Book recounts Beaufort's brush with the wealthy and famous of the early 1900s

If E.F. Hutton were to whisper a little-known tale of a Lowcountry invasion, would you listen?

The famed financier used to escape Wall Street in the early 20th century for his lush Beaufort County hunting preserve now owned by the governor's family. Hutton is gone, but his era of Lowcountry history is getting new attention.

It's a fascinating chapter, when hundreds of old Lowcountry plantations were bought by a Who's Who of America's entreprenuerial giants. Into our sea of post-Civil War poverty stepped the wealthiest of the wealthy. They loved to come down in the winter to shoot quail in golden fields where a hungry hound was more treasured than a ticker tape.

Plenty of them were household names -- the Johnsons who made surgical supplies, the Kresses who used their winter home near Yemassee to raise paperwhite Narcissus bulbs for their chain of Kress "five and dime" stores, the Guggenheims who collected art, the Lorillards who made cigarettes, Bernard Baruch who advised presidents and hosted Winston Churchill, the Doubledays, DuPonts and Vanderbilts.

A wonderful new book tells about their Lowcountry links, usually barely a footnote in their remarkable lives.

"Northern Money, Southern Land: The Lowcountry Plantation Sketches of Chlotilde R. Martin" from the University of South Carolina Press tells of almost 80 estates -- more than 30 of them in Beaufort County. Martin wrote the sketches for the Charleston News and Courier beginning in late 1930. They were used almost as filler by the newspaper, and they were a way for a Beaufort widow to feed two young children.

When collected, they open a window on land-use issues, conservation, sociology and American history.

We owe the book to its editors, Lowcountry researchers Robert B. Cuthbert and Stephen G. Hoffius. They spent three years finding the old newspaper accounts, then crafting updates, clarfications and amplifications.

Martin, and the "Lowcountry Gossip" column she wrote for decades, was quite a figure until her death in 1991. She is often called the first full-time female journalist in the state. Her daughter, Chloe M. Pinckney of Beaufort, was married to the late county coroner and raconteur Roger Pinckney X. Roger Pinckney XI is a Daufuskie Island writer who comes by it naturally. His grandmother was a prolific writer who also left a mark on Beaufort's preservation movement.

She once wrote that the Lowcountry hunt clubs "paved the way for the reception of Yankees (before that time being spelled 'damnyankee') into this section of the country where feeling about them had been very bitter."

The invasion turned out to be a story worth listening to.