantation; Ann Hutchinson Waigand of Herndon, Virginia; Mrs. Suzanne Johnson; Mrs. Peggy Cornett, curator of historic plants, Monticello; Randy Ivey; Professor David S. Shields; Scott White; Roy Rooks of Ballylee Nature Conservancy; and Nathan (Nat) Bradford. The Pomaria Society, formed in August 2014 as a result of the McKissick Museum’s Pomaria Exhibit, has the express mission of the continuation of the work of Adam and William Summer. It is they who will carry on the conservation ethic of sustainability and localism articulated in many of the essays in this collection. For moral support, I must also thank Wendell Berry, who has encouraged me in this and my various projects.

A Note on the Text

In his epigraph to Fences (Farmer and Planter 11, n.s. 2 [April 1860]: 102), Adam Summer defined fence, citing Walker. By Walker he meant John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language, first published in London in 1791. Adam Summer’s fellow editor William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) refused to use Noah Webster’s dictionary, which enforced a new American spelling that was actually a regional one centered in the North. He felt this to be a form of northern cultural imperialism symptomatic of the times. (See Notes on the Text, or, the Devil and Noah Webster, in Simms, William Gilmore Simms’s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization, ed. Kibler and Moltke-Hansen, xiii–xiv.) My favorite quotation on a Webster spelling, however, came from Charlestonian James Warley Miles. In 1880 at the newly structured University of South Carolina, student Eugene Dabbs recorded Miles as saying that today [honour] is cut short enough without abbreviating the spelling, he spells it Honour (Matalene 69).

Adam’s essays usually followed Walker’s spellings, but their texts as printed by various typesetters are not always consistent. Perhaps Adam was not consistent himself. Spelling in his day was more fluid. This edition follows the texts as printed with no attempt to regularize or modernize spellings. Adam’s texts most frequently (but not always) use dont and cant without apostrophes, in English fashion, centre, fibre, lustre, and sombre; and mould, vapour, colour, honour, and endeavour, but seldom humour. He used pencilled, gravelled, revelled, revelling, vallies, villified, excells, and other double-el Walker spellings. Other of Adam’s usual spellings include eyry (for aerie), chrystal, exstacy, extatic, burthen, gass (for gas), camelia, perriwinkle, exhuberant, wholsome, vieing and out-vieing, economise, systematise, checquered, deposites, indited, gallopped, visiters, ricketty, develope, barreness, and lower case negro and negroes. Two of his favorite words, which are often good indicators of his authorship, are amongst and whilst. William’s essays never use these two words. Another of Adam’s favorite words was tasty to mean tasteful. Adam always used Mock bird for mockingbird. William did not. William used milch cows for milk cows, a spelling that Adam seldom used. William also used the spellings potatoe, misletoe, and crysanthemum.

All these usages have been followed in this edition, so that the texts appear as they were published in the nineteenth century. Inconsistencies have been honored. A few insertions of paragraph breaks in pages-long essays by Adam Summer where no paragraphing existed out of journalistic practice have been the only emendations of the text. Only a very few of these have been found necessary.

Introduction

William Summer was born in 1815 in Newberry District in central South Carolina. His brother Adam Geiselhardt Summer was born three years later in 1818. They were descended from the German and Swiss-German Sommer, Hausihl (Houseal), Meyer (Mayer), Süss (Sease), and Geiselhardt families who settled the Dutch (Deutsch) Fork area between the Broad and Saluda Rivers in the 1750s.

The Summer brothers were well aware of their families’ Revolutionary War past in upcountry South Carolina. Their grandfather Nicholas Summer, a major in the Continental Army, born in 1754, was killed in 1781 in a sortie at Fort Granby on the Congaree at the age of twenty-seven. His son, their father, Captain John Adam Summer III (b. 1779), was only two years old when Nicholas died. John grew up without a father, and of course William and Adam knew Nicholas only from family stories, of which there were many.

Their great grandfather, Captain Johannes (Hans) Adam Sommer I (1716–1784), the old pioneer, also served in the patriot cause as both soldier and supplier of meal, grits, and flour from his mill. All his six sons fought for American independence. The Sommer mill was the local gathering spot for the patriots, who reconnoitered there before and after skirmishes and battles. Here the German and Swiss-German settlers brought provisions from their farms, and Sommer had them transported to the soldiers, once across the Enoree and Tyger Rivers to supply General Thomas Sumter before the Battle of Blackstocks in neighboring Union County on 1 November 1780. Blackstocks was to be a turning point in the war, the first patriot victory over Banastre Tarleton, which led directly to the British defeat at Cowpens. The British captured the Sommer mill but could not hold it. It was fortified and garrisoned by the Fairfield Militia under Colonel Richard Winn of Winnsboro. On the distaff side William and Adam’s grandfather, Captain Wilhelm Frederick Hausihl (b. 1730), was a local legend as a fearless and effective patriot.

William and Adam, who had five other brothers and a sister, grew up on the Summer family plantation. Their father was like his fellow German immigrant neighbors in having an independent, self-sufficient farm, the kind that founding father Thomas Jefferson had advocated. It was only in Adam and William’s time that the cotton boom began to change the face of agriculture in the Dutch Fork and the slave system became the norm, with the great wealth that could be made from the staple and the system. For the Summer family this cotton-growing era was the time of moving from pewter to silver and the building of a fine Palladian plantation house constructed when William had just entered his teens and Adam was about to do so.

There had been slaves in the Dutch Fork from the beginning but not in the large numbers of the lowcountry. The early Sommer and Hausihl families were among the early slave owners. Most of the settlers came on land grants to Protestants made possible by Lutheran King George II. Some were indentured servants themselves, but most paid their passage. Many could sign their names. For the most part they were fleeing the terrible wars between Protestants and Catholics in the old country and were in search of land to farm, with the independence and better opportunities that came with land ownership. Hans Adam Sommer had to work off his indenture; the well-to-do Hausihls did not.

The Hausihls were also farmers. They were well educated and had served in Germany as educators and ministers. The pioneer Hausihl’s father, Bernard Hausihl, D.D., was a pastor of the German Reformed Church and a professor of the Protestant Theological Seminary in Heilbronn, Württemberg, Germany. Later he moved with his family to London, where he was with the Lutheran chapel and was court preacher to Hanoverian King George II. Both Bernard Hausihl’s sons came to America. One went to the North and was a Tory. The other went to the South and was a patriot. William and Adam’s grandfather was the son who went south. Captain William Frederick Hausihl raised a patriot troop of horsemen at his own expense and became a well-known raider assisting Generals Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. He was an excellent horseman, and his troop of cavalry served in the regiment of Philemon Waters.

Perhaps taking from their mother’s Hausihl side, John Adam Summer’s children were all lovers of books. Several of them, including Adam, were avid bibliophiles with large and eclectic libraries. As the remnants of their libraries show, Adam and William’s brother Henry Summer’s main interests were theology, history, philosophy, literature, and natural science. Adam collected literature and writing on natural science, history, travel, exploration, and agriculture. William’s interests ran to literature, natural science, botany, history, and philosophy. They all three collected books on agriculture and nature. Henry would go on to help found Newberry College. He was the first secretary of the trustees there in 1859. The president of the trustees was his close friend the Reverend John Bachman of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston. Bachman, a naturalist and John James Audubon’s patron and collaborator beginning in 1831, served as mentor to both William and Adam. Adam donated some of his library to the fledgling institution in 1860.

Five of the six brothers attended college. Nicholas, John Adam IV, Henry, and Adam all went to South Carolina College. Thomas Jefferson Summer (b. 1826) went to West Point for one year before rejecting the military for what he called the noblest of professions—farming. He traveled to Heidelberg, where he studied German, and enrolled at Giessen University to study the new science of agricultural chemistry under the founder of the discipline, Professor Baron Justus von Liebig. Thomas was planning to devote his life to the restoration and rejuvenation of depleted soils in his native upcountry. His sad death in 1852 from the hemorrhage of ulcers ended a promising career at the age of twenty-five. The loss was nothing short of tragic for both Adam and William, who were particularly devoted to their younger brother. As his extant letters reveal, William suffered a long fit of depression. Their father, also still grieving, died three years later in 1855. In 1852 Adam took over Thomas’s life work. His essays on land restoration and proper treatment of the soil, a sampling of which are published here, no doubt were influenced by his brother’s commitment to the cause. One can sense the presence of Thomas in Adam’s Address (pp. 53–70, this volume), given six months after his brother’s death.

All the Summer lads learned early to study and respect nature. As Adam revealed in his Winter Green, a Tale of My School Master (pp. 38–43), they studied at the parochial school attached to the local St. Johannes Kirche (St. John’s Lutheran Church). Their gentle teacher took them on nature walks in the virgin oak-hickory forest surrounding the church. This forest was the church glebe granted to the congregation in 1754. It was there in the old woodland that Adam said he learned to love the natural world. His essays on noble trees collected in this volume stemmed from what he called his near worship of the trees around St. John’s, especially when the church became angrily divided over doctrinal issues. Although he had an affinity for all native trees, large and small, he particularly loved the oak family, or what he called the oak tribe. His three essays The Forest Trees of the South (pp. 87–95) are but a few of the many devoted to the subject. His notable comment Of all the things in the landscape, I would deal most gently with trees is a good indication of his abiding love for this majestic feature of nature.

While William and Adam were children, English replaced German in the pulpit of their church. The older members of the congregation resisted, but it was the young, perhaps William and Adam among them, who favored English and brought about the change. Adam would always emphasize English over German culture. Still, the oldest folks, according to the brothers’ cousin O. B. Mayer, luxuriated in the language when they got together. In so many ways, the brothers’ childhood was a time of great transition. Their father still had a thick German accent. A family friend, Edwin Scott, noted in his reminiscences of Columbia that John Adam Summer said that his son Adam "had spent a year or so in the Creek (that is, studying Greek), thus demonstrating the father’s heavy German brogue (15). One of the local Pomaria companies in the war in 1861 was called the Dutch" owing to their German accents.

In the log schoolhouse at St. John’s, the two brothers were also taught the classics and a love for literature that remained with them throughout their lives. Shakespeare’s plays (an abiding love with Adam) were performed on the school porch with quilts borrowed from the neighborhood to serve as backdrops in their productions. Adam singled out the particular influence of Virgil’s Georgics (which he loved better than his Æneid), Horace (the Odes and Ars Poetica), Sallust, Plutarch, and Juvenal. Juvenal’s satires would perhaps influence Adam’s own satirical bent, seen in many essays collected in this volume. Juvenal and Virgil would remain Adam’s primary early literary influences throughout his writing career. Adam would have liked particularly Juvenal’s answer to someone who asked why he didn’t go to Rome—because, as he declared, he didn’t relish treachery, trickery, and lying. As his essays reveal, Adam’s dislike for urbanization kept pace with the growth of cities, particularly in the North.

After St. John’s, Adam went with his cousin O. B. Mayer to the village of Lexington, where they studied at the Lexington Classical Academy for several years. There the lads again had a close regimen in Latin and Greek in a school that was sponsored by Lutherans as preparatory to the Lutheran Seminary, which had moved there from the Pomaria vicinity around 1831. The Lexington institution was open to males over ten, which meant that Adam would not have matriculated until 1832 or later. There he had good teachers, one of whom was Ernest Lewis Hazelius (1777–1853). Hazelius, born a Moravian in Silesia, Prussia, was persuaded to come to Lexington from Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary by the Reverend John Bachman. Both Hazelius and Bachman emphasized the common beliefs of Lutherans with other Christian denominations, a tradition of tolerance that influenced both Adam and Henry in their spiritual lives. At the time Lexington village was described as one continuous pine forest containing the courthouse, a boarding house, a few dwellings, and three regular grogshops and two licensed taverns—all well attended (McArver and Hendrix 6). Hazelius was especially diligent in building a good seminary library, which he patiently catalogued (McArver and Hendrix 5).

The oldest brother, Nicholas, born in 1804, graduated with first honors at South Carolina College in 1828. He then practiced law before being killed in the Seminole War near Tampa, Florida, at the age of thirty-two in 1836. The second son, Henry, born in 1809, graduated from South Carolina College in 1831 and became a lawyer in Newberry. John Adam IV, born in 1812, graduated from South Carolina College in 1834. He followed Nicholas to Florida and died of fever a few days after Nicholas at the age of twenty-four. The deaths of their brothers shadowed the early lives of both Adam and William, who were eighteen and twenty-one years old at the time. Catherine Parr Summer, their only sister (1823–1906), went to a female academy in Greenville, South Carolina. She was also a lover of books, as the extant presentation copies to her from Adam and Henry attest. Adam’s gift of Emma Embury’s American Wild Flowers in Their Native Haunts (New York: Appleton, 1845) has twenty hand-colored engravings and demonstrates their shared love of what was to become Adam’s special horticultural interest in native plants. It was William and Catherine who were to be the keepers of the flower and vegetable gardens at the plantation in the 1840s and 1850s. Adam, William, and Catherine also shared a love for poetry.

William contracted polio as a child and had to walk with crutches all his life. He said that this prevented him from attending college like his brothers. He detailed the pain he suffered in The Character of a Pomologist (pp. 70–72), recording how, despite his affliction, he still wanted to be useful and thus learned the art of grafting and growing trees. He found he was good at it. He was mentored by a few elderly men of the neighborhood, who had been born in Germany, and then later by Bachman and Joel R. Poinsett. Though not a college student, he was extremely well-read in such subjects as history and literature. He was thus largely self-educated but had the benefit of closeness to both Henry and Adam. Extant in his library are presentation copies signed to him by his brothers.

Adam was at South Carolina College when Thomas Cooper was leaving the presidency. Cooper’s influence on him, as for other students, was great. There Adam also studied modern literature and the classics. The students at the college received a broad classical education designed to produce a gentleman who could excel in all walks of life. The object of education was to help a man do many things well so that he would be proficient in his planted fields, his library, and his drawing room. Entering freshmen at the college were required to have a good knowledge of Latin and Greek grammar, to have already read the whole of Virgil’s Æneid, Cicero’s Orations, Caesar’s Commentaries, Sallust, Xenophanes’s Cyropædia, the Gospel According to St. John in Greek, and at least one book of Homer. Sophomore studies included Horace and Homer’s Iliad. Adam may have learned chemistry from William H. Ellet, newly come from Columbia College in New York. Isaac Stuart likely taught him Greek and Roman Literature. Other possible teachers were Henry Junius Nott (belles lettres, language, and logic), Thomas Twiss (mathematics and natural philosophy), Francis Lieber (history and political economy), Robert Henry (political economy), and William Capers and Stephen Elliott Jr. (sacred literature).

Classmate William McIver in January 1836 described the college routine: Monday and Tuesday recitations before breakfast. Every Wednesday and Thursday, we recite in Cicero and the other days of the week in Homer. These are heard at 4 p.m. by Mister Stuart.… Every Friday is devoted to hearing lectures on History from Dr. Lieber (Matalene 6).

Nott’s Novellettes of a Traveller; or, Odds and Ends from the Knapsack of Thomas Singularity was published by Harper in 1834 and may have been an influence on Adam. Nott (1797–1837)