Day of the Cat, 45th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Hannah Lide was once the hottest thing in Darlington County, South Carolina.

I may or mat not be dying, my ischemic heart may or may not be giving out on me (one more week until my cardiologist appointment to learn more about that), or it may just be wishful thinking on my part (I wasn't made for these algorithmic, hyperthermic times), but as I'm nearing the apparent end of my story, I find myself thinking more and more about my origins. The French word for story is histoire, and what are our stories if not history and what is history if not our stories?

In 1815, Hannah Lide, the daughter of Revolutionary War hero, Major Robert Lide, had no shortage of suitors, those dashing young sons of the antebellum South, who came by the Major's house to woo his daughter. But in the end, it was the handsome and courageous Captain Thomas Edward Hart that won her hand.

Thomas E. Hart, a captain in the South Carolina Militia, was from Society Hill, the so-called intellectual center of the entire Pee Dee region. Society Hill was originally settled in 1736 by Welsh Baptists who had moved down from Pennsylvania and Delaware. The first settlement in Darlington County, it was initially named the St. David's Society, and its library, built in 1812, is the second oldest lending-library in South Carolina. James Lide Coker, the founder of Sonoco and Coker Universities, received his education from the St. David's Society. 

On a steamy August 18 of the year 1815, Captain Hart and Hannah Lide were wed. The couple went on to have at least five sons and two daughters. 

In 1817, they began acquiring property in the northwestern part of Darlington County. They initially bought approximately 8,000 acres of land along the cliffs of Black Creek, and in 1820, they built a house with timber they cut from their new property. Today, the Thomas E. Hart House and surrounding gardens are on the National Register of Historic Places as Kalmia Gardens. A species of mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, is named for the property. 

They continued purchasing land and establishing plantations in the area through the late 1830s. They built a general store there and the area's first schoolhouse. By 1838, the town came to be known as Hartsville, and Captain Hart established a Post Office inside his store for the new town. In addition to being a planter and the proprietor of a general store, the Captain was also the new town's first Postmaster and the Commissioner of Free Schools.  

Obviously, plantations in antebellum South Carolina employed slaves, and in the case of Captain Hart and his bride, Hannah, they owned a lot of them - slaves, human chattel, the "peculiar institution." So when we say that Hannah and the the Captain "built a house" or "built a general store," we mean they had slaves build a house and a store for them. They weren't the ones clearing the timber on their 8,000-acre property. They were slave owners and you're not only free but encouraged to join me in my disgust and animosity towards them. 

To be clear, these were not good people. While I can trace my lineage back to 19th Century settlers and Revolutionary War heroes, those settlers and heroes were slaveholders. Please be assured I harbor no sympathy or wistful nostalgia for the way things were back then.   

During the financial panic of 1837-38, caused in part by a crash in cotton prices, Captain Hart went bankrupt and was forced to sell much of his property to a son-in-law, one Colonel Law. His marriage to Hannah dissolved and he moved to nearby Darlington. His spirit crushed, he died in 1842, destitute and alone. His estranged widow and their oldest son, Dr. Robert Lide Hart, continued to develop the area and ran several prosperous plantations in Darlington County.

In 1845, Colonel Law sold 491 acres of the land he had acquired from the Captain, his father-in-law, to John Lide Hart, his brother-in-law and Hannah and the Captain's third son. John Lide Hart established the Hart Plantation on the land, what is now part of downtown Hartsville. Like his father before him, John Lide Hart fell on hard times and had to sell the plantation and his business ventures to one Caleb Coker, who gave his son, Major James Lide Coker, half of the plantation when James returned home from school at Harvard. 

Hannah herself operated a plantation at Cashua Ferry Landing on the Great Pee Dee River. Later Freedmen’s Bureau documents indicate that Hannah held 35 slaves at her Cashua Creek Plantation, some as young as Furman, a 9-year-old field laborer. 

Yankee that I am, I tend to mispronounce "Cashua" to rhyme with Nashua, New Hampshire, but its correct pronunciation is "cash-way." In Folk Etymology in South Carolina Place Names (1966), published in the journal American Speech by Duke University, Claude Henry Neuffer notes that the owners of a ferry on the Great Pee Dee called their business, "Cash Way," meaning that all persons who crossed had to pay a cash fare. The name became "Cashua" in the local pronunciation, and although the ferry has since been replaced by a (non-toll) bridge, the name remains. 

Hannah Lide Hart died on October 2, 1875. Her son, the Dr. Robert Lide Hart, continued to operate the family plantations until his death on January 24, 1879.  

History, it's said, doesn't repeat but it rhymes. The names of all those Harts and Lides, those Cokers and Laws, strangely resonate with me. I'm a Hart, and my former next-door neighbors in Atlanta, an elderly couple who passed away a few years before the covid pandemic, were Brooks and Cary Lide. They had lived in their house for over 50 years. For much of my career, I worked for a company known as Law Engineering, originally an off-shoot of a laboratory in Atlanta formed by a chemist named Thomas C. Law, and I briefly dated a Coker, who I thought was the hottest thing in Smyrna, Georgia in the mid-1980s. 

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake - Stephen Dedalus.