Meeting Street Memories: The Poyas-Mordecai House of 69 Meeting Street
By Peg Eastman
The historical marker on the Poyas-Mordecai house captures neither the true significance of the Poyas family nor the prominence of its subsequent owners. The house is located on Lot No. 89 of the Grand Modell of colonial Charles Town, purchased in 1720 by Daniel Bourget. After his death in 1770, the spacious lot passed to his daughter Rachael and her husband, John Earnest Poyas and their four children.
Poyas was the son of Huguenot émigrés Jean Louis Poyas and Marie Jourdain, who arrived in the township of Purrysburg in 1732 as part of a group of German and Swiss Protestants. He moved the family from their perch on the banks of the Savannah River to Charles Town in the 1740s, where he operated a mercantile business on East Bay St. Capitalizing on his connections in the backcountry, he built up a prosperous trading company and left an estate that included 1,200 acres in Granville County. John Ernest Poyas also acquired several lots and houses in Charles Town through his marriage to Rachael Bourget. During this time, he represented St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s parishes in the First S.C. Provincial Congress in 1775 and from 1776 to 1778.
A largely forgotten patriot, Poyas lent £41,171 to the state during the Revolution but paid dearly for his politics after Charles Town fell to the British. He was arrested with other prominent citizens, put aboard the Sandwich and sent to St. Augustine, in the Loyalist colony of British East Florida, where he lived in exile from August 1780 to July of the following year. He was later sent to Philadelphia with fellow political exiles, finally returning to S.C. in 1782 where he represented the city parishes in the S.C. House.
Locally, he was commissioner of the workhouse and markets and of the poor for Charleston, tax inquirer, assessor and collector for St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s parishes as well as fire master and commissioner of the streets. He died “much respected” in 1786 and is buried in St. Philip’s churchyard.
Between 1796 and 1800, the patriot’s son, Dr. John earnest Poyas, M.D., built a three-and-a-half story stuccoed brick single house situated atop a high basement on the property he inherited from his grandfather Bourget. Designed in the Adamesque style, the house features high ceilings and boasts an elegant second-floor drawing room with cypress wainscot and delicate gesso work in the fireplace mantle, cornice frieze and door surround.
Dr. Poyas was elected to Charleston City Council in 1791 but declined to serve. He did serve on the vestry of St. Philip’s and was buried in the churchyard after his death in 1824. His estate included a plantation and brickyard in St. Thomas’ and St. Denis’ Parish, a schooner and numerous slaves. His home at 69 Meeting St. passed to his widow, née Catherine Ball Smith, a descendant of colonial Landgrave and Governor Thomas Smith.
The house was sold from her estate in 1837, advertised as “having six upright and two garret Rooms (double Piazza fronting the South) with a two-story Brick Kitchen, Carriage House, Stable, and other outbuildings, all of Brick.”
The purchaser was Moses Cohen Mordecai. A Charlestonian by birth, Mordecai was “the most prominent Jewish Charlestonian of the 1850s and 1860s,” according to author Robert Rosen. He owned the Mordecai Steamship Line, which was heavily involved in extensively in importing fruit, sugar, coffee and tobacco from the West Indies. Politically, he represented Charleston in the General Assembly in the state House and state Senate. His influence extended to every aspect of the community.
He was a director of the Southwestern Railroad Bank, the Charleston Gas Light Company), the South Carolina Insurance Company and the Farmers’ and Exchange Bank of Charleston. He was vice president of the Charleston Ancient Artillery Society, a member of the Charleston Board of Health, captain of the Marion Artillery, a member of the Committee on Civic Improvements, warden of police, commissioner of markets, a delegate to the Augusta commercial convention and commissioner of pilotage.
From 1857 to 1861, he served as president of the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue on Hasel Street. In the 1840s he favored the installation of an organ in the new sanctuary, thus siding with the Reform faction of the congregation.
In 1851, with Ker Boyce and B. C. Pressley, Mordecai helped launch the Southern Standard (later the Charleston Standard), a Unionist newspaper that rejected separate state secession and promoted political cooperation in Southern states.
Although opposed to war, when South Carolina seceded, Mordecai supported the Confederate cause. At the onset of hostilities, his steamer Isabel, named for his wife, removed U. S. Army Major Robert Anderson from Fort Sumter after the famous battle on April 12, 1861. Both the Isabel and his schooner J. W. Ladson were outfitted for blockade running.
In February of 1865, the Columbia City Council appointed Mordecai “food administrator” to sustain its starving citizens. Later that year he and 20 other community leaders were authorized to discuss S.C.’s return to the Union with President Andrew Johnson.
Financially devastated by the war, Mordecai left his Meeting Street mansion never to return and moved to Baltimore, where amazingly he reestablished Mordecai & Company and operated a steamship line between Baltimore and Charleston.
With his finances restored, in 1871, he collaborated with Amarinthia Yates Snowden and subsidized the return of 84 South Carolina soldiers lost in the battle of Gettysburg. Mordecai was blind for the last 18 years of his life and died in Baltimore on December 30, 1888.
In January 1884, brothers James Savage Murdoch, John Hamilton Murdoch and Rollo George Murdoch, bought 69 Meeting St. and lived there until they died. During the war, James Murdoch was a successful blockade runner. Brother John, when only 13, helped a Confederate general escape to the mountains of North Carolina, where young John foraged for the desperate general.
After the war, James Murdoch was an executive in the American Manufacturing Company. There is a marble tablet on the north wall of the former Confederate College dedicated to James Murdoch and a bronze tablet in his memory in the Charleston Library Society.
John Hamilton Murdoch exported cotton, and brother Rollo George was a partner in the Valk and Murdoch ironworks. The Murdochs were also leaders in cultural and philanthropic projects and are credited with bringing to Charleston musical and dramatic celebrities.
When the earthquake of 1886 devastated Charleston, the elegant Charleston Club building just north of 69 Meeting St. was destroyed and replaced by a park. John Hamilton Murdoch thus was freed of the Charleston tradition of “north side manners,” of not putting windows on the side of the house overlooking the neighbor’s yard. He installed windows on the north side of his house, overlooking the park.
Although the two brothers never married, the descendants of John Hamilton Murdoch lived in the mansion until 1966 when Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Evans. purchased it.
The mansion made the news in 1966 when a Moorish Revival-style wooden outbuilding on the lot, probably built by Mordecai, was razed to make way for a straight drive to a back lot being sold to John C. Wilson. The Moorish Revival style was employed in several Charleston buildings in the 1850s, notably in the Farmers’ and Exchange Bank at 141 East Bay, designed by architect Francis D. Lee and built in 1853-54. Mordecai was a director of the bank at the time, raising the possibility that Lee designed the outbuilding for him.
In 2000, the grand town house was filmed in the blockbuster movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. And in 2017, it made the papers once again when Bob and Sue Prenner sold it for $5.35 million.
My appreciation to Bob Stockton, Lish Thompson, Elizabeth Gay, Wally Davis and Sandy Taylor for contributing to this article.
A Charlestonian by birth, Margaret (Peg) Middleton Rivers Eastman is actively involved in the preservation of Charleston’s rich cultural heritage. In addition to being a regular columnist for the Charleston Mercury she has published through McGraw Hill, The History Press, Evening Post Books, as well as in Carologue, a publication of the South Carolina Historical Society.
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