The Wright Stuff

Hidden away deep in the Lowcountry is a rare architectural gem with the unusual name Auldbrass. The only project in the South designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Auldbrass' 326 acres lie along the Combahee River, near the town of Yemassee, and are dotted with buildings displaying the trademarks of Wright's distinctive aesthetic - steeply angled walls, pagoda-like cupolas, delicately milled exterior woodwork, on low-lying structures that seem rooted in the soil and surrounding landscape.

Window detail, staff quarters

Auldbrass was the 1938 brainchild of lumber magnate Leslie Stephens, who assembled parts of several old plantations that had fallen into disrepair (he used the name of one of them, Old Brass, for his new venture) and asked his fellow Midwesterner Wright to design what Stephens envisioned as a modern "plantation" for hunting and outdoor recreation. Wright, always sensitive to the terrain into which his structures would be inserted, was fascinated by the grounds' many live oaks and mimicked their twisting trunks and branches by designing building walls that leaned inward at an 80-degree angle. He used cypress for much of the exterior cladding of the main house, guest house, stables and kennels, further tying the structures to their surroundings, and even designed downspouts based on the Spanish Moss that festooned the property.

courtesy Anthony Perez

Ambitious in conception, Auldbrass was never fully completed. World War Two and its shortage of building materials halted construction until the late 1940's, and by Wright's death in 1959, only the main house, guest cottage and a storage barn had been built. At Stephens' death in 1962, his daughter and son-in-law struggled to maintain the property, opening it to tours and getting it placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Sold to a lumber company in the early 1970's, the property deteriorated due to its high maintenance costs until the Beaufort County Open Land Trust managed to find a buyer willing to place a conservation easement on the property and undertake a full restoration.

The Wright-designed swimming pool

The new owner was, and still is, film producer Joel Silver ("Who Killed Roger Rabbit", among a long list of films), a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. Silver, who bought the property in 1987, has ever since been working to fully realize Wright's original conception and has generously allowed the Open Land Trust to offer tours over three days in the fall of every odd-numbered year to support the organization's mission. This year's dates haven't been announced as yet and the property is not open to the public at any other time, hidden away in Lowcountry solitude.

Tea Season

"There are few hours in life more agreeable," Henry James once observed, "than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." Charleston in the spring is happy to oblige James' opinion with the many church tea rooms that appear between Easter and the start of downtown's Spoleto performing arts festival in late May.

The tea room tradition can be traced back seventy-five years ago, to 1948, when a group of women belonging to Old St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in West Ashley were tasked with cleaning out the church's sanctuary, long neglected due to falling attendance at Sunday services. The ladies fortified themselves each day with homemade box lunches and jugs of iced and hot tea.

Old St. Andrews tea servers, c.1974

Soon passersby began commenting on the delicious sandwiches and pastries on view. The fundraising possibilities were not lost on the women, and soon a tea room was established to raise money for refurbishing the sanctuary. The idea caught on at other churches, and today these seasonal tea rooms raise thousands of dollars for philanthropic purposes or for church repairs.

In addition to enjoying such Lowcountry delights as ham biscuits and okra soup, hummingbird cake and Lady Baltimore cake and Tipsy Pudding, the tea rooms offer a relaxing way to visit some of downtown's historic churches and help maintain them. If you'd like to experience this unique and charming Charleston tradition, here are churches offering tea rooms this spring:

• The St. Phillips Tea Room, 142 Church Street: April 29 - May 4. Monday-Friday 11:30am to 2pm. 843-722-7734 stphillipschurchsc.org

• Second Presbyterian Church, 342 Meeting St., May 20 - 26, Friday-Saturday, 11:30am-2pm and Sunday, 12:30-3pm. 843-723-9237. 2ndpc,org

• Grace Church, 98 Wentworth St., May 27 - June 1st and June 3 - 8, 11:30-2pm. 843-723-4575 gracechurchcharleston.org

(Photos courtesy the Post&Courier and Charleston Magazine)

Blue Bloods

With spring now well underway, our beaches become prime destinations for a host of newly active marine life, from nesting loggerhead turtles to migrating red knots. Often overlooked, though, are the animals that have lived on earth longer than almost any other species - horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), which begin coming ashore in great numbers during the late spring and early summer to mate and lay eggs.

A horseshoe crab fossil from the early Triassic period

They aren't crabs, of course, but arthropods related to spiders and scorpions, which first appeared in the fossil records of 400-million years ago, surviving shifting continents, ice ages and dinosaurs to earn the nickname "living fossils." Despite their formidable appearance, especially the long whip-like tail, horseshoe crabs are harmless and stingless. The tail is used to right themselves if they become flipped over by surf.

Red knots and other migrating birds depend on the crabs' fat and protein-rich eggs to bulk up before continuing on to summer nesting sites; loggerheads, particularly egg-bearing females, prey on them for their calcium-rich exoskeltons. And humans have harvested them as fertilizer and cattle feed, but

Copper gives the crab's blood its distinctive blue color

especially prize them nowadays for their copper-laden blue blood, which contains a chemical used as a component of vaccines and intravenous medicines to detect toxic impurities. If you've received any vaccination or infusion, you have horseshoe crabs to thank for the drugs' safety.

Our Atlantic horseshoe crabs belong to one of four species found throughout the world. Along with their useful blood, another unique feature is a set of ten eyes - two compound eyes on the top of the shell, with more photoreceptive cells than any other animal, and eight simpler eyes around the shell's perimeter which are sensitive to the length of daylight and to ultraviolet light, giving horseshoe crabs exceptional night vision and allowing them to minimize predation by being most active at night.

In May and June, especially on full-moon nights, males and females come ashore in great numbers to mate. Each female lays about 4,000 eggs in each of multiple nests she digs in the sand between high and low tide marks. Two to four weeks later, the hatchlings claw their way out of the sand at high tide, to be carried out to deeper water where they'll live on the seabed during multiple moltings as they grow to adult size.

Harvesting for biomedical use

Although horseshoe crabs are not considered endangered, harvesting them for their blood is somewhat controversial, even though only a third of the blood is removed from each animal before it's returned to the ocean, where the lost blood is regenerated in about a week. But disrupting populations on beaches and tidal marshes, however temporarily, can affect the food supply upon which other migrating and nesting species depend. South Carolina's DNR and federal wildlife officials are considering denying permits for harvesting at the Cape Romaine Wildlife Refuge to the north, and permanent bans are in place on several islands that form part of the ACE Basin to the south. With spawning season just around the corner, harvesting's future continues under negotiation.