How three headstones tossed in a Marine Corps pool are making their way back home

For a time, the Fripp and Jenkins families interred at St. Helena Parish Chapel of Ease rested in relative peace.

They were buried alongside other historic families — the Chaplins, Perrys, Popes — who’d worshipped at the small Episcopal church in Frogmore from about 1740 until 1861, when the congregants all but abandoned St. Helena Island with the arrival of Union forces. And for years after, they were largely undisturbed — by the Northern troops who trained on the land, the Methodist freedmen who later found refuge in the church, even the forest fire that finally turned the chapel to ruins.

But that changed one day in about 1960, about 100 years after the cemetery closed.

Two infants’ tombstones quietly disappeared from the grounds and turned up miles away at the bottom of a Marine Corps training pool, along with a third headstone stolen from Stoney Creek Presbyterian Church just outside Yemassee.

William Benjamin Jenkins, three months. Died 1851.

Mary Rose “Minnie” Fripp, eight months. Died 1854.

Dr. Thomas Woodward Hutson Sr., 68. Died 1871.

The rest of the story is fuzzy.

Why did the vandals steal tombstones at all, let alone those of two infants?

Did the men hail from Marine Corps Air Station-Beaufort or Recruit Depot Parris Island, or did they trespass on the base?

Tommy Logan, chairman of the nonprofit Stony Creek Presbyterian, said he’s seen vandalism before, particularly by apparent practitioners of Gullah juju. He once found a large piece of velvet in the middle of the cemetery, surrounded by candles, covered in burnt cigars, money and playing cards. Five or six years ago, he found a small, slain goat.

But “nothing like taking the headstones,” Logan said. “They (the thieves) were probably up to no good, out drinking and cutting a fool.”

No one is sure why, but then-Beaufort County Coroner Roger Pinckney X kept the relics at his home workshop on Beaufort’s Pigeon Point Road until he died. They remained there until September, when the Pinckney family began cleaning the yard for an upcoming wedding and decided headstones did not fit their decor.

Soon, a relative reached out to Kimberly Morgan, a Beaufort historian and recent headstone-whisperer, who’s been tracing the history of unmarked cemeteries at the Beaufort air station.

Months later, she’s found there’s little record of the young Jenkins and Fripp children, and no known descendants of their parents. The tombstones, however, have been cleaned and delivered to the Parish Church of St. Helena in Beaufort, which is responsible for the Chapel of Ease today. Parish historian Robert Barrett hopes to place them in the chapel cemetery in the coming weeks.

He says he’ll lay them flat to deter vandals like those that struck the Sheldon Church in Gardens Corner in 2012.

As for Dr. Thomas Woodward Hutson, a little research yielded a goldmine.

“It’s like the spirits made the Pinckneys call me,” she said.

Home at last

Charlotte Hutson-Wrenn’s phone pinged on Christmas Day as she ate brunch with her 94-year-old mother in Charlotte, N.C..

It was a Facebook message from a stranger — Morgan — who said she had the tombstone of her great-great-grandfather.

“I went, ‘No, that can’t be right,’ ” Hutson-Wrenn recalled. “For a second, I couldn’t remember.”

Hutson-Wrenn knew who Morgan was referring to.

History is a constant in her life. The Charlotte artist paints in the Gullah style, something she says resides in her spirit and comes from the “collective ancestor world” of her descendants and the generations of black women who served them.

Her family has kept alive the story of its patriarch, William Hutson, an Englishman born in 1720 who became the first pastor of Stoney Creek.

Thomas Woodward Hutson was his great-grandson, born in Beaufort in 1803. He studied medicine in New York before returning to Stoney Creek until the “late war” pushed him to Aiken in 1893, where he continued to heal and preach.

What Hutson-Wrenn couldn’t remember was that her cousin, a history fiend like Morgan, had learned of the graveyard theft and added the detail to a cemetery records website, where he’d also posted a depiction of the prominent doctor and a copy of his obituary, which spoke of “bright character and scrupulous integrity.”

“Ancestors call on you to tell their stories,” Hutson-Wrenn says, and Mike Hutson heard that call clearer than most.

When she double-checked the website, the Charlotte painter was overjoyed to find that Morgan was right.

“It happens and it’s tragic, but it’s been returned. So that’s more important to me than the theft,” she said.

But she never got tell her cousin the good news. A week later, she learned he died suddenly on Thanksgiving after a short illness. He was buried at Stoney Creek a few weeks ago. Thomas Woodward Hutson’s headstone will follow as soon as Logan settles on the best way to re-set it.

On Friday, Hutson-Wrenn said she believes her cousin may still have played a part in guiding the marker’s caretakers to her.

“There was some serendipity, because Mike would have been so happy,” Hutson-Wrenn said. “... There are legions of ancestors thrilled to have him home.”

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 5:46 PM with the headline "How three headstones tossed in a Marine Corps pool are making their way back home."