MINIS COLUMN: Lowcountry logger a self-starter, provider

Claudia Varnish heard her father tell the story of how their church came to be where it is. She found the details told about New Emanuel AME's beginnings fascinating. The story he told from his hospital bed one Tuesday in December reminded her that someone in the family should interview him and record what he knew for posterity.

"I was just sitting there amazed at how much he knew," she says.

He talked about who donated land for the new church building, when it was constructed, where the old church building, now reconstructed behind the new one, had been. She also learned that her dad, an expert chain saw operator, had cleared the land for the new church.

Varnish felt a sense of pride while listening to her father talk about the church congregants in Jamestown, their tiny community 21 miles northeast of Moncks Corner.

Varnish didn't know that her father, 85-year-old Harry Whitaker, would not be able to speak in a matter of hours. Then, on Dec. 30, Whitaker, who was born Nov. 7, 1926, died. She never learned about the family's Goose Creek roots or why it moved to Jamestown.

"What we did not get out of him that Tuesday, it was too late," she says. "We dragged our feet."

Still, she does have great memories of a father who was a self-starter and a quick learner and cared for his family well. He was a logger who sold pulp wood to area lumber yards. He put the farming skills his father taught him to work raising corn and watermelons.

Still, there were lean times.

"Sometimes we didn't have food on the weekends and my father would go fishing and go hunting to get deer meat for us to eat," Varnish says. "He would kill a hog as a way for us to have food to cook. He did a lot of fishing in the Santee River, catching bream, cleaning them and frying them."

He also taught many young men in his community how to hunt deer and squirrels, she says.

"There is a chair he would sit in. He used to sit there watching his hunting dogs outside. You go to the house now and the chair is vacant."

Varnish longs to know more about ancestors such as Dan and Susan Whitaker, her father's parents, and Sam and Georgianna Courtrair, his mother's parents. Most of all, she longs to hear her father telling their stories from his perspective.

There's a saying: When an old person dies, it's like a library has burned.

Varnish knows all too well what that means.

Reach Wevonneda Minis at 937-5705 or wminis@postandcourier.com.