Twentieth Century Magnolia

By the 1900s, Magnolia’s gardens were well established as Charleston’s premier tourist attraction.  The owners of the early century -- John Grimke Drayton’s daughter, Julia Drayton Hastie, and then her son, C. Norwood Hastie, a banker and financier-- devoted their efforts to maintaining the gardens as the Reverend had created them. “Nobody in those days ever thought of doing anything except having things as they always were,” explained Sara Hastie Low, C. Norwood’s daughter, in an interview December 2004.  Every February 15, the gates opened to thousands of visitors, who wandered the garden’s winding paths and marveled at its otherworldly beauty.  And every May 15 the gates closed to the public until the following year.  Magnolia was still very much a private estate, and though their fortunes had greatly diminished since the Civil War, in the first part of the century the Draytons recovered some trappings of an aristocratic lifestyle.  They split their time between town and a summer cottage and lived at Magnolia six months of the year, as a family home.

“Growing up, the feeling of Magnolia was magic, really, it was wonderful, I had the best of all possible lives,” Ms. Low remembers.  Though facilities were primitive – wooden iceboxes, no telephone, intermittent electricity generated on the property – the family employed many servants to make life at Magnolia more comfortable.  With a staff of sixty tending to the labor-intensive tasks required to keep the estate functioning, the family was able to maintain a high standard of living.   By the 1920s, Magnolia’s public popularity and growing fame had made it an important focal point in the cultural rebirth later called the Charleston Renaissance.   

During this time, Magnolia played host to some of the era’s most colorful celebrities.  C. Norwood Hastie had married Sara Simons Calhoun, a vivacious, outspoken girl nearly twenty years his junior.  Worldly Sara -- who is said to be the first woman in Charleston to drive a car -- had traveled widely in the Northeast and in Europe, and when the lovely riverside estate on the Ashley became her home, she brought the social whirl of the jazz age to Magnolia.

“The entertaining at Magnolia was endless,” Ms. Low recalls. “And the house looked beautiful because my mother filled it with flowers three times a week.  It was divine.”  Visitors included literati from Somerset Maugham and Louis Untermeyer to Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay, musicians like George Gershwin, financiers like Henry Ford, English dukes and duchesses, and American politicians and their wives, including Eleanor Roosevelt.  Young Orson Welles paid a visit, “on his cane and being very theatrical. He was so fascinated that the next year he came back again!  My mother was a fantastic hostess, that’s what made Magnolia so marvelous.  They had wonderful food, and they had a great deal of fun, and my God, they’d stay late.”

Between glamorous parties, gardening played an important role in the Draytons’ lives.  Also resident at Magnolia was Marie Clinton Hastie, C. Norwood’s sister.  She had been a great favorite of her grandfather, the Reverend John Grimke Drayton, and she inherited his green thumb.  “My aunt Marie was a great help to my mother,” Ms. Low says, laughing, “because my father acknowledged at the outset that he had no taste whatsoever. And when things began to look funny would they please do something about it.  So my aunt Marie and my mother, who both had terrific taste, went around and said oh that looks terrible, it’s wrong.  They did an awful lot about rearranging things to make them look better.”  Thrown from a horse at the age of seventeen, Marie spent much of her life in a wheelchair, but her work in the gardens helped maintain her high spirits, and she made significant contributions to garden design and maintenance during this period.  Marie Hastie also wrote a history of Magnolia that, despite its romanticized perspective, remains a useful reference to this day. 

When C. Norwood Hastie died in 1951, he left the Magnolia property jointly to his sons – Ms. Low’s brothers -- C. Norwood Hastie, Jr. and John Drayton Hastie.  From 1941 until 1975, Norwood Hastie and his wife Charlotte managed the plantation, maintaining the gardens’ annual tourist season and establishing a large professional nursery, which sold plants raised at Magnolia to customers throughout the South. “It was a more peaceful place when we lived here,” Charlotte Hastie recalls.  “Serene.  It was just a lovely, beautiful, quiet garden.”

Norwood’s worked diligently to preserve the garden, and he focused especially on enhancing Magnolia’s collection of Camellia japonica.  Norwood developed a sophisticated Camellia breeding program, and he introduced hundreds of new varieties to the garden.  By the end of his career, he was a well-respected expert on the subject, and his writings on camellia cultivation are still commonly reprinted in professional journals, forty years after they were first written.

By 1975, the local economy was quite different from what it was just after WWII, and it was clear to Norwood that Magnolia needed to change to keep up with the spirit of the times.  The nursery industry had begun to favor larger-scale operations, and Magnolia, always a specialty nursery, wasn’t able to effectively compete.  Norwood and his brother decided that Magnolia’s best strategy for the future would be to shift its focus away from the nursery business and more fully embrace its potential as a public attraction.  After all, Magnolia had been the first tourist attraction in Charleston – it was the oldest public garden in America – and the rest of Charleston had finally caught on to the economic potential of this nascent industry.  Magnolia should broaden its public appeal, and if it was to do so successfully, the commitment to change would have to be bold, decisive, and unflinching.  The older Norwood felt it was time for him to retire, and his younger brother, with his background in business – specifically in media, first radio, then television – would be the one to help Magnolia grow into the new role cast for it by the modern world.

In 1975, John Drayton Hastie bought out his older brother’s share with a plan to make Magnolia nationally relevant again, just as his parents had done in the 1920s.  He sought to broaden the appeal of the site while continuing to preserve its historic charm.  He would enhance the grandeur of the place by highlighting the gardens’ history and improving the site; and he wanted to raise the gardens’ national profile.  Magnolia -- open only during the Springtime since 1870, and appealing mainly to lovers of flowers -- would become a year-round destination, a multi-faceted site that could interest to all members of the traveling public.  To accomplish this, J. Drayton Hastie Sr. -- almost of retirement age himself – threw himself into the work with unflagging passion and enthusiasm. 

“Drayton was an entrepreneur,” his sister-in-law says.  Initially following in his father’s footsteps as a banker, Drayton Hastie worked on Wall Street during the Great Depression, at one point being the youngest registered representative on the New York Stock Exchange.  He served as a lieutenant, then as a captain, in the Pacific theater during World War II.  Having married Fernanda de Mohrenshieldt, granddaughter of William Gibbs McAdoo, former Secretary of the Treasury and founder of the Federal Reserve, Drayton Hastie returned to New York finance after the war.  But soon the siren song of Charleston called him home.  As president of Reeves Telecom, he became a pioneer in radio and television broadcasting in the Lowcountry.  In 1950 Hastie’s radio station, WUSN, aired Charleston’s first black program, Duke Ellington’s “The A-Train.”  Later, his television station, WUSN Channel 2, featured Mary McNeil, the area’s first black commentator.  WUSN-TV was also known for its innovative advertising -- its elephant mascot, “Susie-Q of Channel 2,” became a popular attraction.  Lowcountry families often brought their children to the station to ride on her back.

Hastie officially retired from Reeves in the late 1960s, and though he worked for the company in various capacities until 1979, he turned the focus of his entrepreneurial eye to the family business: Magnolia.  His avowed goal, he said in a 1990 interview, was to “make the gardens more beautiful every day, every year,” and to create an attraction that held interest for “every member of a traveling family.”

Drayton Hastie brought numerous innovations to the gardens.  “He always wanted to make it color all seasons,” his wife, Fernanda Hastie, says.  Drayton Hastie added more than 200 varieties of flowering shrubs to the gardens, including a large number of camellia sasanquas, which create a glorious bloom in the fall and winter months.  The Garden, heretofore designed only to provide bloom during the Spring months, evolved tremendously during his tenure.  If there was a month at Magnolia that passed without flowers, Hastie would find a plant that would bloom at that time, and then plant it by the thousands.

He and his wife also conducted extensive research into the property.  “We pieced it all together after quite a bit of time,” Mrs. Hastie recalls.  “We wanted to be very careful not to exaggerate.”  They moved into a house adjoining the Magnolia property and opened the main plantation house to the public, for the first time, as a historical tour.  “We got tired of people peeping in the windows,” joked Hastie.  “So we figured we’d better let them in to have a look.” 

Additionally, Drayton Hastie added family-friendly attractions like the Maze, made of Camellia sasanquas and hollies instead of the usual boxwood, and a Zoo & Nature Center, where native and plantation animals can be viewed at close range.  He also laid out several specialty gardens, including the Barbados Tropical Garden and the Biblical Garden, which he dedicated to the generations of religious-minded caretakers of Magnolia’s sprawling Garden.  Picnic areas and a playground beneath the oaks rounded out the package, making Magnolia an attractive destination for the entire family – including pets.  Dogs on leash are welcome at Magnolia.

Drayton Hastie felt strongly that Magnolia’s natural heritage – its marsh, lake, river, and swamp environments-- be shared with visitors.  Once an avid hunter, in later life Hastie became a fierce animal activist.  Setting aside all of Magnolia’s 500 acres as a wildlife refuge, he developed a network of canoe trails through the former rice fields, built a wildlife observation tower, and introduced the “Nature Train,” which carries visitors through the plantation on a guided wildlife tour.  He established a weekly naturalist-guided bird walk to introduce guests to some of the 200-plus avian species sighted at Magnolia.  Year-round residents include the Anhinga, the Bald Eagle, Eastern Screech Owl, Carolina Chickadee, and numerous types of ducks, herons, and egrets, all of which nest on the property.

Drayton Hastie also created the unique Audubon Swamp Garden.  Named for John James Audubon, another early visitor to Magnolia, the Swamp Garden encompasses a network of dikes and boardwalks that allows visitors access to the mysterious tupelo and cypress swamp and its resident turtles, alligators, and waterfowl.

Drayton Hastie’s plan to reinvigorate Magnolia Gardens, and to share them with the public, worked.  Fifteen years after he took the reins, the number of annual visitors to Magnolia had grown from 5000 to 150,000.  But in 1989, Hurricane Hugo struck the gardens a devastating blow.

“We knew there was going to be bad weather,” Mrs. Hastie remembers.  In the middle of the night an enormous oak tree crashed through the ceiling, “so we jumped out of bed.  Pitch black dark, and of course water pouring in like Niagara Falls.  Drayton looked out the window and said oh we’ve been ruined, or something like that, it was very terrible.  And he got some garbage cans and he bailed, we started bailing out the water.”

In the morning, “Magnolia was an absolute mess.  You could hardly get over there.  It was really very shocking.  Near the greenhouses it was just like tenpins, all the pine trees.  And many trees down in the bridge pond, they were impossible even to look at.  Where you walked in the camellia garden was so bad I thought that will never, never come back.  It took over three years to clear that area.  Covered with trees and branches and broken bushes.  I think it is absolutely amazing it has come back the way it has.”

Magnolia Gardens’ recovery was largely due to Drayton Hastie’s perservering spirit.  “It was tough on him but we just all faced it, you know, all the workers on the place.  We were very worried, but you just go on,” Mrs. Hastie says.  Drayton Hastie launched an enormous general cleanup, even hiring helicopters to pull tree trunks and other debris from inaccessible areas of the gardens.  Though it took years to clear the gardens entirely, and in some places damage from the hurricane can still be seen, within ten days of the storm Hastie had reopened Magnolia to the public.  “He was always that way, he plunged ahead,” Mrs. Hastie says.   “He fought the battle, brought it all back.”