GEORGE'S FRIENDS

 

President George Washington rented the Heyward house at 87 Church Street for his week-long stay in Charleston in early May 1791, during his six-week tour of the newly-independent southern states.

 

His Charleston schedule included a mix of  public ceremonies, formal visits – including one to The Charleston Orphan  House, where he was conducted by his friend John Mitchell – and private dinners. On May 6th. he dined (probably at this house) with Sir Pierce Butler, South Carolina's first senator, who had already welcomed the President on his arrival at the Charleston Wharf. Washington later noted that during his visit he had heard about the excellent work of a young Irish designer/builder, James Hoban, who hailed from Kilkenny, where the Butlers had their principal estates; Hoban would later design the President's House in the new federal capital.

    

PIERCE BUTLER

 

Pierce Butler was born in Co. Carlow in 1744 into a branch of the powerful Ormonde Butler family and had an early career as a British army officer in the North American colonies. He married Mary Middleton of Charleston in 1771.  He sold his army commission in 1773 and with the money bought the 1700-acre Hampton Point Plantation on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. He added another 7000 acres in South Carolina over the next fifteen years, including Eutaw Plantation near Beaufort and Maryville on the Ashley River. His experiments with intensive rice cultivation on his estates were highly regarded.

 

From 1775 he was active in revolutionary affairs, helping to plan the defense of Charleston and eventually joining Washington at the New Jersey front. From 1778 onwards he represented Beaufort districts in the South Carolina House of Representatives and in 1779 was State Adjutant General. After the loss in 1780 of a child (to disease) and their Eutaw house (to the British) the family moved to Philadelphia. A member of the Continental Congress in 1787, Pierce was also a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, where he is credited with developing the concept of the Electoral College. He was a U.S. Senator from 1789 to 1793.

 

His wife died in 1791 and was buried at St. Michael's, where her husband had been active in church affairs.  Pierce Butler was a U.S. Senator again from 1793 to 1796, after which he returned to the South Carolina legislature as a representative. In 1802 he began his final term in the U.S. Senate (he resigned in 1804). Then and later, he acted as adviser to Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, dividing his time between Washington, Georgia and Philadelphia, where he died and was buried in 1822. 

   

O'BRIEN SMITH

 

O'Brien Smith was born in Ireland in 1756 and arrived in Charleston at the age of 26 to take over an inheritance from a Parsons relative. He married Martha Skirring, thereby acquiring additional property and status, and settled into a comfortable plantation life at Duharra. In 1791, when Pierce Butler accompanied Washington South (being numbered among the 'particular friends' who shared the hospitality extended to the President at his cousin William Washington's plantation at Sandy Hill), they spent the second night of their journey at O'Brien Smith's Duharra Plantation near Jacksonboro. Not yet 36 at the time of the President's visit, Smith was elected to the South Carolina General Assembly five years later, moving to the Senate in 1803. He became a U.S. Congressman in 1804, returning after a single term to practice law in Charleston and to participate in the Irish Volunteers, in which he became commander of the Second Battalion, 28th. Regiment. He died aged 55 in 1811 and is buried in the 'Burnt Church' cemetery near Jacksonboro alongside his friend Aedanus Burke.

 

AEDANUS BURKE

 

Born in Galway in 1743, Aedanus Burke came to America in 1769.  A prominent Charleston lawyer and patriot, he enrolled in the South Carolina Militia and the continental army and was arrested and imprisoned by the British. He served as a state judge in 1778 and was also elected to the 1779 state legislature.  After independence he became a leading anti-Federalist and in 1789 was elected to Congress, where he served one term. He became Chancellor of the Courts of Equity in 1799.  On his death in March 1802 he left $10,000 to the recently-established Hibernian Society.  He is buried in Jacksonboro, SC, near his good friend O'Brien Smith.