Getting Ready For Xmas & Muffy's Surgery 12/2-19/2009

Well here we are just 5 days before Christmas already and it just seems like we had one a few months ago. Not an awful lot going on here. We got our Christmas tree and got it all put up. We got our shopping done and all the boxes wrapped and mailed out early so the families would have them in time for Christmas.

As we had said in the last blog we had Muffy to a surgeon in Mt. Pleasant to have her ear checked and this past week we took her down for the operation. We left here at 4:30 in the morning as she had to be there by 7:15. We decided to stay overnight as it was a 90 mile drive there and of course 90 miles back so we opted to spend the night as we could pick her up the next day if all went well. We spent some time caching in the Mt. Pleasant are to kill some time and keep our minds occupied. We did see a couple of interesting sites while we were caching.
The first was Patjens Post Office which was built by the Patjen family in 1899 adjacent to their store on Church St. to serve as the post office in Mt. Pleasant. The Patjen family served as postmasters until 1917 and the building was restored in 2001.
Next was Long Point Plantation where we found 2 caches located on the land where the plantation once stood.The Long Point Plantation is significant primarily because of its historical and archaeological research potential. Long Point Plantation offers an opportunity to study a small, nucleated plantation settlement. The plantation was built sometime between 1719 and 1763, but “comes of age” under the control of the Venning family during the nineteenth century. The plantation was originally obtained by James Allen in 1719 and the plantation house and structures were probably built either by James Allen or his son, James Allen, Jr., prior to 1763. The plantation was purchased by the Vennings, a prominent and wealthy Christ Church Parish clan, in 1800 and was held by that family until 1899. The plantation, which is believed to have contained a small cluster of structures located within the parameters of this site, was economically oriented, through time, toward livestock, cotton, and finally subsistence crops. There is little historical information concerning the plantation’s appearance prior to the 1902 Coast and Geodetic Survey Map of Charleston Harbor and Vicinity. There was a main house and 5 smaller buildings of which there is only one still standing and it was believed to be either a icehouse or smokehoue. As we were driving around the "Old Village" section of Mt Pleasant we came across a Confederate Cemetery which was quite old with a lot of history to it. The Confederate Cemetery is now located in a part of the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina called the “Old Village.” This section of town was where the original settlements on the east side of Charleston harbor could be found. Until 1837 this part of town was known as Greenwich, when it and Mount Pleasant Plantation were incorporated into the town of Mount Pleasant. In the late 19th century, Emily C. Tew, sister of Col. C.C. Tew who is found on the Confederate monument, maintained the cemetery. After her death, the cemetery was poorly taken care of and was soon overgrown with weeds. Then, in 1922, Robert V. Royall entrusted the cemetery to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), and it was cleaned up and revitalized.
The cemetery itself is a part of a much older cemetery in that section of the town, as records show that it extended from Carr Street all the way across to Royall Avenue, quite a bit larger than the present fenced area. The area was part of Greenwich Common, where property owners from along the waterfront could find firewood and graze their livestock. The tombstones that are still present in the cemetery date as early as 1814 (Abraham Roach) and as late as 1917 (Catherine A. Hale), although evidence suggests that there are many unmarked graves in areas surrounding and within the present fenced area. None of the 17 existing tombstones are signed by the carver, and people no longer are buried there. Around 1884, when the Berkeley County Courthouse was being constructed across the street, the ladies of Mt. Pleasant erected the Confederate Monument, although the exact date for that monument is unknown, and the ladies fenced off the area in the process. The cemetery became known as the Confederate Cemetery, even though tombstone dates do not necessarily center around the Civil War. When the area near the cemetery was being excavated, probably for the foundation of the courthouse, many unmarked skeletons were found buried around the area. During the Civil War, it was tradition for soldiers who died in the nearby hospital, the present Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, they would be buried in large unmarked graves. The soldiers found during construction were soon reinterred in the cemetery, and a “home made” cement monument marks the final resting place of these Unknown Soldiers. The War of 1812 monument had been standing at the corner of Pitt and King Streets before the Civil War, but it was moved to the cemetery in 1922 for protection from vandalism. The monument marked the burial place of the Third Regiment of State troops from the War of 1812, who had died at Haddrell’s Point from disease. In 1923, General C. Irvine Walker of the Confederate War Veterans had the inscription put on the monument. Both the War of 1812 monument and the Confederate monument are listed in the national Save Outdoor Sculptures (SOS) index. The Confederate Cemetery today is marked off by a square fence measuring 50 feet, three inches on each side. The full plot from Carr to Royall Street measures approximately 100 feet by 200 feet. It is owned by the Confederate Memorial Association and is maintained by the town of Mount Pleasant.
After we finished caching we checked in at the motel and had lunch and just hung around waiting for the doctor to call. He did call about 6:30 and Muffy was fine and he told us we could pick her up sometime the next day. We did pick her up about noon and she seemed really good for just having major surgery so we headed back to MB. Well it's Sunday now and she really is doing great other than she can't hear out of her right ear.

Other than that things are going well. Liz and Bob got hear and we did go out one day with them and did a few caches. We took another trip to Oak Island to have lunch with Bev, Jen and Jillian. Liz and Bob joined us as they hadn't seen them since last spring. We had a nice lunch and Jillian enjoyed a few Christmas presents we had gotten her. Jen did have her baby on the 11th and it was a girl, Jenna and Mom and baby are doing great.

On the 12th we hosted our caching Christmas party at Logan's Roadhouse and everything went great after they finally got us seated in. the room we had reserved. They had a large group come in that had reserved a spot in the NMB Logan's and ended up at the one in MB and the hostess thought that they were our group and seated them in the room we had reserved. Well it was lucky we had a GPS game to keep them busy till they cleared the room out or we might have left. It ended up fine though and Logan's gave us complimentary appetizers for everyone which was about 40 people.

I had a stress test on the 11th which came out fine, lucky I had it before the screw up at Logan's, and we also had blood work done by our new doctor. It's a woman and she seems very thorough in the physical she did on myself and Mom. We had to change doctors because of the change in insurance companies by the Town of Camillus. Our old doctor wouldn't except our new insurance. We went lasr Friday to do our follow ups and everything was fine. The only thing I have to do is take Vitamin C and of course lose some weight...........easier said than done and Mom was fine. We found that she checked a few things in our blood work that none of our other doctor's ever checked.

Mom has been volunteering in the nursery as much as she can. December has been busier than it was in November with lots and lots of newborns which she just loves. We've gone caching a couple of other times and that's really about all that's going on. We are spending Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day (the name derives from the Anglo-Saxon tradition giving seasonal gifts (in the form of a "Christmas box") to less wealthy people and slaves. In the United Kingdom this was later extended to various workpeople such as labourers, servants, tradespeople and postal workers), with our friends here. Ed is having New Years Eve at his house and Janet and Doug will be visiting us for a few days so we will be spending New Years with them.

Well that's about it for now so we will say MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR to all our BOYS and their WIVES and to our WONDERFUL GRANDCHILDREN and of course to ALL our friends and we hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. Love Mom & Dad Dori & Dick