The stories passed down by the older and wiser ones create a fascinating oral history for those of us today. I have a copy of a 1980 letter by Lee Gandy, an area historian, who interviewed the older residents. I do not have a copy of his research or other recorded history from his interviews; and I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the facts he writes. However, this letter sheds an intriguing light on some forgotten history.
Gandy wrote a 5-page handwritten letter to Mr. Sites, who lived near Spring Hill, and references a visit to his homeplace. He starts out by saying Mr. Sites had shown him a large collection of many Native American Indian relics from one of his fields on Wateree Creek. Sites had an oral history story that the field was a former Indian village. Mr. Sites had proudly told Gandy that he had Wateree Indian blood in his lineage. Gandy also spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Eleazar and mentioned that one of them is blind. If any of
you readers know who he is talking about, please let me know. The Eleazar couple told him that the first Eleazar immigrant in the Dutch Fork married a girl whose parents were killed in Orangeburg by the Edisto Indians, who sold the girl to an Indian family who raised her as their daughter. Gandy goes on to say that Everhart Vollmers’ son John married a “red-headed lady”, named Nancy Lightfoot, and” speculated” she was a Chickasaw Indian.
He also refers to a story about the Slice immigrant. He said, “One of the old slice women told me that the Indians took in the Schliass (Slice) family, who were weak from hunger, so cold, and so ill, that they lay down on a path to freeze to death together, after those in cabins drove them away.” She goes on to say that they knew the father back in Wittenburg before they left to go over to the Carolina colony. She said, after Schlaiss was released from prison, he went to the town tavern and declared that if he could pay for his passage to Carolina, he would never return. The people in the tavern took up the money, and he came to the colonies. Now, is this factual? I don’t know. On the auswanderer section of the Dutchforkchapter.org site, it says that Adolf Gerber’s list of Wurttemberg emigrants, written in Germany, says Ulrich Schlaisss and his wife, “had a bad reputation.” Whatever Ulrich’s issue was it has been greatly redeemed by the incredible blessings of the Slice family descendants. Gandy mentions that he doesn’t
know the name of the immigrant “Sceitz” or Sites, who married the Indian lady.
Next week, we will explore more of Lee Gandy’s letter. I promise you that it is very interesting!
