More Tales of Old Town Bluffton is my newest book about the South Carolina Lowcountry. It is now available on amazon.com, along with all my other books. The first 31 pages can be viewed by clicking on Amazon’s Look Inside feature on their website. The book can also be found at The Heyward House, the welcoming center for the town of Bluffton, SC.
My new book, Tales of Old Town Bluffton, The Complete Writings of Andrew Peeples, is now available in paperback from Amazon Books. The book can also be found at The Heyward House, the welcoming center at the town of Bluffton, SC. Andrew Peeples’ stories are full of early twentieth century small town local color. He was born in 1905 in Bluffton, SC, and raised on Calhoun Street (the main street) in the house shown below. He was the seventh son in a family of fourteen children. He graduated from Bluffton High School and later from the University of South Carolina. For many years he worked as the Health Education Director for the South Carolina State Board of Health.
All of the people in my new book, Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story, were real people, not imaginary. (See The Real People in My New Book above.) Perhaps you knew some of them, or know about some of them. Perhaps you are related to some of them? One of the most important people in my book, besides my mother and father, was my father’s lawyer, W. Brantley Harvey, Sr. (1893-1981) He was a well known South Carolina lawyer and politician. He is often referred to as Senator Harvey in the book because he was a South Carolina senator for 24 years. Senator Harvey’s words are on almost every page of the court testimony recorded in my book. You can learn more about him at https://harveyandbattey.com/attorneys/firm-history/.
Included on the last page of my book is a reprint of the meditative article, Tombstone Thoughts, the Historic Bluffton Cemetery, by the Very Reverend Dr. Charles E. Owens, III, Rector of Church of the Cross, Bluffton, S. C. His reflections on memories of past lives, and how cemeteries remind us of the transitory nature of our lives, made a fitting ending to my book, which is primarily about the impact of lives now over on those of the living. Many of my relatives lie buried in the Bluffton Cemetery. The word cemetery comes from Latin and Greek words that mean “sleeping place.”
On April 4, 1951 at 3:30 P. M., my brothers and I experienced a trauma that marked us for life: our father took us by force on our way home from school in Philadelphia and brought us back 700 miles to his and our home: Bluffton, SC. My twin brother and I were nine and one-half years old, and my younger brother was only six. None of us, including our father and mother, ever fully recovered from that event and the subsequent custody battles that followed.
John Samuel Graves, Jr., my father, and Florence Rubert, my mother, married on June 25, 1939. After 11 years of marriage my mother decided she wanted to think things over. She and my father agreed to a trial 3 month separation, and on June 3, 1950, Mother took us north to stay with her sister, her mother, and her grandmother. After about 10 months had passed without our father being allowed to see us he became convinced that he had to take matters into his own hands: he would go get us and return us to our ancestral South Carolina home. The details of that story are presented in my new book, Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story, a non-fictional account of those and previous times in the Lowcounty town of Bluffton, South Carolina. For more information about the people described in the book please visit The Real People in my New Book tab.
My book is now available in its Second Edition on Amazon Books. Amazon’s Look Inside feature allows a viewer to read substantial portions of the book’s text. Please take a look! The Second Edition in not primarily different from the first edition. It has been re-edited for spelling, grammatical and formatting issues. The Second Edition also contains photographs that were not in the earliest versions of the book. Some of these additions and corrections have been posted for quite some time on this site at Testimony Back Story & Photos.
Please see my recent article A Lowcountry Childhood in the 1940’s under my Articles Tab.
