EDGAR LEE LLOYD
Edgar. Lloyd (1874-1933) was from Maryland. He came to Georgetown with Atlantic Coast Lumber Corporation (ACL), formed in 1899 and incorporated in 1903. At a time when Georgetown businessmen were seeking alternatives to the culture of rice, ACL was the brainchild of wealthy New York financier and international businessman Charles Flint, who sought to make this region of the South “lumber country.” A few years after ACL was founded, Charles Flint turned the lumber business over to Minneapolis lumberman Freeman S. Farr, who served as the first president and a leading stockholder of the Atlantic Coast Lumber Corporation, as receiver of Georgetown Lumber and Timber Company and Georgetown and Eastern Railway, and as treasurer of the Oneida Timber company and the Southern Mercantile company—all newly-organized South Carolina Corporations.
Atlantic Coast Lumber ignited the evolution of “modern” Georgetown. They purchased Savage’s lumber mill and land of the former Serenity Plantation and began operation in 1899. The company, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, constructed the largest lumber mill on the East Coast in Georgetown, buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of land and timber rights in the surrounding counties. The plant eventually covered 56 acres in the bend of the Sampit River, property today occupied by the steel mill. The company acquired control of the Georgetown & Western Railroad and built a network of branches and spurs from the main line for hauling cut timber from remote logging camps to the mill. This flurry of activity created hundreds of new jobs and stimulated economic growth in Georgetown with an infusion of outside capital. It brought a number of new folks to town, among them Edgar L. Lloyd, who became assistance secretary and assistant treasurer of the company.
Soon after arriving, Edgar L. Lloyd experienced tragedy. In 1900, he married Bernice Sigler from Hot Springs, Arkansas. They were living in Lloyd’s new and “modern” brick house, built on Fraser Street in Georgetown’s historic district, when in 1901 Bernice and her infant son died. Bernice was 24 years old when she and her unnamed child were buried side by side in their graves at Prince George Winyah churchyard.
In 1903 in Georgetown, E.L. Lloyd remarried Maud Storrs Farr (1868-1936), a manager at ACL and the daughter of its president, Freeman S. Farr. The Lloyds had a daughter, Mabel Farr Lloyd, born the same year.
When the Georgetown Country Club was founded a few years later in 1905, a woman's golf tournament was set in progress for a cup offered by Mrs. E. L. Lloyd, and Edgar Lloyd was elected the club’s first president. Maud was founder and president of the first Georgetown chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (D.A.R). She attended luncheons, bridge parties, and teas and mingled with the locals. Her brother, Raymond S. Farr, general manager of ACL, and his wife, Clara Taft Farr, also lived in Georgetown, as did Maud’s sister, Mabel, and brother-in-law, Rufus M Barnes, ACL’s assistant general manager. These couples all actively participated in local society and affairs. It was a heady, and very social time in Georgetown. In fact, in 1913, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd entertained Harold Kaminski, the future owner of the house, at a “Chafing Dish Party” party. Of course, at the time Harold’s future wife, Julia, growing up in the Pyatt house on Highmarket Street, was still a child of 13.
Atlantic Coast Lumber officers and executives— most of them northerners—hunted in their leisure time and shot ducks around Georgetown, and these sportsmen contributed largely to the region becoming a “sporting paradise.” Hunting ducks had held little appeal for southern plantation owners, who had considered it an inferior sport. They, like the English, preferred deer-hunting. However, in 1894 President Grover Cleveland paid a visit to Gen. Edward Porter Alexander’s South Island preserve soon after he acquired it. Out duck hunting, President Cleveland was tossed off a skiff in a gale and had to be rescued and hauled out of the water. This news was carried across the U.S. in all the major newspapers. Yet the bigger news was that Cleveland bagged 46 ducks that weekend. Suddenly the “ready-made” plantations of the lowcountry, no longer productive as rice fields, were in demand as winter residents and hunting preserves by elite sportsmen from the North. Guests at Gen. Edward Porter Alexander’s South Island preserve between 1900 and 1902 included Charles Flint, the father of Atlantic Coast Lumber, and its president, Freeman S. Farr, as well as Farr’s son-in-law Rufus M. Barnes.
Edgar L. Lloyd was involved in Atlantic Coast Lumber’s acquisition of Hagley Plantation on Waccamaw Neck (and Weehawka Plantation to the north) and the purchase of eighty-five acres on Pawleys Island, where the company subsequently maintained boarding houses, including the Pelican Inn, and beach cottages for its employees. The lumber company put a steamboat, the Governor Safford, into service from Georgetown to Hagley Landing, and laid a three-and-a-half-mile railroad track that traversed the Neck and the southern causeway to Pawleys. This made it possible for mill workers to access the island from Georgetown via ferry and train in less than an hour and a half. ACL logged the lands of Hagley Plantation, but they also constructed a hunting lodge on the property for senior management of Atlantic Coast Lumber, which the Freeman S. Farr family, including E. L. Lloyd, used as a ducking ground. These ACL arrangements lasted from June of 1901 until September of 1905. The next year, a hurricane destroyed the railroad to Pawleys. Meanwhile, a Georgetown boat captain initiated a new ferry schedule that took seasonal travelers to Pawley’s by a different route.
Bypassed by beachgoers, Hagley Plantation was a backwater when Atlantic Coast Lumber leased it in 1909 to their Du Pont Company interests, headed by Eugene du Pont Jr. The Charleston News and Courier credited Raymond Farr and Edgar Lloyd with first convincing the E.I. Dupont de Nemours Company to locate one of its wood alcohol manufactories adjacent to ACL, to purchase the wood waste and sawdust from its mills and convert it to ethyl alcohol. The newspaper reports that Eugene Dupont leased Hagley a day after making the deal for the alcohol plant, Dupont Powder Factory, which operated at Atlantic Coast Lumber in Georgetown beginning in 1909. Eugene Dupont claimed he had been “on the ground frequently” in Georgetown and become “aware of the splendid shooting advantages of this section of country.” Calling themselves the “Hagley Gun Club,” the lessees were given “the right and privilege only of hunting and shooting game” on Hagley’s 2,250 acres, and “also the right at all times to the use of the house near the wharf on the Waccamaw River.” However, they did not have exclusive use of the plantation. The lease was made with the “distinct understanding” that “a co-ordinate, co-equal, and co-extensive right and privilege of hunting and shooting game . . . upon said property and the use of said house during the currency of the term hereof . . shall be reserved to and enjoyed by the General Manager [Farr], Assistant Manager [Barnes] and Assistant Treasurer [Lloyd] of said lesser and such of their friends, not residents of this State, as they shall select.” [M.A. Lockhart (2017) From Rice Fields to Duck Marshes: Sport Hunters and Environmental Change on the South Carolina Coast, 1890–1950. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4161]
In 1912, Eugene Dupont with James Kelly of New York and none other than composer and conductor John Phillip Sousa together purchased their own shooting preserve near Georgetown. The property, the Ricefield plantation, comprised 6,500 acres and is plentifully stocked with deer, quail, wild turkey, geese, and ducks. It also has extensive timber lands and rice fields and a trout brook. There was a hunting lodge on the estate and the three ardent sportsmen “expect to have several weeks shooting here every autumn and winter.” The northern procurement of plantation preserves, as well as historic houses as winter residences, would remain a northern trend throughout the South Carolina lowcountry into the 1940s.
The guiding force behind the initial establishment of Atlantic Coast Lumber was Georgetown’s progressive intendant and mayor, W.D. Morgan, mentioned earlier. Morgan first encouraged the lumber businesses to move to the area, and he was a catalyst for much of Georgetown’s growth during his term of office, 1891 to 1906. During his tenure, the face of the town changed dramatically. New schools were built, as well as the new federal office building at 1001 Front Street. Oak and elm trees replaced those that had lined Georgetown’s streets until the hurricane of 1893. Concrete sidewalks were laid in much of the business area. There were electric streetlights, and new streets in the West End. Morgan was active in securing appropriations for deepening Georgetown Harbor.
Private development was an important aspect of the Morgan years, with the ready availability of lumber and millwork, and dozens of wood-framed and wood-sided houses were built in
Georgetown between 1890 and 1910. Newcomers or newly prosperous residents built both substantial houses and modest cottages for themselves. During this building boom, W.D. Morgan, ACL executives and other Georgetown businessmen were spinning off development companies. W.D. Morgan, John Burness (J.B.) Steele and Edgar L. Lloyd partnered in Georgetown Farm Land and Homeseekers Company. They were buying up land in the region, clearing timber off and sawing it into lumber, and building small farms of 50 to 1000 acres, which they then advertised across the country for sale to prospective farmers. [Georgetown Times, “Development of The Farm Lands Near the City,” (November 25, 1916).] This was an endeavor to promote the raising of truck crops -- an industry then underway that it was hoped would become big business in the region. Everybody was out to develop any latent resources of Georgetown county. Edgar Lloyd was involved in a number of these ventures.
Meanwhile on July 8, 1914, the Georgetown Times notes in a headline: “House on the Bluff Overlooking the River Bought by Mr. Edgar L. Lloyd.” It reads: “A real estate deal of considerable interest to the people of Georgetown was consummated yesterday, according to the information, when Mr. E. L. Lloyd became the owner of the very desirable residence and lots on the crest of the hill on the river front just south of King street and southeast of the government building. This is considered one of the finest residence sites in Georgetown, and for some months has been discussed as an ideal site for a tourist hotel— as it certainly would be. Mr. Lloyd could not be reached yesterday afternoon or last night, so that The Times cannot state the use to which his purchase will be put; but it feels free to say that he has got a mighty fine piece of property, superbly suited for either residence or hotel.”
E.L. Lloyd, ever the modern man, had that fancy new brick house downtown, so it is unclear if the Lloyds lived in the Bluff house after he purchased it. At some point, he and Maud became estranged. Her father, Freeman Farr, had died in 1905, and her brother served as ACL president until R.J. Clifford came to town as the new president of the company.
Two years after buying the property, on July 1, 1916, E.L. Lloyd advertised the following in the Georgetown Times “Wanted—2 or 3 gentlemen boarders to occupy nice large, cool rooms, with bathroom in connection. Call at No. 9 King street, rear of postoffice.”
It is important to note that through the years the address of what is now the Kaminski House was sometimes 9 King Street, and sometimes Front Street. King Street once extended across Front Street to the water, and the actual front entrance to the property was from King Street. Today Joseph Rainey Park covers what was once the King Street extension.
Edgar Lloyd advertised again in the Georgetown Times on June 2, 1917: “For Rent—Cool desirable rooms, conveniently arranged for housekeeping. Lights, bath and water. Located on the ‘Bluff’ at No. 9 King St.”
Perhaps Lloyd, separated from Maud, was living in the house, and setting up “Bachelor’s Hall.” Whatever the case, the house served as a rooming house during these years.
Then in 1918, Lloyd sold it to the house and property to R.J. Clifford.
When the Lloyds daughter, Mabel, married in 1927, Town and Country magazine carried the announcement with no mention of her father, only her mother, who was then living in Richmond.
Edgar L. Lloyd died in West Palm Beach Florida in 1933 and was buried in Maryland with the Lloyd family.
Maud was living with her sister and brother-in-law, the Rufus Barnes, in Columbia when she died in 1936. According to her death certificate, she was a Christian Scientist and refused to see a doctor when she became ill.
She was brought back to Georgetown and buried in Prince George Winyah churchyard with Edgar Lloyds first wife, Bernice Sigler Lloyd, and her infant son
by Jennie Holton Fant