Greenville mule got a Yankee's goat

The 200-year-old Rock House was built by Capt. Billy Young, a hero of the American Revolution

Some of the Union cavalry crossed the 1820 Poinsett Bridge in the mountains of Greenville County

GREENVILLE, S.C.

 The Union cavalry who invaded Greenville on May 2, 1865, came from Asheville, and their routes would have brought them past two rock-solid monuments of 19th-century craftsmanship: the Poinsett Bridge on the State Road and the Rock House on the Buncombe Road.

 The Rock House was built some 200 years ago by Capt. Billy Young, a hero of the American Revolution. It once was the largest house in Greenville, but it is so secluded that I never knew about it during the decades I lived there. I looked it up during the 150th anniversary of Stoneman's Raid, because the most prominent local victim of the raid was listed by historians as "Capt. Choice of the old Rock House."
 Josiah Choice was 62 years old when the raiders came down Buncombe Road. There are varying accounts of what happened to him. He may have been killed for shooting at a cavalryman who confiscated his horse. The Choice family had a home nearby, so it is possible that "of the old Rock House" described the locale where he was killed, rather than the actual house where he lived.
 About 150 Union cavalry from Stoneman's rear guard were dispatched from Asheville in late April to pursue Jefferson Davis, the fugitive president of the Confederacy.  They rode together through Saluda Gap to the foot of the Blue Ridge, where they fanned out. Some of them followed the State Road across Poinsett Bridge and entered Greenville on the Rutherford Road. Click here to read our 150th anniversary story about the havoc they caused in Greenville. 
 The rest of the Yankees came down Buncombe Road, took Josiah Choice's life, and left us with a great story. It's too good to be true, but The State newspaper in Columbia reported it Aug. 23, 1959, after reporter Virginia Oles visited her Aunt Em, Emily Rosamond Thackston, the great-granddaughter of Capt. Young. Aunt Em's father, William Thackston, had inherited the house from his wife Katherine, the captain's granddaughter. 
 Capt. Young (1759-1826) was known as That Terror To The Tories during the Revolution. Yankees were sometimes called Tories, too, and at least one of the Union soldiers at the Rock House probably was sorry he met Capt. Young's daughter Emily Young Rosamond (1812-1888). This Emily was the great aunt of the Aunt Em who told the story to the newspaper.

Here's Your Mule was a
 popular Civil War song

 As the story goes, by the end of the war, a mule named Susie was the last livestock on the Rock House plantation. All the men were working in the fields, so only Emily was home when a Yankee rode up on a worn-out horse.
 Without so much as a good morning, the soldier went into the barnyard, unsaddled his horse, saddled Susie, and rode off. Emily was especially fond of Susie, so she wept with grief.
 Early the next morning, there was a sudden commotion in the yard. The whole household rushed out to see what was going on. There stood old Susie at the barnyard gate, wearing the Yankee's saddle. However, there was no rider.
 Emily threw her arms around Susie's neck and kissed her. She whispered into the mule's ear, "Susie, you threw that Yankee and came back home!"
 Later that day, the Yankee returned with a noticeable limp. He went to the barnyard, saddled his own lame horse, and rode off without a word of explanation.
 Susie, of course, became a war hero whose story was repeated for generations.


 Old Buncombe Road is a landmark between downtown Greenville and Furman University.  The original wagon road was built in the years following the Revolution. The road reached the North Carolina line in 1797 and finally connected in 1827 with Buncombe County, N.C. That opened up a trade route into the western frontier of Tennessee and Kentucky. In Greenville County, the road followed the Reedy River and the North Fork of the Saluda River before intersecting the State Road from Columbia, which crossed the Blue Ridge at Saluda Gap. This is the old route of U.S. Highway 25, which now passes through the Greenville watershed.
 Capt. Young was born in Loudoun County, Va., grew up on a large farm on the Pacolet River in Spartanburg County, and enlisted in the 2nd Spartan Regiment at age 16. He fought in the "Snow Campaign" of 1775 (which included the Battle of the Great Cane Brake in lower Greenville County), Musgrove Mill and Kings Mountain in 1780, and Cowpens, Augusta, and Ninety Six in 1781. After the war, he was appointed in 1785 as the first sheriff of Spartanburg County.
 In 1789, at age 30, Capt. Young married 15-year-old Mary Salmon from Virginia. They settled on farmland about four miles northwest of the village of Greenville (which was originally called Pleasantburg) and had at least 14 children. (Emily was born in 1812 and married James Rosamond in 1833.) Capt. Young and his brother acquired large tracts of land northwest of Greenville along the Buncombe Road. Some of their acreage eventually became part of Furman University when the campus was relocated from downtown Greenville in the 1950s.
 It was about 1792 when Capt. Young began building the Rock House, using granite quarried from nearby Paris Mountain and brought down by slave-driven ox carts. The stone walls are 36 inches thick outside and 26 inside.  It's likely that he employed some of he same stonemasons who built the Poinsett Bridge in 1820. The house has eight rooms, a central hallway, and a secret compartment in the attic where the family hid heirlooms and food to protect them from the Union raiders.
 The Rock House may have still been under construction when the captain died in 1826. The house eventually served as a stagecoach stop and a post office on the Buncombe Road.
 After the Civil War, the Rock House was owned by Benjamin Franklin Perry Jr., whose father was the post-war governor of South Carolina. The younger Perry had married one of the captain's granddaughters. Thackston, a widowed Confederate veteran, inherited the house and lived there until his death in 1909. Then the house was passed down to his daughter Emily (1875-1958) and her brother Henry (1866-1943), who farmed the land until his death. In 1956, "Aunt Em" vacated the Rock House at age 81, and the place fell into disrepair. 
 In 1958, lawyer Harry J. Haynsworth III and his wife Jean bought the Rock House for $7,500 and renovated it into a formal home. Haynsworth (1923-1994) was the brother of Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. (1912-1989), a Supreme Court nominee in 1969. The taxable market value in 2020 is assessed at $326,420.

Robert Mills' 1820 Atlas shows Capt. Young's Rock House between Greenville and Paris Mountain. Buncombe Road is labeled as From Saluda Gap to Greenville 28.00 (miles).

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Yankee raider plundered heart of a Carolina girl

Thirty years after the Civil War skirmish at her family home, Caty Moore Callahan Long (1847-1904) and her second husband Billy Long (1848-1914) sat for this 1895 portrait. Caty's son Lige Callahan was not present; his wife Lizzie Black Callahan is standing in the center, along with their young daughters: Minnie, Fannie, and Hattie. Billy Long is holding Caty's grandson Tom Callahan. Also standing are the Long children: Caroline, Janie Ellison, George and Ezekiel. Tom was the last of Lizzie's children born in a cabin on the Moore farm, so this picture was taken about the time that Lige moved his family to Piedmont.

Lige with his pet goose

Lige Callahan
(from a family reunion booklet)

Meet the unlikely son of the 'Battle of Anderson'
 

PIEDMONT, S.C.

 I love it when legends turn out to be true.
 I've reported a few legends in the pages of The Stoneman Gazette, including some from the so-called "Battle of Anderson," where I had heard a legend that a wounded Yankee later returned to South Carolina to thank the Southern belles who saved his life. 
 More recently, I was delighted to hear from several members of the family, who filled me in on the rest of the story, which is far better than the legend. Not only did the Yankee return, but he married a young lady who lived on the farm where he was wounded—and they had a son. After the devil caught up with the Yankee, so to speak, his widow married the son of a Confederate veteran who fought at Bull Run. So Caty Moore Callahan Long was connected to the first and last combat of the Civil War. 

The marker in Williamston (left) is 10 miles from the actual site of the fighting. 

 There were at least three skirmishes in Anderson County on May 1, 1865 as Stoneman's raiders converged on Anderson in pursuit of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Two were near Craytonville and Pendleton.
 The one that figures into this story was near Williamston, halfway between Anderson and Greenville. It's the only one that has monuments—a state historical marker in Williamston which commemorates "one of the last engagements of the war," and also a stone erected at the actual site by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans which calls the skirmish "the last unit action of the war east of the Mississippi River."
 The site of the skirmish was a farm on Old Williamston Road, just off I-85 at Exit 35, about a mile north of Shiloh Methodist Church. This was the home of Thomas B. Moore (1803-1873). Part of the Moore family farmhouse still stands on the property.

 This is where a squad from the 10th Michigan Cavalry encountered a group of teenagers from the Columbia Arsenal, which was a prep school for The Citadel in Charleston. Neither side was looking for a fight, but gunshots soon rang out. 
 Both sides sustained wounds. Cadet James Spearman of Newberry was shot in the hand. A Michigan cavalryman was shot from his horse and apparently abandoned by his squad as they disengaged from the fight.

 His identity is something of a mystery. After searching regimental records, I concluded he was James O. Callaghan, from Grand Rapids, Mich., who enlisted at age 41 and would have been one of the oldest members of Company E. Yet some family members say that DNA tests indicate he was from Kentucky. The 11th and 12th Kentucky Cavalry were part of the raid, but I have not found their fosters. 

  We will call him Callahan, because that's the name of his descendants. Some of the Southerners were eager to finish off the fallen Yankee, but the Moore family rescued him and saved his life. He recovered in a wayside hospital in Greenville, which was occupied by Union forces after the war. At some point, Callahan returned to the scene of the battle, was charmed by the farmer's teenage daughter, Emily Catherine Moore (1847-1904), known as "Caty." They moved (possibly eloped) to Texas, where their son was born in 1867. They named him Elijah, after Caty's grandfather, and called him "Lige."

 James Callahan was scorned by his in-laws, and not just because he was a Yankee. He was often drunk and abusive toward Caty. He eventually disappeared, possibly at the hands of Caty's brother, John Moore (1830-1905), a ruffian known as "Devil John." (A dastardly deed by John Moore against Billy Long is described in this 1882 clipping from the Anderson Intelligencer.
 The family rarely talked about Caty's first marriage, according to Jimmy Orr, the great-great-grandson of Caty and her second husband, Billy Long. "It was considered shameful for many years," Orr said. Modern generations were not even sure of Lige's father's name until they found "James Callahan" listed on Lige's 1937 death certificate.
 According to family stories Orr heard from his grandmother and great-aunt in the 1990s, one night Devil John Moore rode home with Callahan's horse and told Caty "he must have drowned in the river." When Caty wanted to remarry, her brother assured her that she did not need to worry about the return of James Callahan.
 Lige's descendants compiled a family history for a reunion in the late 1990s. It includes two stories of the demise of James Callahan. One says that he lost all his money while gambling in a town on the Mississippi River and then left his family behind. Another tale says that Caty and James made it to Texas and setttled on a farm, where dust storms and domestic abuse made her life miserable. The 1870 census shows that Caty and Lige had returned to South Carolina and were living with her parents.

Lt. John Long

 Around 1872, Caty married Billy Long, the son of a Confederate soldier named John Ezekiel Long (1826-1905), who was a 1st Lieutenant with the 4th S.C. Volunteers and fought in the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) that began the Civil War. On the morning of July 21, 1861, Lt. Long's unit bravely thwarted a Union flanking move on Matthews Hill—ensuring a Confederate victory and signaling that the war would not end quickly.
 Caty and Billy Long had four sons and four daughters while also raising "Lige," who inherited his father's temper and often did not get along with his half-siblings. Caty died of tuberculosis at age 57 in 1904, and Billy Long died at age 65 in 1914. In her will, Caty left the Moore homeplace to her daughter, Janie Long Ellison; perhaps because she didn't trust Lige to manage it well. She left Lige just one dollar, and he vowed he would never touch it.
 In 1887, 20-year-old Lige Callahan married 18-year-old Carrie Elizabeth "Lizzie" Black, the daughter of a Confederate veteran. She had Native American blood, and many of their children had black hair and dark complexions. Their five oldest children were born in a cabin on the Moore farm, and the rest were born in the town of Piedmont. Today they have dozens of descendants, including including Mitchells, McCalls, Hoopers, Robinsons, and Callahans. 
 Like many men of his generation, Lige went to work in the new cotton mills that sprang up quickly across the South. The Piedmont Manufacturing Company opened in 1873 on the banks of the Saluda River, and the town of Piedmont grew up around the mills. (Seven years later, the nearby mill town of Pelzer was founded by Ellison Adger Smyth, who probably was one of the cadets who fought at Moore's Farm.)

 The 1910 census lists Lige as a cotton mill slasher living at 2 Anderson Street in Piedmont. (A slasher operated a machine that starched the fabric as the yarn was woven.) The address probably should be Academy Street, which was a driveway connecting Anderson Street to the town's original school.
 Most of Lige's children also worked in the mill, and none of them made it past seventh grade in school. 

Lige Callahan's 6-room house still stands
 at 2 Academy Street in Piedmont

 In the 1920 census, Lige was listed as a mill operative living at 2 Academy Street, and in 1930, he was a carpenter living on McElrath Street, near the iconic footbridge that connected the Piedmont mills until it was destroyed in a 2020 flood.
 Lige became a skilled carpenter, even though he was handicapped by a clubbed foot, could not read, and had a weakness for alcohol. He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, played the fiddle, smoked a pipe, raised a garden, and kept a pet goose that would fly to meet him when the mill whistle sounded at the end of his shift.
 In 1910, Lige told the census that he was born in South Carolina (perhaps protecting a family secret), but in 1920 and 1930 he said his birthplace was in Texas. One family tradition said he was born in Sherman, Texas, a town on the Oklahoma border. 
 Lizzie Callahan suffered a stroke at age 53 in 1924 and was in a wheelchair until she died in 1930.
 When 70-year-old Lige Callahan died of kidney disease at Greenville's St. Francis Hospital in 1937, he had 28 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. His son Dub filled out Lige's death certificate, verifying his father's name, James Callahan, and his birthplace in Texas, without specifying the town. Lige and Lizzie are buried at Shiloh United Methodist Church, about a mile south of the Moore family homeplace and just a few yards away from what is now the northbound shoulder of I-85.
 Their sons were:

1. Jim Callahan (1888-1960), possibly named for his Yankee grandfather, never married, taught himself to read the Bible.
2. Tom Callahan (1895-1950), known as the best weaver in the Piedmont Mill.
3. Donald "Dub" Callahan (1903-1960), made a career in the Piedmont Mill, became a 33rd-degree Mason like his father, married Anna Hunnicut and had one son.
4. Elijah Callahan Jr. (1911-1994), a carpenter who married Faye White, had two children. When little Ligia was 12, he repaired a broken fiddle for his father. 

 Their daughters were:

1. Minnie Mitchell (1891-1973), eloped with Henry Mitchell and raised 10 children on a farm in Greenville County. I'm grateful to her great-granddaughters Heddie Fogle Adams and Shannon Owens Wyatt for sharing the family history and helping me cross-check details.
2. Fannie Hooper (1892-1930), married a mill co-worker named William Hooper, died while giving birth to her sixth child.
3. Hattie Robinson (1893-1985), eloped with co-worker Chris Robinson, raised 10 children in Lige's old house at 2 Academy Street in Piedmont.
4. Lessie Fleming (1897-1973), married World War I veteran Henry Fleming. They spent much of their life in Florida and the Charlotte area.
5. Ressie Patat (1901-1966), married Emory Patat. They raised four children in Athens, Ga.
6. Dessie "Det" McCall (1905-1966), married Cleo McCall, who was a sailor in World War II, settled in Pickens County.
7. Mary Callahan (1908-2001), stayed in Piedmont to care for her mother and father in their last years, then worked in the mill.
8. Kate Callahan (1914-1923), named for her grandmother, died of diphtheria at age nine.

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