Jean de la Gaye, a French Huguenot immigrant purchased 250 acres on the marshes of Battery Creek where around 1736 he began building a home for his young bride, Catherine Gautier. The house was built using tabby construction. Tabby is a type of concrete made by burning oyster shells to create lime, then mixing it with water, sand, ash and broken oyster shells.
Jean de la Gaye returned to France in 1769 after the death of his wife and upon his death the property was sold at auction. General Stephen Bull purchased the Retreat, and in 1798 it was given to his daughter, Sarah Bull Barnwell as a wedding gift.
In 1828 it passed to John Gibbs Barnwell II, one of the leading figures of early Beaufort. His younger sister Ann married the Rev. Edward Tabb Walker who bought the property shortly after their wedding in 1844.
At the start of the Civil War, the Rev. Edward Tabb Walker, Ann and their family of nine children fled to Walterboro. Legend has it that when Union soldiers arrived at the Retreat House, they pillaged the house and in doing so they found a bible hidden beneath the floorboards. Upon learning that the house belonged to a minister, the officer in charge spared the home from destruction.
At the end of the war, Retreat Plantation was offered for sale for taxes by the Federal government, as were many Beaufort properties. John Gibbs Barnwell II bought it back for the family for $8 and returned it to Edward Tabb Walker for the same amount.
Rev. Walker occupied the house again until moving to Edgefield as rector of Trinity Church and the property passed to his youngest child, Edward Barnwell Walker and his wife, Elizabeth Guerard Heyward of Savannah. A small dairy was put into operation, but soon life became hard for the young couple and by 1912 their poverty had become so intense that the house was no longer habitable. After the death of Edward Barnwell Walker in 1926 the house passed to his four surviving children, but they never occupied the home.
By 1938, when it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. James Sturdevant, the house and grounds had fallen into almost total ruin. The Sturdevants restored the property and sold it to Bronson Lamb in 1949 who added the ground floor kitchen.
Antonio Ponvert, a retired Cuban sugar plantation owner, purchase the property and added the formal gardens to the side of the house. B.G Pinckney and his wife Anne purchased 150 acres of the Retreat, including the house, in 1965 after being Mr. Ponvert’s caretakers for 10 years. They completed the restoration and added the second floor master suite as well as the sunroom and back porches.
Eventually the Pinckney’s sold part of the Retreat property to a developer but maintained a large portion of their original tract on which several generations of Pinckneys still live. In 2015, Mrs. Anne Pinckney donated to the Open Land Trust, a conservation easement protecting forever the remaining undeveloped portion of the Retreat, which consists of nearly 50 acres.
From the Fall 2015 Open Land Trust Newsletter…
“Mrs. Anne Pinckney recalled when she and her late husband moved to the Retreat, they had no neighbors and could count on one hand how many docks they could see when gazing across Battery Creek towards Wright’s Point and Port Royal. As time marched on, things began to change. The Pinckney’s cattle and horses and the fields they roamed were replaced with planted pine trees for timber production. They went from having no neighbors to many and the hands of five men would not be enough to count the number of docks visible from their bluff.” Josh. B. Bell, Stewardship Director
pinckneyretreat.org 