The Ghosts of Petit Versailles

Petit Versailles, a lost residence in suburban Charleston, linked the tragic stories of two women who expired prematurely during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The house fronting the Cooper River was built for Elizabeth Gadsden but occupied by her godfather, Francis LeBrasseur. Following their deaths, Francis’s wife, Anne, quit the property and embraced a deadly spiritual fantasy. Petit Versailles was later annexed to a brewery and might have disappeared before the American Revolution, but the possibility of its survival into the twentieth century haunts the history of Ansonborough.

The story of the mysterious property known by the grandiose name Petit Versailles is rooted in the shadows of the now-famous Gadsden family of Charleston. Thomas Gadsden (1688–1741) was an English ship captain who settled in Charleston in 1720. In October of that year, he purchased a suburban plantation from Isaac Mazyck, a prosperous French Huguenot merchant who had owned the property since the 1690s. Mazyck’s plantation was a few hundred yards north of the original boundaries of urban Charleston, and abutted the northern edge of William Rhett’s estate known as Rhettsbury. The property purchased by Thomas Gadsden in 1720 included sixty-four acres of high land and about forty acres of marsh fronting the Cooper River to the east. It was known as the Bowling Green before 1745, when it began to be subdivided under the name Ansonborough.

Within the landscape of this suburban farm, the residence of Captain Thomas Gadsden stood at what is now the northeast corner of East Bay and Vernon Streets, very close to a waterfront landing site once known as Anson’s Landing. He shared the home with his wife, Elizabeth Terry, whom he had married in Barbados in 1715.[1] The young couple baptized and buried a son named Robert in London in 1718, and lost another son, Thomas, shortly after settling in Charleston.[2] Elizabeth Gadsden, the couple’s third child, was born here on 27 July 1721 and baptized that September at St. Philip’s Anglican Church.[3] On Elizabeth’s first birthday in 1722, Thomas received a commission to be Collector of His Majesty’s Customs for the Port of Charleston.[4] The Gadsden family returned to St. Philip’s to baptize another child named Christopher in March 1724. One year later, Elizabeth Terry Gadsden died and was buried at the familiar churchyard.[5] By the spring of 1725, Thomas Gadsden was an eligible widower in his mid-30s with two small children.

The next memorable episode in the story of the Gadsden family of South Carolina represents a mystery of sorts. In the summer of 1726, for reasons not explained in surviving documents, Thomas Gadsden felt compelled to make some arrangements for the future of his five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Women in the English-speaking world at that time possessed few legal rights, as I described way back in Episode No. 12, and the contours of their lives were shaped by a deeply paternalistic world view. A free woman in colonial South Carolina existed in the legal shadow of her father until marriage, at which time her legal existence was totally subsumed by that of her husband. Marriage and motherhood were the only culturally-approved stations of her life. Free women who never married formed a very small minority of the population, and they represented a family burden in the eyes of the law and their community. In this context, Thomas Gadsden’s decision to create a legal trust for his young daughter represents an unusually proactive step.

Two days after Elizabeth’s fifth birthday in July 1726, Thomas Gadsden conveyed a small piece of real estate to the girl’s godfather, Francis LeBrasseur, a French Huguenot merchant who had been in Charleston since the turn of the eighteenth century. The property in question formed the southeastern-most corner of the high land comprising Gadsden’s suburban plantation, now the southwest corner of East Bay and Society Streets. Measuring 240 feet by 104 feet, the rectangular lot was enclosed by a new fence of “ceadar poasts and rales” erected at the charge of Francis LeBrasseur. The property was surrounded by open land at that time, bounded to the south by “pasture land” belonging to the widow Sarah Rhett, to the north and west by pasture belonging to Thomas Gadsden, and to the east on a narrow foot path that later became part of East Bay Street, adjacent to “the marsh next to Cooper River.” Gadsden sold the half-acre lot to LeBrasseur for the nominal sum of five shillings (South Carolina currency), but the surviving document includes no explanation of the motivations behind their bargain.[6]

Moments after acknowledging receipt of the deed of sale, Francis LeBrasseur and his wife, Catherine, legally conveyed the half-acre property as a gift to Elizabeth Gadsden. In the surviving text, Francis explained that he was motivated by “the love vallue & esteem I bear unto my god-daughter Elizabeth Ga[d]sden . . . & especially for & in consideration of the sum of five shillings curr[en]t money of this province to me in hand paid . . . by Capt. Thomas Gadsden.” Five-year-old Elizabeth had no need of her own land at that moment, of course, nor would the law of that era recognize a minor female as its legal owner. Rather, the transaction created a legal trust designed to benefit the child once she reached adulthood. LeBrasseur conveyed the land and everything associated with the property “unto the s[ai]d Elizabeth Gadsden her heirs & assigns forever, to her & their own proper use benefit & behoof,” not immediately, but “after the deaths or decease of the s[ai]d Francis LeBrasseur & Catherine his wife (which of the two shall out live the other).”[7]

The act of a father-figure bestowing property on a daughter was not unusual at that time, of course, but family transactions of this sort customarily occurred immediately before or after the girl’s wedding. In fact, Thomas Gadsden’s 1726 reservation for five-year-old Elizabeth represents a curious anomaly in eighteenth century South Carolina. Most fathers of that era waited to see if their daughters survived to a marriageable age before beginning to consider the nature of their doweries. If Thomas was seriously ill at that time, or simply concerned about his daughter’s future welfare, he might have simply drafted a will and specified the scope of Elizabeth’s future inheritance. Similarly, if Gadsden hoped the property would help Elizabeth attract a future spouse, he might have endowed her with a larger dowry than a vacant half-acre lot sandwiched between two suburban plantations. Instead, Elizabeth’s father and godfather crafted an unusually early and relatively modest trust that defies easy explanation.

In light of these facts, I suspect that Thomas Gadsden and Francis LeBrasseur worried in that young Elizabeth might never marry. The law and culture of that era expected a young girl like Miss Gadsden to mature and leave her father’s household to become the legal dependent of a future husband. If such a marriage seemed unlikely, for whatever reason, the men responsible for her care were obliged to plan for her future life as an adult spinster. Two days after her fifth birthday, Elizabeth Gadsden’s father and godfather executed the legal paperwork to provide for such a future. Significantly, the reservation crafted for her contains no mention of how the trust might be altered by a future husband, a contingency most parents of that era anticipated for their marriageable daughters. Because no descriptions, depictions, or memoirs of Elizabeth survive, we can only guess at the circumstances that inspired the trust created for her. Perhaps she was born with some physical or developmental disability, or perhaps some childhood illness permanently impaired her physical mobility. Whatever the cause of their concern, Thomas Gadsden and Francis LeBrasseur felt compelled to plan for the girl’s future at an early date.

The documents created by Elizabeth’s father and godfather in July 1726 mention only a wooden fence surrounding the girl’s half-acre lot. Shortly thereafter, however, Francis LeBrasseur erected a residence here that he occupied for the rest of his life. The affluent Huguenot merchant owned other real estate in urban Charleston and a number of enslaved servants, some of which property he had acquired through his marriage to the widow Catherine Buckley nearly twenty years earlier.[8] LeBrasseur did not necessarily need another residence, therefore, but likely built a new house on Elizabeth’s lot as an investment in the young girl’s future comfort. By the early 1740s, if not much earlier, the structure was known locally as “Petit Versailles,” though the activities or architectural features that might have inspired that curious name are now obscure.[9]

In the meantime, Thomas Gadsden sold his Bowling Green plantation to Captain George Anson in the spring of 1727. An obscure clause in that well-known transaction specifically exempted from the sale Elizabeth’s half-acre lot at the southeast corner of the plantation and reserved a driveway, now called Society Street, extending from her house through Anson’s property to the “Broad Path” leading in and out of Charleston (now King Street).[10] Immediately after selling the Bowling Green, Gadsden purchased a 300-acre tract at the rural headwaters of the Ashley River and invested in the creation of a rice plantation.[11] It is possible, therefore, that Elizabeth remained in the suburbs with the childless LeBrasseur couple, who cared for the girl while her father pursued various commercial ventures and courted another wife.

Forty-year-old Thomas Gadsden married Collins Hall at St. Philip’s Church in April 1728, and the couple’s first child, Philip, arrived sixteenth months later.[12] That joyous news was followed just a week later by the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Gadsden, who was buried on 13 August 1729.[13] Her early death, caused by maladies long forgotten, essentially voided the legal trust created for Elizabeth’s benefit in 1726, but it did not affect the bond of friendship between her father and godfather. Francis LeBrasseur continued to inhabit the Gadsden property known as Petit Versailles, though he buried his own wife, Catherine, in November 1730.[14] Just over two months later, Francis married a younger widow named Anne Mellish Splatt, who had come to South Carolina with her English husband, Richard Splatt, some years earlier. Anne brought to the household one surviving child from her first marriage, after which she and Francis baptized four more children during the early 1730s.[15]

Francis LeBrasseur, one of the venerable Huguenot settlers of early South Carolina, died in December 1736 and was buried at St. Philip’s Church.[16] Immediately thereafter, Thomas Gadsden resumed management of the property he had set aside a decade earlier for his daughter. At some point in the late 1730s, Anne LeBrasseur and her own surviving daughters removed from Petit Versailles and took up residence in one of the several other properties she owned within the bounds of urban Charleston. Surviving records do not reveal whether she quit the petit chateau voluntarily or whether Captain Gadsden encouraged her to leave. By 1740, if not earlier, Gadsden had rented the property to the visiting captain of His Majesty’s Ship Tartar, the Honorable George Townshend (1716–1769), eldest son of Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend, in England.[17]

Captain Townshend sailed away from Charleston in October 1741, by which time the Gadsden population of South Carolina had recently declined. Thomas Gadsden buried his third wife, Alice Mighells, that July, followed immediately by a young daughter named Eleanor. The elder captain, Collector of His Majesty’s Customs for Charleston, died in August 1741, while his teenage son Christopher was living abroad.[18] In his will, Thomas Gadsden appointed two local merchants to administer his estate. Although he instructed them to sell numerous properties and hold the money for Thomas’s young sons James (born 1734) and Thomas (born 1737), the executors did not sell the property formerly reserved for Elizabeth Gadsden.[19] Instead, they advertised to lease “the house and orange grove commonly called or known by the name of Petit Versailles, as also an able young man slave to be hired by the month or year, who is qualified to wait on a gentleman or attend in a house, having been bred up in the late Collector Gadsden’s family.”[20]

For reasons known only to herself, Anne LeBrasseur chose not to return to Petit Versailles or to continue living in one of the several rental properties she owned in urban Charleston. Instead, she occupied a well-furnished new brick house near the northeast corner of Broad and King Streets with her daughter, also named Anne.[21] The middle-aged widow who had buried two husbands and six of her eight children had, in recent years, become a follower of the itinerant evangelical preacher George Whitefield. The zealous advocate of what became known as Methodism had visited Charleston several times between 1738 and 1741 and scandalized the Anglican clergy with passionate, fiery sermons about personal pathways to divine grace.[22] While a toxic mixture of grief and religious extasy filled her heart, Anne’s imagination fixated on a morbid spiritual fantasy that clouded her judgment. On the 9th of June 1742, she loaded a pistol with two lead balls, placed the barrel against her breast, and squeezed the trigger.

Charleston’s weekly newspaper, the South Carolina Gazette, described the suicide of Anne LeBrasseur as a “melancholly accident.” The “widow gentlewomen of considerable fortune,” said the report, had recently become “a prime disciple of Mr. Whitefield’s.” Inspired by the controversial preacher’s recent performances in Charleston, Anne had “shifted into a third communion”—that is, became obsessed with a desire to merge with a divine spirit—and “shot herself with a pistol loaded with a brace of balls, through the body.” She did not die immediately, but lingered long enough to explain her state of mind to those who heard the shot and discovered her bloody corpse. Anne Mellish Splatt LeBrasseur “expired in an hour or two after,” said the Gazette, “professing her full assurance of her salvation, and that she longed to be in the blessed mansions which she knew were prepared for her. She recommended the care of her child,” ten year old Anne, “to the Rev. Mr. Garden,” rector of St. Philip’s Anglican Church.[23]

Back at Petit Versailles, the executors of the estate of Thomas Gadsden continued to manage his various properties until his eldest surviving son, Christopher, attained the age of twenty-one in 1745 and returned to Charleston.[24] At that same moment, the local agents of George Anson, now an admiral and member of British Parliament, began subdividing and his Bowling Green plantation as a new residential neighborhood called Ansonborough. That August, Anson’s local attorney sold the admiral’s half-acre brewery standing at the southeast corner of two newly-created thoroughfares named Anson and Centurion Street. The purchasers, as I described in Episode No. 234, were a pair of trans-Atlantic merchants, Richard Shubrick and his brother, Thomas.[25] Eleven months later, in late July 1746, Christopher Gadsden sold to the Shubrick brothers the adjacent property known as Petit Versailles, which his father had reserved exactly twenty years earlier for Elizabeth Gadsden.[26]

Richard and Thomas Shubrick combined Anson’s old brewery with Petit Versailles to create a one-acre complex they called “the Brew House.” An advertisement to sell the enterprise in November 1755 noted that the suburban property included a “dwelling house, brew house, slaughter-house, salting-house, and one large store house thereon,” as well as various implements “for carrying on the brewery.”[27] No buyers appeared until the spring of 1759, however, when a benevolent organization called the South Carolina Society purchased the one-acre Brew House and an additional four acres of adjoining property that the Shubricks had also acquired from the agents of George Anson.[28]

During the early 1760s, the officers of the South Carolina Society built a number of rental tenements along the old driveway leading from King Street to Petit Versailles, which the benevolent organization now called Society Street. Some parts of Anson’s old brewery and the residence erected by Francis LeBrasseur apparently survived this era of change, however, and continued to generate rental income. By the summer of 1767, for example, an English gardener named John Watson informed the public that he had removed from Trott’s Point (aka The Hard) “to the house known by the name of the Brew House [i.e., Petit Versailles], where he still continues gardening, selling of seeds, tools, fruit trees, American plants, &c. as formerly.”[29]

The South Carolina Society soon grew tired of managing rental property and began to liquidate their holdings on Society Street. On some unrecorded date during the winter of 1770–71, the officers sold the half-acre lot formerly known as Petit Versailles to a prosperous Lowcountry planter named Thomas Lynch the elder.[30] Lynch’s use of the property is unclear, but later sources identify this lot fronting East Bay Street as the site of his primary town house in the years preceding the American Revolution. Historian Edward McCrady, for example, noted that Lynch then lived very near the house Henry Laurens, which formerly stood in a four-acre garden on the north side of Society Street, slightly west of East Bay Street. “Near him,” said McCrady, “Thomas Lynch had built an elegant house of cypress from his plantation on the Santee.”[31]

Whether Thomas Lynch actually built a new wooden house on this site in the early 1770s or merely renovated the older house known as Petit Versailles is a question not answered by surviving documents. The affluent planter mentioned the suburban property briefly in a will drafted in the summer of 1773, before he was elected to represent South Carolina in the First Continental Congress. To his wife, Hannah Motte Lynch, Thomas bequeathed temporary possession of “my house near Charles Town, with all & every part of the lott on which it is built, also all my household furniture, and plate which shall be in the said house at the time of my death.”[32] Following the demise of the elder Thomas Lynch in December 1776, while returning from Congress in Philadelphia, his eldest son, Thomas Lynch Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, gained legal possession of the property formerly known as Petit Versailles.

The younger Thomas Lynch did not live long to enjoy his father’s suburban residence in Charleston. Debilitated by a lingering illness, Thomas and his wife set sail for a Caribbean climate in December 1779 and were lost at sea. The subsequent surrender of Charleston to British forces in the spring of 1780 delayed the settlement of his estate for nearly a decade. After the British evacuation of December 1782 and the formal conclusion of war in 1783, Thomas’ sisters divided his extensive property amongst themselves. In the summer of 1788, Elizabeth Lynch (1756–1825) and her husband James Hamilton (1750–1833) sold the wooden “house and lot” once inhabited by her father and brother to a twenty-two-year-old veteran of the Revolution, a patriotic young planter named Nathaniel Heyward (1766–1851).[33]

Over the ensuing century, at least three generations of the Heyward family occupied the historic property at the southwest corner of East Bay and Society Streets. The executors of Nathaniel’s son, Charles Heyward (1802–1868), sold his wooden “mansion” in 1868 to Theodore Dehon Jervey (1817–1892), who married in 1870 the widow Elizabeth (Heyward) Trapier, daughter of Charles Heyward.[34] Their family and visitors to the old house took exterior photographs around the turn of the twentieth century that survive in several local archives. Focusing on the structure’s eastern facade, these photos show a dilapidated but once grand wooden house standing two stories above a raised brick cellar. A high pedimented portico surmounted a projecting entrance vestibule, which was surrounded on three sides by eight tall columns. Imposing brick pillars fronted East Bay Street and supported neglected wooden gates sagging with age. The rear of the house included an elongated octagonal wing oriented on a perpendicular axis to the principal entrance.

Such Neo-Classical features suggest that the structure was built, or at least extensively remodeled, in the Federal style popular in this area at the end of the eighteenth century. Long identified by local historians as the Nathaniel Heyward House, built circa 1788, one might argue that it could have been the same residence occupied in the 1770s by both Thomas Lynch senior and junior. If that hypothesis has merit, we might extend the logic and posit that the Lynch and Heyward families might have simply updated and expanded an earlier edifice built on the site in the mid-1720s, a humble Petit Versailles built for a forgotten young lady.

In short, the old wooden house standing at the southwest corner of East Bay and Society Streets might have been one of the oldest and strangest residences standing in Charleston at the dawn of the twentieth century. But no one living at that time remembered the stories of joy and sadness experienced by the likes of Elizabeth Gadsden, Francis and Anne LeBrasseur, and a host of other tenants who inhabited the site over the generations. Despite the blossoming of a preservation movement in Charleston during the first quarter of the twentieth century, the decrepit wooden mansion disappeared around the year 1920. The precise date of its demise is now elusive, but continued research might draw a curtain over this long story.

Nothing remains of Petit Versailles on the landscape of modern Charleston, though various archives, libraries, and museums preserve numerous clues to the lives of its former inhabitants. We cannot conjure them back to the realm of the living, but the act of reconstructing their individual stories revives, however imperfectly or impermanently, a faint outline of people and buildings long departed.

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