Unseen Lives of Connemara
/In 2020, the National Park Service published a study of Black history at Rock Hill/Connemara. The home, with its extensive land holdings, was built and developed by C.G. Memminger, Treasurer of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and eventually purchased by Lilian and Carl Sandburg before being converted to a National Park in 1967.
The study is entitled Black Lives and Whitened Stories and was compiled by David and Anne Whisnant. In their introduction, the Whisnants explain that the study was undertaken to tell the untold story of the black slaves and servants who worked and often lived at Connemara during its long and rich history.
The report is both extensive and comprehensive and reveals a much more diverse and complete history of this historic property at the heart of Flat Rock. Four short biographies have been excerpted from the document as a very small introduction to the work done on the study.
The reader may download and read through the entire study at:
https://www.nps.gov/carl/learn/historyculture/upload/508_CARL-HRS.pdf
James Fisher
Ellison Adger Smyth owned Rock Hill (Connemara) from 1900-1942. Following the path of many wealthy Charlestonians, he purchased Rock Hill for his summer home. He built a large barn and fenced pastures for livestock and for over twenty years, Smyth and his family enjoyed Connemara as a summer retreat. In 1924, he added electricity, plumbing and heat to the home and became a year-round resident.
Probably the best documented Black workers ever present at Rock Hill/Connemara are members of the family of longtime Smyth Family valet, chauffeur, and housekeeper’s aide James Melvin Fisher.
Fisher was born either in 1891 or 1894 (sources differ; his gravestone states 1894, but other records indicate 1891) and died in February 1978. Fisher is buried in Oakdale (not to be confused with the important East Flat Rock Black cemetery, Oakland) Cemetery in Hendersonville.
James Fisher was the son of Lloyd and Amanda Fisher, both born in South Carolina, perhaps into slavery, in 1848 and 1858, respectively. In 1900, the family was living in Greenwood, South Carolina, and Lloyd Fisher was working as a “day laborer.” Although neither parent could read or write, three of their four children were all listed as “at school” (the youngest, daughter Daisy, was only two). By 1910, they were still in Greenwood, with James listed as a “laborer,” like his father doing “odd jobs.”
Soon after, Fisher must have gone to work for the Smyths, very likely living in the household. In his interview, Fisher said that he met Ellison Smyth in 1911–1912 when his mother’s employer—Smyth’s oldest daughter, Margaret Adger Smyth McKissick, for whom Fisher’s mother worked as a cook—sent him from their home in Greenwood, South Carolina, to work for her parents, the Smyths, in Greenville.
At some point before 1918, he married Carrie Goodwin, also a South Carolinian born in the late 1880s or early 1890s (again, records differ) in Taylors, South Carolina - but by 1900 living in the O’Neal Township of Greenville County, South Carolina doing farm labor. Carrie Goodwin’s parents, Lee Goodwin and Lizzie Goodwin, were born in 1859 and 1864, respectively, and in 1900 Lee Goodwin was listed as a farmer renting his land—perhaps a tenant or sharecropper.
How James Fisher met Carrie Goodwin is not known, but perhaps she had come to work for the Smyths. The 1910 census finds her working as a cook with an elderly white farm couple, the Gilreaths, still in the O’Neal Township of Greenville, South Carolina.
But by 1920, she and James were married, living together with an infant daughter Mary in a house they owned at 129 Glover St. The Fishers’ early marriage was apparently interrupted briefly by James Fisher’s military service in World War I. Details are again elusive, but James Fisher’s gravestone indicates that he was a Private First Class in the U.S. Army. His World War I draft registration card (undated) shows him living at the Smyths’ address at 237 Broadus Avenue in Greenville, but employed as a butler for Captain E. A. Smyth, “Flat Rock, NC.” Fisher indicates that he is married and should be exempt from the draft due to “wife to support.” This rationale must not have been sufficient, however, because a military document dated September 25, 1918, lists James Fisher (a butler, with a serial number matching that of “our” James Fisher’s draft registration card) among a group of men inducted into military service and sent to Camp Sevier, a relatively new training installation for federalized National Guard soldiers four miles northeast of Greenville.
By 1924, the Fishers had a second daughter, Bennie, born in 1922 in Greenville, and the family had moved, with the Smyths, permanently to Flat Rock. As had generations of Black workers on the property going back into slavery, the family took up residence in what is now known as the “Swedish House”—slave quarters built in 1852 by the Memmingers. By the time the 1930 census recorded the family again, they were all living on the Smyth property—James as butler, Carrie as maid, daughter Mary (age ten) doing chores, and daughter Benny (8) listed as a servant.
Carrie Fisher died in January of 1932 in Flat Rock. Four years later, James Fisher remarried—to Nellie L. Penson of Hendersonville. In the final census record for Ellison Smyth before his death, James and Nellie Fisher remain in the Smyth household, with James then listed as chauffeur and Nellie as cook. (James Fisher explained in his 1975 interview that Nellie and her first husband already had a house in Hendersonville, but that when James married Nellie, Smyth offered to pay her to work if she would come to Connemara to live with her husband, thus ensuring that Smyth retained James Fisher’s services. The census does show her earning $260/year for her work, compared to James Fisher’s $624.)
In his 1975 interview, James Fisher explained that he remained at Captain Smyth’s side—serving at times as his personal nurse—until Smyth died in 1942.
Sometime after this, he moved off the Connemara property—presumably to wife Nellie’s home at 819 6th Avenue W. in Hendersonville. James Fisher went on to work for several other employers around the region. Younger daughter Bennie Lee Fisher died unmarried of breast cancer at age twenty-nine in February 1951. Nellie L. Fisher died of a heart attack in church in 1953. When James Fisher died in 1978, his funeral was held at the Star of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, a Black congregation that had been organized in Hendersonville in 1873.
Fisher lived long enough to be interviewed by CARL staff in 1975, and thus is one of the only Black individuals connected with Rock Hill or Connemara to have left records of life and work there in his own words and voice.
James Robinson
Also listed in the Smyth household in North Carolina in 1930 was another Black man who had come to Flat Rock from South Carolina with the Smyth family: fifty-five-year old James Robinson, their chauffeur.
Previous CARL studies have identified Robinson by name and included an image that they note may have shown him with Smyth grandchildren at Connemara around 1910. The studies said that he was married but that his wife’s name was not known, posited that he had no children of his own, and reported that he died in the 1930s.
While a full picture of Robinson’s life remains elusive, new research shows that unlike James Fisher’s, Robinson’s life appears to have remained grounded in South Carolina even after he (apparently) moved to Flat Rock with the Smyths and was counted (with no other of his own family members) with their family in the 1930 census.
Robinson’s June 27, 1937 death certificate, which shows that he died at age sixty-two of a cerebral hemorrhage after what appears to have been several years of declining health related to hypertension that had started in 1930. The death certificate shows Robinson survived by wife Anna, and the couple’s residence as 11A Glover St. in Greenville. With information supplied by Anna, Robinson’s occupation is listed as chauffeur, his birthplace as Towensville (possibly Gowensville?), South Carolina, his mother’s name as Rebecca (last name unknown), with father’s name unknown.
Johnnie Simmons
Henry Simmons. Founder of the Society of necessity and Uncle of Johnnie Simmons
In his interview with NPS staff in 1975, James Fisher said that Johnnie Simmons was hired (possibly in the 1920s) after the Greenville-based cook (named “Plummer?”) went back home to South Carolina to take another job. Simmons may have worked for Smyth for more than a decade, perhaps until Smyth’s death.
The hiring of Johnnie Simmons seems to reflect Smyth’s transition to employing local Henderson County Black labor, rather than relying upon Black servants whose roots were in South Carolina. According to his World War II draft registration card, Johnnie William Simmons was born June 16, 1900 in Henderson County. In 1919, he married Hattie Thompson, herself formerly of Greenville, South Carolina. The couple soon had a daughter, Marion, born about 1923
Hattie Simmons worked as a domestic laborer but died relatively young in 1955 of a cerebral hemorrhage after suffering for several years from diabetes and arteriosclerosis. Her burial in East Flat Rock’s Oakland Cemetery, was handled by Hendersonville’s Black funeral home, Pilgrim’s. Johnnie Simmons lived until 1978 and was also buried in Oakland.
A second-generation Henderson County resident who resided by 1930 in the Black community of East Flat Rock, Johnnie Simmons was the nephew of Society of Necessity founder Henry Simmons. Johnnie Simmons’s father Mack Simmons was Henry Simmons’s brother. At her death in 1908 at age forty-eight, his mother, Sarah Simmons, a member of the Baptist Church and Society of Necessity, was termed a “well-known colored woman in the neighborhood,” whose internment at Oakland Cemetery was attended by “a large number of friends.”
Although further details about Johnnie Simmons’s life are thus far elusive in searches of online documents, it is clear that he was part of a large and important Henderson County family.
More about The Society of Necessity here. Link
Aunt Sally Markley
Aunt Sally Markley
By the 1920s, as the Smyths began to rely more heavily upon local Black workers, at least one important connection appears to have been forged with the prominent Markley family.
“Every spring,” Frank Ballard recalled in 1982, “Capn’ would hire Aunt Sally Markley to come over and clean the house … .” Questioned further, he added, “Jim Markley’s mother, yes
The Markley family—Sally Darity Markley (1859–1959) and her husband John Calhoun Markley (1848–1921), both born in slavery—moved to Flat Rock in 1877. Raised in a blacksmithing family, John Markley and son Jim Markley ran a Flat Rock blacksmith shop that for decades served generations of local and seasonal residents. The large Markley family complex on Blue Ridge Road consisted after 1900 of the shop and several houses. The one where Sally and John Markley lived—and raised their eleven surviving children— became known after John Markley’s death in 1921 as “Aunt Sally’s House.”
After John Markley’s death, son Jim operated the blacksmith shop until the mid-1960s. “Aunt Sally,” meanwhile, worked seasonally for the Smyths (and perhaps others) and became well known in the area as a midwife who assisted four different Flat Rock physicians.
Sally Markley lived in the family home in Flat Rock at least until she suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1953. She died in 1959 and was buried in Oakland Cemetery. Son Jim died in 1965.
More about the Markleys here: Link.
