The Edisto Island Open Land Trust (EIOLT) purchased the Hutchinson House in 2016 with the vision to restore it to its 1885 appearance and open it to the public as a place of learning. It was a grand plan and truly visionary as the house was collapsing under the weight of time and Chinese Wisteria. Over the course of the last eight years, it has taken heroic measures to ensure its safety, a dome erected to keep the rain, wind, and as luck would have it, snow away, a temporary roof installed, the original brick piers rebuilt and repointed, and rotting wood carefully replaced. We are in the final stretch, but as we work to finish the exterior and interior restoration and preservation of the Hutchinson House, we need your help. With sky-rocketing construction costs and newly discovered structural concerns the total cost of the final push to completion will ultimately reach just over $700,000. We must raise an additional $275,000 to finish bringing this amazing representative of African American vernacular architecture back to life.
One of our overarching goals is to open the entire house to the public, including the second floor where two bedrooms are located. Structurally, the internal staircase and second-floor joists must be strengthened to allow visitors to reach and enjoy the second floor safely. We want visitors to experience what it was like to live in the Hutchinson House, to commune with the memories of Hutchinson descendants such as Patty Bailey who, as a child, visited her grandfather, Arthur “Rich” Hutchinson and grand-aunt Lula Hutchinson Whaley,
“My room was upstairs and I would look out the window and when I would look out, oh, it was such a breeze too. Beautiful breeze…I think that window was upstairs in the hall…But in my bedroom I would see the well, I would see the tree, I would see several cherries to my right and straight ahead.”
Please help us provide the necessary structural supports within the Hutchinson House so all visitors can enjoy the marsh breezes as Patty did from the second-floor windows and reflect on what life was like for the newly freed men and women of Edisto.
Thanks to a generous, anonymous donor, all donations through July 31, 2024 up to $25,000 will be matched! Now is the perfect time to contribute and make your donation count. Bringing the Hutchinson House back to life is an honor for all of us at EIOLT and we are so thankful for your continued support of this amazing initiative to save and open the Hutchinson House to the public.
A trail around a portion of the Hutchinson House grounds has been constructed and will soon be open to the public. Once we have completed Phase Two of restoration and initiate Phase Three, we will be able to open the entire site to the public. Our goal is to use the house and the lands surrounding it as a conduit to share the story of how this land shaped so many lives on Edisto from the first land grant on the island in 1683, which included this property.
As a land trust, our primary goal is to preserve the ecological and agricultural integrity of the lands of Edisto Island and its surrounding coastal communities. To this end we must steward the land we own and the Hutchinson House is no exception. In fact, the Hutchinson House is the site of our most intense stewardship work. Because the property is publicly accessible, we have implemented many habitat improvement activities so we can interpret their importance to visitors.
Our environmental interpretation of the site compliments our historical interpretation to educate visitors on not just the importance of preserving our history as Edistonians but also our natural environment. Bluebird nestboxes, bat boxes, pollinator gardens, wildflower meadows, and a demonstration Sea Island Cotton plot provide us centerpieces to articulate the significance of protecting the land we steward.
As part of both our historical and environmental interpretation of the property, EIOLT maintains a small plot of Sea Island Cotton for demonstration. Henry Hutchinson made his living and based his entrepreneurial business on producing, processing, and selling Sea Island Cotton for the Charleston market. He planted his own lands in cotton and ginned cotton for his neighbors. Henry’s cotton gin was built inside the Clark Manor’s old cotton house, which Henry refurbished. A cotton house was a special two or three story outbuilding on a plantation that housed all of the cotton processing facilities. Here cotton from the field was dried, cleaned, ginned, cleaned again, and then packed in bales to be shipped to market. Henry is believed to have owned and operated a steam-powered McCarthy Gin in his cotton house, an expensive and modern machine for the time that could quickly handle massive amounts of cotton with few laborers. Henry acted as a middleman, handling the processing and shipping of the cotton and distributing the profits accordingly. Our demonstration Sea Island Cotton plot gives us a living exhibit to interpret this important facet of the Hutchinson’s history to visitors.
Click here to learn more about our Sea Island Cotton project
