Sherman slept there -- probably in a Calhoun County plantation home

Oh, the tales this old house could tell. Then the sliver of doubt would be gone, the hard-to-believe legend could be verified.

But since the Baker house can’t talk, the current owner has to step up and make the argument that Gen. William T. Sherman slept here in February 1865 and that a piano-playing child persuaded Union soldiers not to burn the house after Sherman left on his way to Columbia.

Standing in northern Calhoun County in the cleared front yard of the early 19th-century house, which is oddly both decrepit and grand, William Gardner motions to the second-story porch.

“You can just see Sherman and (Gen. John) Logan come out and stand on that porch and address the troops,” Gardner said. “It’s so quiet down here (on the ground) you can hear the bridles when the horses move. He’s telling them, ‘We’re going to go burn the bridge over Congaree Creek today.’”

Chances are that really happened. The official records of the Union Army indicate Sherman and Logan camped at the Baker plantation near Sandy Run on Feb. 14, 1865. Cold rain, maybe even some sleet, fell that night. The leaders almost certainly took advantage of the the best bedrooms on a plantation that had several structures. A letter from a Baker family member six weeks later states “Gens. Sherman and Logan occupied the lower part of this house as their Headquarters.”

But there were at least two Baker houses in that general vicinity, and some of Sherman’s troops also stayed in the nearby Kinsler house. There are questions about exactly where Sherman slept and planned the assault on Columbia. “I am not saying it is not true,” Calhoun County Museum and Cultural Center Director Debbie Roland said of Gardner’s vision. “I am just saying that Sherman troops were all over the place.”

The locations of Sherman’s headquarters the next few nights also are slightly squishy. He camped somewhere along the intersection of Congaree Creek and Old State Road the night of Feb. 15, in a clearing at Camp Sorghum near the current Riverbanks Zoo botanical garden the night of Feb. 16 and in a home where the Clarion Hotel now stands in Columbia the night of Feb. 17-19. He camped somewhere between Columbia and Winnsboro the night of Feb. 20, and stopped in Winnsboro Feb. 21 long enough to file a report late that day.

Interactive map: Sherman’s path through Columbia 150 years ago

Fairfield historians also aren’t sure precisely where Sherman slept that night or even if he spent the night in Winnsboro. For generations, it wasn’t a matter of pride to tell visitors the most hated man in the South stayed in your house.

A step back in time

When the Gardner family bought the Baker house in the 1970s, they were looking for acreage, not history. They were interested in the 51 acres surrounding the house, though the impressive wooden structure and several outbuildings helped seal the real estate deal. “I fell in love with the house,” Gardner said. “When I was up on the second floor looking out the windows back over the field, I could hear them talking.”

Nobody has lived in the house for years, and it has many problems. Some window panes are missing. Large chunks of the heavy old plaster have fallen from ceilings and walls. Small vines creep along the interior walls in the attic. Gardner has looked into making repairs, but the last time he checked, it would have cost around $100,000 to bring the house close to its original condition. For now, he’s leaving it the way it is.

The bones of the house are strong and amazing. Knock on the massive square columns holding up the porch, and they feel as thick as the tree trunks they were hewn from 185 years ago. The interior stairs are so solid that Gardner challenges visitors to try to make them squeak. The metal roof doesn’t leak, even around the small piece rigged to allow visitors to stick their heads out and view Columbia 20 miles away on the horizon.

The structure was built between 1825 and 1830. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, with an application that highlights its high basement, hand-hewn logs and pegging and full-length hipped-roof veranda. It apparently was built for William Baker III, the grandson of one of the early Saxe Gotha Township settlers who was granted the land in 1738. There’s a small graveyard near the house, with nine graves dating to the 1800s.

According to the 1860 census, 26-year-old W.H. Baker, a planter, lived in Sandy Run with his 47-year-old mother, Mary, and his 20-year-old wife, Margaret. The Bakers owned 46 slaves, 19 of them 15 years old or younger, and farmed about 200 of their 1,200 acres. They owned 54 head of livestock. The house and a nearby log barn both were used in that period and remain standing.

Mike Bedenbaugh, executive director of the Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation, has toured the house and is extremely impressed. “It’s a magnificent place that with the right combination of things could be restored to be a great home again,” he said.

The National Register application doesn’t mention Sherman’s stay. The possibility of that history comes from a few letters and documents and from oral history. The auxiliary legend from that fateful 1865 visit has even less written documentation.

Union records indicate Sherman left the area expecting the Baker house to be burned. Family lore revolves around how a little girl and a piano saved the house. As the story goes, the Bakers tried to bury things of value to protect them from Sherman’s marauders. A piano, owned by an itinerant music teacher staying at the house, was too large to bury. (Other tellings have it buried and dug up by Sherman’s men.)

When the Union troops were preparing to burn the house, someone asked a young girl who lived there if she could play a song on the piano. She did, with such gusto that the men decided to spare the house. By some tellings, the song she played was “Dixie.”

Given the tenor of the times, the Sherman-slept-here legend is more likely than the child-played-Dixie-to-save-the-house story. If only the house could talk, it could tell what actually happened.

This story was originally published February 12, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Sherman slept there -- probably in a Calhoun County plantation home."