Five Simple Technologies to Improve Your Family's Resiliency

With this post I’m switching to another subject that, when I’m not writing fiction, I spend time researching and thinking about: energy and its sources and uses. Since there are many connections between energy and water (energy is used to pump and transport water, and in the case of hydroelectricity, water is used to make energy), when I'm energy blogging I’ll sometimes talk about water was well.

Whether it’s due to peak oil or a hurricane, war in the Middle East or a heat wave, there are many factors that could create spot shortages in energy, could cause prices to rise sharply in the short term, or could gradually but inexorably inflate energy costs in the long term.  Although different energy forms are not completely interchangeable (for example, electricity cannot easily substitute for oil in the US without major upgrades in our electrical grid and transportation infrastructure) they are fungible enough that a shortage of any one of them will cause prices to rise for all.  Even without natural disasters or wars, I expect short term we will see gasoline prices increase (unless the economy tanks sharply, pulling commodity prices down with it), and longer term we will see electricity prices rise significantly for peak hour use (i.e. periods of max air conditioning).

So, to make your family resilient either in the face of a temporary shortage or a longer-term escalation in price, here are some simple, highly cost effective technologies you can employ.  Though some may seem laughably obvious, the majority of Americans employ only one or two, and often even those ineffectively. 

1)   Attic sealing and insulation.  Very simple, fairly cheap, and yet not nearly as widely used as it should be.  It’s important to remember that there’s a difference between movement of heat and movement of air.  Insulation prevents movement of heat but if there are gaps, holes, etc, between the lower floor and the attic, it won’t prevent air movement.  At any temperature, air moving across the skin makes us feel cooler than we otherwise would, so sealing up these holes and gaps is a good idea.  If you already have some amount of insulation, someone may need to go into your attic, pull back that insulation, look for gaps and then seal them with caulk, expanding foam, or rigid foam board insulation.  Then you (or a service) can add insulation until it’s about knee deep.  If your house is now drafty and poorly insulated, you can save as much as ½ to 1/3 of your monthly winter heating costs. Remember also that heat wants to rise more than it wants to travel horizontally, so insulating your attic is more important than replacing single pane windows unless they’re very leaky and drafty.

2)   Ceiling fans.  As stated before, at any temperature, movement of air across the skin makes us feel cooler than we otherwise would.  So in the summer months, ceiling fans are a great way to combat heat using far, far less energy than air conditioning units.  In South Carolina I noticed many houses and shops use both air conditioning and ceiling fans so that the air conditioning can be set at a much higher level—say 80 degrees—and still be quite comfortable.  A ceiling fan can save you as much as 40% of your summer cooling costs.  Ceiling fans are more energy efficient than floor fans, but they are also more work to install properly.

3)   Programmable thermostats.  Don’t heat or cool your house when you’re not there to benefit!  And at night use a blanket or a ceiling fan to help warm or cool you to a comfortable temperature.  Programmable thermostats cost about $35. They are not all that difficult to install or program, though, sadly, 40% of Americans who have programmable thermostats never actually program them.  (Ouch!)  During the winter, take advantage of this simple technology to a.) automatically turn down the heat when you’re gone to 55 degrees, (most pets can do ok with 61 degrees), b.) turn the heat down at night to whatever temperature keeps you comfortable under a couple blankets, and c.) turn on the heat an hour before you get up so the house is pleasant again.  You can experiment with the settings that work best for you, but heating the house up to 70 degrees 24/7 costs you way more than you need.  In the winter, our house generally varies between 55 degrees at night and 63 degrees during the day, but I’m willing to wear lots of wool. (I also encourage my kids to use those other little technologies called sweaters and slippers.) In the summer, leave the air conditioning off until an hour before you’re going to return home. Or you could leave your blinds closed during the day and when you come home, open up the house to the cooler evening temperatures and use a whole house fan to push the hot air out and pull the cool air in.  Another low tech tip—plant deciduous trees on the south side of your house that will shade the house in the summer and let in warming sunlight in the winter.

4)   Bicycles, racks, and panniers.  The bicycle is one of the most efficient machines mankind has ever devised.  It takes less energy per mile to go by bicycle than by any other mode of transport, including walking.  For most terrains it’s easy to cover a mile by bicycle in six or seven minutes.  For distances under two miles, when you factor in time to walk and park your car, it’s generally as fast to bicycle as drive.  And you don’t need to be Lance Armstrong kitted out in Lycra!  You can wear regular clothes, ride an upright bicycle at a leisurely pace and be no sweatier or tired than if you’d spent the minutes strolling your neighborhood.  To make your bicycle useful for errands, get a rack with panniers.  This will allow you to carry two grocery bags full of stuff with ease—the load will be on your bicycle, not on your back!  If, like me, you live in an area with hills, consider an electric bicycle.  These are substantially more expensive but they essentially make the hills flat and can be an excellent car substitute if an oil shortage arises.

5)   Water Filters.  Why pay for bottled water if you can filter water from your tap that tastes as good for a fraction of the cost?  Having a good filter on hand also means you can tap many sources of water in case of an emergency (say an earthquake, hurricane or tornado) that shuts down the water supply system.  There are many filters on the market--one I like is the Big Berkey water filter.  From their website:

This system removes pathogenic bacteria, cysts and parasites entirely and extracts harmful chemicals such as herbicides, pesticides, VOCs, organic solvents, radon 222 and trihalomethanes. It also reduces nitrates, nitrites and unhealthy minerals such as lead and mercury. This system is so powerful it can remove food coloring from water without removing the beneficial minerals your body needs.

Even if you don’t use a filter to reduce chemicals in your normal drinking water, in a crisis it might be handy to turn water from a rain barrel, creek or pond into safe drinking water. For some reason, Berkey doesn’t ship to California or Iowa. (I think it has to do with these state’s laws.) Remember, as gasoline prices go up, any liquid shipped by truck is bound to increase in price as the shipping weight involved is substantial.  If you really like carbonated beverages, you can get a home carbonator like this for around $100.

So five simple, inexpensive technologies that can vastly improve your family’s ability to weather an emergency or save you nearly their upfront cost the first year by reducing your energy (or bottled water) bills. I hope you'll give them a try.

Head in the Beaufort Clouds

Carolina sky

It rained in San Francisco yesterday on the last day of May.  It rained again today. If you lived in San Francisco you would know that it never rains here this time of year. Nor in May do we get billowing, puffy clouds with dark undersides that roll northeast as if looking for trouble in the Sierras. Even though the sun sometimes shines through the downpour, one begins to despair of summer at all.  And so on these obstinately cool, winter-like days when my strawberries are unlikely to ripen and bike rides are sodden excursions, my thoughts turn to South Carolina--Beaufort, to be specific--where it did not rain yesterday and the temperature reached 97 degrees. Now there’s summer for you, even if the solstice has yet to arrive.

A view to what was

There was a time, a stretch of two years, when my thoughts often turned to Beaufort.  I thought of Beaufort while sitting at my kitchen table, while doing the Tai Chi form, while driving across San Francisco to pick my daughter up from school.  I remembered how the light filtered through the Spanish moss, how the river ebbed and flowed with the tide, how the cord grass swayed in the wind. I ruminated over the masses of oysters growing on the city’s piers, the daytime’s suffocating heat, the evening’s lively breeze. When I shut my eyes I saw the stately houses, the ancient arching trees. My thoughts were not so much of Beaufort as it exists, but of Beaufort as it was, though the present Beaufort was my signpost to the former age.

The way lamps used to be lit

The way to get around

Though I could visit Beaufort (and I did) I couldn’t visit 1849, at least not in person.  I read books and books, both factual accounts and narratives from the period, in my quest to digest the values and the language, the customs and the manners, the technologies, cuisine, and cultural reference points of the era. Armed with legions of details, I then had to think through my characters, how they moved through this world over a century and a half ago, parsing what would have been important to them and why. In 1849 women still wore petticoats because hoop skirts had yet to come into fashion. This made their clothing heavier and hotter than a decade later. In 1849, whale oil was still used to fuel lamps rather  than kerosene. In fact, the world had just about reached peak whales and peak whale oil, although no one then yet knew it. In 1849 laundry was a heavy, hot affair and no one with money did their own. In addition, since dyes were not colorfast, most top layers of clothing were brushed, not washed, preferably by a servant. In 1849 roads in the South were poor and trains not yet prevalent, so for a town like Beaufort, being on a steamer route connoted a nearly cosmopolitan connection to the exterior world.

Crushed

In 1849, most Americans (Thoreau one of the few excepted) felt pride in the crushing of Santa Anna and the Mexican army and saw nothing amiss in forcing Mexico to sell of a third of its land at a cut-rate price to its stronger neighbor. In 1849, gold was practically leaping into the hands of miners in California, Chopin was writing his last waltzes in Europe, and the engines of the industrial North were revving up, even if the South couldn’t hear their echoes yet. In 1849, the last good president had been Andrew Jackson a dozen years before, John Calhoun (South Carolina’s “cast iron” senator) was on his last legs, and manifest destiny was no longer a doctrine but an achievement in progress. In 1849, things were changing in America with more speed and uncertainty than the average citizen was comfortable with. Though the last five sentences are all gross generalizations, it gives broad brushstrokes of the American 1849 mindset. But what their memories would have consisted of—that was harder to reconstruct.

Granddaddies

What I gleaned from my reading was that historical cultural memory of the era proudly focused on the glorious revolution that their grandfathers had achieved and the momentous first-of-its-kind government they’d subsequently created. In 1849 these grandchildren knew they had inherited something grand but were growing uneasy as to whether it was a legacy they could keep.  The Bible, the Magna Carta, ancient Rome, and ancient Greece were their touchstones. George Washington and Mr. Jefferson had been known (or at least seen) by men and women still alive.  In 1849, most people were aware that life was less dangerous, brutal and short than it had been for their forefathers, and they were grateful. The Civil War and its awful grinding slaughter did not lurk unpleasantly in their past.  At that point the pain involved in rending the nation in two was not something they could conceive of. Though certainly adept enough at hangings, whippings and other brutality, they were also incapable of imagining the systematized factory barbarity that the twentieth century achieved at Auschwitz that still haunts our collective memory today. We can envy their innocence, but events that should have featured prominently in their historic conscience—the Trail of Tears, the horrific sea passage of the slave trade—most seemed to dispose of with a shrug.

No looking back

1849 in America was not a time of regret for past failings or longing for what was. That would come later, at least for the South. Instead it was a time of expansion and optimism, of growth and domination. For those growing cotton, it was a time of great wealth. For centuries now America, priding itself on its optimism and expansion--geographically, economically, and otherwise--has been little interested in all but the most superficial glances backwards. Perhaps those who are confident of the future always have little patience for history. Perhaps like a shark we must always swim forward or perish.

Salty pillar gets a good look

Perhaps only those who are uncertain about what lies ahead try to see what the past can tell us. Like Lot’s wife, they are the ones who, with wavering step, turn back to glimpse the fire and brimstone. For this momentary act of defiance, Lot’s wife (she never even gets her own name) is transformed into a pillar of salt. But the Bible gives us the story of Lot and his doomed cities precisely to encourage us to look back, to reflect, to learn. Sometimes looking back, even to the summer of 1849, is a means of swimming forward.

Why Remember the Civil War?

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."--Abraham Lincoln

I have ancestors that fought on both sides of the U.S. Civil War. My mother’s kin fought for the Union and my father’s for the Confederacy. Generations later, both families made it to California, one via Kansas, the other by way of Oklahoma. Both came to the Golden State during the Depression, and it was this historic event that I heard the rumbling echoes of as I grew up. The tales of my childhood were of how my great-grandmother, a widow, would have starved if my grandfather hadn’t sent her money home from the WPA camp. And how my grandmother, an independent woman working as a nurse until she was in her thirties, proudly saved a sizeable sum of money before she was married.

 If there were stories about battles in my family, they were about my grandfather’s stint on Okinawa (horrific.) I knew nothing of Manassas or Fredericksburg, and I only grew aware of Gettysburg when required to memorize the Gettysburg Address in school.  (Thank you, Lincoln, for keeping it short!) Remarkably, I covered the American Revolution four times in my academic career, but never the Civil War. I had a vague notion that the South had slaves and that the slaves escaped on railroads. Since slavery was bad, the North had been in the right and so of course won the war.

Exodus isn't just a book in the Bible

I was six and a half when I heard “a king” had been killed (I asked what country he was king of), a murder shortly to be followed by that of Bobby Kennedy. It was the same year my parents continued their own parents’ migration by leaving California for Washington State. San Francisco’s summer of love in 1967 had been too much for them, and they fled for the calmer climes of suburban Seattle. Little did they know that a mere three years later the bottom would drop out of Boeing and the Seattle economy, creating a exodus so enormous that a billboard near Sea-Tac airport read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle, turn out the lights.” That economic recession colored my entire childhood and, in a way, shaped most of my twenties, though at the time I was relatively unaware how history could be an active participant in a person’s destiny.

Dress like Martha

Ah, history.  We can’t do anything about it.  It’s dead.  It’s gone. Doesn’t remembering just evoke pain and recrimination? Why not live and let live, go forward afresh and new? This year, 2011, is the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. It is nothing compared to the bicentennial of our country’s founding.  Now that was a party.  1976—seems like yesterday. Stars and stripes were everywhere, on every product, in every ad. Schoolhouse Rock had Saturday morning cartoons about it, and people even sewed their own Martha Washington dresses from Butterick patterns.   

"I'm just a bill . . ."

The Declaration of Independence was an unequivocal milestone in human achievement, and our war of revolution (unlike the recent humiliation in Vietnam) was one we could all feel good about.  We won. We were right, and through our courage, fortitude and wisdom, we established a precedent for the world to follow.  The French fleet who’d really signed the deal for us weren’t mentioned much, and Loyalists who bet on the wrong horse and had to leave everything behind to flee to Canada weren’t brought up at all. The subsequent near annihilation of the native peoples of the continent didn’t get much play, nor did how the legitimization of slavery by the Constitution and our Founding Fathers was a betrayal of the country's founding precepts, not to mention it left a huge mess for following generations to resolve. No, the American Revolution was crystalline in its fife and drum purity and unambiguous goodness.

Sesquicentennial Splendor

Compare that national extravaganza to this year. Now, it’s true that a sesquicentennial is fundamentally less exciting than a bicentennial—heavens, the word itself is a pain to pronounce.  So what we have are a few new books out, some magazine and newspaper articles on the Civil War, some low-key, local events.  But I would posit that this is at least partly because we’re not sure how to view this war anymore. What used to be clear is murky these days. The South’s bitterness has mellowed and developed a different patina; the North’s righteousness has turned into something more ambiguous and wistful. Yes, the Civil War ended slavery, but we’re starting to remember that that had not been its original intent. Yes, the war saved the Union, but if the Constitution had been a contract, both sides had violated its terms, and who was to blame that there was no exit clause?  And we’re more aware these days that in every battle, one side’s victory meant the others side’s death and maiming, and as such they can’t be celebrated, only mourned.

Dead Americans

618,000 Americans died in the Civil War war, 68,000 of them African-American. That was the cost of that war. Though few understood it at the time, those 618,000 husbands, sons, and brothers were consumed by an epic battle of industrialization wrestling agriculture for the reins of the North American continent.  Which is not to say the Civil War was not about slavery—it was.  But it was also about the deal that had been brokered by the Constitution that had been unraveling for decades. It was about changing technologies and energy sources, and how society necessarily had to evolve as a result. It was about immigration and conflicting, competing economic models.  And, like most wars, underneath it all it was about money and power and who would possess them.  

Soldier and family

In the end, the South chose to dig in its heels rather than adapt to the moral, economic and technological pressures demanding it change. In the end, the North couldn’t allow a powerful, hostile country to stretch all the way across its southern border. If they didn’t fight the Confederacy after Fort Sumter, they would’ve inevitably fought them a few years later over control of the western territories. For its security and future wealth, the North had to both defeat and crush the South to remove it as a threat. That this would impoverish and embitter a future third of the country for the next century was either not taken into account or considered an adequate price to pay.

 The Civil War is valuable to remember as an example of what happens when patched-together compromises can no longer hold.  It’s what happens when adaptive small changes—often known as reforms—are resisted, forcing large changes—often known as revolutions or collapse—to come all at once. It’s what happens when, in the face of historic forces, a people says its way of life is non-negotiable and then finds out that, indeed, history does not negotiate.

There is value in remembering people and events in all their complexity--their good and their bad, their dark and their light. We gain when we comprehend the entirety of a person or an era (or as close as we can get to it) rather than a sanitized, one-sided version. The Civil War, with its suffering, loss, and heartache, should make us sad and even uncomfortable.  And it’s important to acknowledge that our leaders, even the ones we most admire, had failings as well as strengths.  This approach doesn’t make for a good party.  There’s no basking in any nostalgic, rosy glow.  But an honest look back lets us embrace both the wonder and the warts of our history and let us know ourselves—our own virtues and our own failings--better because of it. In this way the mystic chords of our nation's memory, dissonant though they may still be, can slowly grow in harmony.

Pearl City Control Theory, a Novel Available as Ebook $2.99

Pearl City Control Theory, a novel of city Buddha-mind walking, love and breaking free is available as an ebook on both Nook and Kindle for just $2.99.  

It's a modern comedy of manners set in urban San Francisco, very different than Beaufort 1849!  Here's the description:

When Sara’s husband, Mark, goes to the East Coast for law school, Sara stays behind in her beloved San Francisco. Their marriage will be BCDR -- bi-coastal, dual rental. It’s only for three years, Sara tells herself. An admirer of efficiency, she intends to keep loneliness at bay by moving in with her erratic sister, Amanda, and by staying busy at work in her newly promoted position as a manager for a large consumer products manufacturer.

But Sara’s tightly controlled world starts to crack when she accepts the help of an inscrutable mentor and begins volunteering at a domestic violence shelter on the weekends. As mercurial Amanda does her best to disarray the order of Sara’s life, challenges at work and at the shelter test Sara’s resolve and illuminate the fissures in her careful structures. To top it off, Sara finds her mentor far too helpful when she knows she shouldn’t be seeing him at all . . .

Win a free copy of Beaufort 1849!

I am guest blogging for the next couple days at author Suzanne Adair's blog.

Suzanne Adair's Blog--The Improbable Story of Robert Smalls

Leave a comment on this post at her blog for a chance to win a free copy of Beaufort 1849!

Between the Wars

Roaring through the twenties

I’ve been on a jag lately of immersing myself in the culture of upper-crust Britain in the decades between the world wars. Though I’ve long been a fan of P.G. Wodehouse and Mrs. Dalloway, now, from re-watching Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisted (oh so good), to reading Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, to tearing through a number of lightweight Georgette Heyer period mysteries, the twilight of the British aristocracy has been on my mind.  Ah, the details that no other era can match! Mannish women wearing monocles, the plover eggs at an Oxford luncheon, snobby countesses in tiaras, bathtubs full of newts. Who can forget Poirot in his white spats, or Bertie chasing his cow creamer while his faithful Jeeves rescues him from a dreaded Aunt or two? In this manic world, Cedric and Lady Montford prance together in their jewels, Sebastian laments about the bad mood of his teddy bear Aloysius, and the butler never does it but gets killed instead.

Lloyd George--no fan of lords

It’s an odd literary flowering that documents this period of frantic parties and still opulent displays of wealth. The first World War, the great one, had finished this particular group of people off, even if they hadn’t realized it quite yet. But the changes had been raining down for a while, working to erode centuries of privilege stretching from the Middle Ages. One could say it began with the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1846 that allowed cheap grain to be imported into Britain from other countries, lowering domestic agricultural profits.  Others might say it was the invention of the spinning jenny and the cotton gin that created a capitalist-mercantile class, a class that spent most of the nineteenth century fighting to expand its wealth and influence at the expense of its more refined brethren.  The aristocracy, however, not without a trick or two themselves, fought back and hung on. As late as 1880, these seven thousand families owned four-fifths of the land in Britain. They dominated government and social prestige, controlled the Houses of Parliament, and filled the ranks of the army, church and civil service with their second and third sons. In 1884 another blow was struck with a series of reform measures that allowed nearly 60% of the male population to vote. (Gosh, sounds radical.) And then in 1913 Lloyd George, a Welshman no fan of landlords, pushed through his “Land Campaign” with higher taxes for landowners, government control of rents, and higher wages for laborers.  The coffin for the aristocracy had been built and the grave dug, but the body was still kicking.  Then came the war.

The dead left behind in France

The young men of this class and era, schooled at Eton and Harrow and Cambridge and Oxford, had been groomed to lead and rule, so when war with the Kaiser came, they promptly volunteered to command troops for king and country.  But it turned out to be a different kind of war than anyone expected, and in France and Flanders men died or were maimed in horrific numbers.  It was a bloodletting that diminished all of Britain but impacted aristocratic young men in disproportionate numbers.

Party time

The war also brought an abrupt end to many repressive Victorian mores, and when  the armistice finally arrived, the freedom was exhilarating. Still, even in the midst of parties and gaiety and cocktails and flappers, the landed gentry sensed something was wrong. Already financial troubles were knocking at the door even if they did their best not to listen. Already the older generation raged at the assaults on their wealth and prerogatives, or worse, resigned to their fate, sold off millions of acres of inherited land--one of the largest transfers of territory in British history--just to stay afloat. Country houses and London town homes soon followed until the landed class had no land to pass onto their children.  With the corpse in the coffin, the twenties and thirties were a glorious two-decade wake. 

The final, most undignified blow followed the second war.  After a hefty increase in taxes to pay for debt brought on by the war, and a hefty increase in wages for the average worker, no one could afford servants at all.  Without chambermaids, valets, gardeners and cooks, estates couldn’t be maintained, dinner parties couldn’t be given, and being an Earl or Duchess grew suddenly irrelevant.  It took Hitler and WWII to hammer down the final nails in the British aristocratic coffin, and then that class was buried into obscurity and irrelevance for good.

Though there is art and architecture from these decades that evokes the style and exuberance and wild social change of the era, I think it is literature that captures it best. This is true even if the novel or story was written slightly later and tinted by nostalgia for something that can be revisited in memory but never regained.  Was this lost world a paradise? Well, it was certainly nice for those seven thousand families. Should its passing be mourned? A harder question to answer.  Yes, something has been lost, and the world is still missing it. But dead bodies have to be buried. No one wants to live with zombies in tiaras and spats.

The Aiken-Rhett House: Take a Ride on the Roller Coaster of History

I like grand old houses, their craftsmanship, their whimsy, their attention to detail. A fine house can charm the senses and even, on occasion, uplift the soul. But best of all is when a house has a story to tell. 

Aiken-Rhett house in 1865

 Often a century or two of renovations muddy the narrative or even lose the storyline altogether in favor of central air and indoor plumbing--modern conveniences that are understandable enough, I admit. However, to my delight, in Charleston, South Carolina, there exists a house where the whispers of history are abundant, where layers of generation upon generation are still plainly in view. It is a house that depicts the rise and fall not only of a family but of an entire civilization. It is the Aiken-Rhett house.

The house was built by Charleston merchant John Robinson who, with the fickleness of early nineteenth century fortunes, lost it soon afterwards. It was then bought by William Aiken, Sr., a prosperous Irish merchant, to be used as rental property. (Pretty grand rental property, even back then!) When Aiken Sr. died in a carriage accident (notice a theme of reversals?) the house was left to his son, William Aiken, Jr. He promptly moved in with his bride, Harriet Lowndes, the beautiful and well-educated daughter of a South Carolina political grandee. She spoke four languages and was destined to become one of Charleston’s leading hostesses. This son of an immigrant had truly made his way into Charleston society.

Grand Entryway

Slave quarters and other outbuildings

Time for renovations! The house was expanded and upgraded into one of the most magnificent residences in Charleston, a city not lacking in resplendent abodes. Aiken himself became a big cheese not only in Charleston, but the entire state, elected both governor of South Carolina in 1844 and a member of Congress in 1851. Owner of a number of plantations, he was also one of the largest slaveholders in the state. At the back of the Charleston house were outbuildings where the ten to twenty house slaves that worked there during the antebellum years could often be found—in the kitchen, laundry, stables, carriage house, and in their living quarters in the upper parts of these buildings.

In the 1850’s the price of cotton went sky-high. Time for more renovations! The interior was redecorated and an art gallery was constructed for the collection of paintings and sculptures that the Aiken’s brought back from their extensive tour of Europe.

We’ve ridden the roller coaster of history up for the Aiken-Rhett house. Fasten your seatbelts for the ride down.

Remembrance of things pas

Though a slave owner, Aiken was a Unionist and did not support secession. However, like most Southerners, after Fort Sumter he supported the Confederacy, tying the fate of his family to Confederate fortunes. During the bombardment of Charleston, many of the grand houses were pounded into rubble, but this house escaped due to its placement further up Charleston’s slender peninsula. However, when Charleston fell to Union forces in 1865 the house was looted and Aiken arrested and taken to Washington for trial. He was later released due to the intervention of northern politicians he’d made friends with during his political heyday.

Dining Room

Though their house had been looted, abused, and most of its valuables stolen, the Aiken family managed not to lose their home to federal taxes like so many in Beaufort did. They hung on and stayed on, as did most of the old families in Charleston. Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash, as the saying goes. In the Aiken’s case, this meant wallpaper peeled, and carpets grew threadbare. It meant fabrics and plaster began to disintegrate, and in some places dry rot set in. With little money for wood or coal to heat large spaces, grand rooms were shut up entirely. It meant multiple generations lived together, paying expenses as best they could. Harriet Lowndes Aiken lived in the house until her death in 1892, the grand ballroom becoming her bedroom. Her daughter, Harriet, and her son-in-law Major A.B. Rhett raised their five children in that house. Their descendants occupied it until 1975.

Over the course of a hundred and fifteen years, remarkably few alterations were made. Electric lights were bought to some rooms. Heating panels were added to the dining room. The slave quarters were left nearly untouched. The brilliance of the Historic Charleston Foundation that now owns the house was its choice not to restore the house according to one period or another of its long history. Instead, with one or two exceptions, they’ve preserved the house just as it was when they received it, in all its decaying grandeur.

Ballroom

Walking through the grand double parlor with its fragments of wallpaper and full-length portrait of Harriet Lowndes Aiken, we sense the soirees to which the fashionable elite of Charleston flocked. Waltzes echo in the mirrored ballroom; on the piazzas we almost glimpse the young ladies in wide skirts laughing with their beaux. In the dank basement warming-kitchen, we sense the constrained lives of the slaves; in their painted and plastered living quarters in the outbuildings, we discern the slaves’ hierarchy in status as well as their chance for privacy and camaraderie. We can even admire the pleasant life the Aiken horses must have led in their rather elaborate stables. And then we feel the years rain down on the impoverished household, taking their toll in roof shingles and rooms left purposely shut up and untouched. Even in its last stages of decay, the dining room still must have been grand. And even as plaster fell and gardens became riddled with weeds, the Aiken-Rhett family clung to the house out of survival and proud testament to what once was.

Like a ballgown found moldering in the attic the Aiken-Rhett house conveys more in its shambles than a reproduction would in pristine counterfeit. It tells us that as a civilization prospers, so do its dwellings. And after that civilization collapses, the buildings are often all that remain, silent narrators of a story distant and sad, whispering to us from across the centuries as the roller coaster of history glides on.

(Govenor Aiken makes a brief appearance in Beaufort 1849, but, sadly, his house does not, except in as much as it influenced the conception of the Birch home in Beaufort, Villa d’Este. All photos above are via the Library of Congress.)