Posted on 07/06/2006 7:01:52 AM PDT by SquirrelKing
It appears that the Northern invasion of the South is complete -- at least it is on a patch of land known as Delta Plantation in Jasper County.
There, a diehard rebel named Henry E. Ingram Jr. made his last stand against the onslaught of Yankees, only to be thwarted by a man from Long Island, N.Y., and now -- gasp -- a French Canadian.
Ingram promised to keep Yankees out of Delta Plantation in Jasper County when he bought 1,700 acres there in 1998. His resolve to keep them out still is strong, but the covenants he put on the land don't seem to have any teeth.
Those covenants did, however, scare Canadian-raised Bluffton resident Louise Legare a bit as she was close to signing a contract to buy a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house on the land from Bluffton Home Builders.
The list of rules she got from the builders was missing the first pages, so she went to the Jasper County Courthouse to get the missing ones. There, she found the covenants, or rules, that Ingram demanded of buyers:
1. They could not be Yankees.
2. They could not have the last name Sherman (an obvious reference to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman).
3. And the land could not be sold or leased to those whose last names could be rearranged to spell Sherman.
Clearly, Ingram doesn't like Northern folk.
Now, however, Legare and Bluffton Home Builders are working with Ingram's son, Ashley Ingram, to remove the covenants. The former Delta Plantation is on both sides of U.S. 17, just north of the Georgia state line.
"When (Legare) brought it to us, we all kind of had a good laugh," said Jim Hobbs, a partner in the home-building firm.
In fact, Legare is buying the land and home from Bill Cook, another partner in the company, who happens to be a native of Long Island, N.Y. No one at Bluffton Home Builders had seen the covenants before Legare found the missing pages, and no one has ever tried to enforce them, Hobbs said.
If Henry Ingram had his way, he still would keep Yankees off of the 1,700 acres he once owned. His holdings on the plantation have dwindled to 10 acres.
Ingram, now a resident of Corpus Christi, Texas, said his son and attorney, who are both local, should be looking out for his anti-northerner wishes now.
"Yankees destroy everything they have up North, then they come down here," Ingram said. "When they destroy everything (in the South), where are they going to move next? Another country?"
Legare, who grew up north of Montreal, figures her far-northern upbringing must be especially abhorrent to Ingram.
"I must be more of a Yankee," she said. "I'm the person he really doesn't want to live there."
Amazingly, Legare is a much better choice to own Southern land than a New Yorker, according to Ingram.
"French people are much better and more desirable than a Yankee," said Ingram, who once owned video-poker casinos in Jasper County. "They don't stick their noses in other people's business."
The same feature drew Legare and Ingram to the land -- nature. Ingram said he's seen Carolina panthers, bald eagles and fox squirrels on the land. It is that quiet beauty Legare is after.
"I was raised in a very nature-like environment," Legare said. "I think the nature is beautiful in South Carolina."
Ingram, who says he is leaving Texas for Costa Rica soon, cites the boorish manners of Yankees as one of his prime dislikes for them.
"They look down their little pointy noses at the people in the South because we are polite and nice to them," Ingram said. "They think people who are polite and nice are dumb."
Contact Jim Faber at 706-8137 or jfaber@islandpacket.com. To comment on this story, please go to islandpacket.com.
I have many dear friends from up north. We jokingly call each other redneck, hillbilly, yankee, etc.
There are good and bad folks in every region.
Although I've never been there, in the aftermath of 9/11 I learned to respect the many good, honorable people from New York.
I'll go ahead and admit it, those idiots you see on the Cops TV show, we do have a lot of those here in the South, it's a result of decades of inbreeding (no kidding).
I agree, this is entirely unreasonable. If someone has the misfortune to be relocated for a time, do they lose their essential Southern-ness? If my dear sister had the misfortune to have been born in the North, does she lose centuries of Southern blood? I think not.
I detect in this document the author's sense of humor.
I thought it was from decades of "no breeding".
That, and no daddy at home.
That's one thing about many places in the South and very few in the North: there's much more emphasis on who your people are, and having the right ancestors can open social doors. You can even form a type of kinship with people whose ancestors fought in the same unit as your ancestors during the War. Interestingly no one in the South has ever sought to verify what I've said about who my people are; they just accept it.
You are correct of course. As I said in my original post, the dividing ones are in general. There are others, such as yourself who dont feel that divide. Ive also said that with parts of the country sniping at each other it weakens our defenses against those who as you say, really hate us all because we are Americans.
Exactly, where I live people really are nice and are always willing to help out when asked. People in these parts keep to themselves. The way I was brought up was to mind your own business. I lived in the same house for 15 years and never talked to one neighbor, they never introduced them self so I took it as being left alone, worked for me.
A good buddy of mine from the Navy married into an SOB family and I had a chance to attend a few social occasions as his guest. To say that the SOBs were arrogant would be incorrect. Arrogance is a front, put on by people who only think they're superior and they tend to be condescending to those they suspect might threaten them. SOBs know with absolute certainty that they are superior to everyone else, and that allows them to be generous to those lesser persons like myself who were not born in Charleston. They were, to a man, among the kindest people I ever met in a regal sort of way. Just as long as I remembered my place; I may have been an officer and a gentleman but I was a still Yankee officer and a Yankee gentleman.
And when I married, to a Yankee girl from Ohio I met while at Department Head school in Rhode Island, the SOBs wouldn't travel North to the wedding but threw us a very nice reception when I moved my bride down there.
Well, you can't really lie about stuff like that and get away with it for long. Besides, why would anybody lie about it? or care, if it weren't true?
"That, and no daddy at home."
That's not just one region. That applies, unfortunately, to the nation as a whole, thanks to Lyndon B. Johnson's GREAT Society.
Things that go boom in the night
He still runs his fireworks stands in SC. He claims to be a judge in a small border town in Texas though no one else seems to know about it. (He says he got himself made a judge because he was tired of the police and the FBI investigating him.) He moved his video poker enterprise to Texas after it was made illegal in South Carolina, but Texas didn't care for it either so he is opening a casino in Costa Rica.
There are only small degrees between being "an eccentric", "a character" or "a sleaze".
1. They could not be Yankees.
2. They could not have the last name Sherman (an obvious reference to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman).
3. And the land could not be sold or leased to those whose last names could be rearranged to spell Sherman.
I've got something similar in my front yard, just without the words:
From the New York Herald shortly after Davis' death on December 6, 1889:
"In the essential element of statesmanship, Davis will be judged as the rival and parallel of Lincoln. When the two men came face to face, as leaders of two mighty forces, bitter was Northern sorrow that Providence had given the South so ripe and rare a leader and the North an uncouth advocate from the woods."
From the Raleigh News and Observer shortly after the war:
"It is profitless to discuss how far any measure of the Confederate government was right or wrong, but as for Mr. Davis, he had the responsibility; he had full knowledge of all the circumstances; he had the general plan of the whole war from Texas to the Potomac to subserve and watch and to carry out. It is to our glory that there was no Fort Lafayette at the South. It is to the honor of the Confederate government that no Confederate secretary ever could touch a bell and send a citizen to prison."
Thanks for posting that so we could see the text. What a goofball!
Yet that 'uncouth advocate' beat that 'rare and ripe leader' in every way imaginable - politics, leadership, international relations, military control, legislative ability, you name it. And when the end came, that 'rare and ripe' leader was willing to call for guerilla warfare and the total destruction of the south rather than honorable surrender. Fortunately for the Southern people the confederate military leadership was wise enough to ignore him.
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