© D.McK
THE PRINGLE HOUSE
Royal governors have visited here; invading generals have made the house headquarters in two wars; it was twice besieged; a famous beauty left its doors and was lost at sea; and even Josiah Quincy was impressed by its hospitality. But there are new roses every springtime on the garden wall....
The Pringle House
If tradition has any influence upon its own children, your true Charlestonian should be a violently proud person, who votes with a flourish, as a Signer would vote; who looks aloft—not at the sun—but at the spires of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s, and seeing them in their proper places in Charleston’s profile, knows that the world again revolves; who makes horrid faces regularly in the direction of Fort Sumter; who cheers “Huzza!” at the lightest mention of General Francis Marion; in short, who conducts himself generally in an extremely historic manner.
He has none of these gestures. He dines at mid-afternoon, goes amiably about his affairs, is aristocratic to a degree and in the same degree is gracefully hospitable. In the center of one of our country’s most fertile areas of dramatic action he is not theatrical. It bothers you, for example, if he happens to be a Prioleau and you are passing the Huguenot church which a Prioleau founded in 1685, that he has no appropriate expression of Seventeenth Century piety.
If Charleston really knew what was expected of her in dramatic ritual she would do all those things. Happily Charleston does not know, or she might exploit and become odious. Instead she watches the cloth-of-gold roses climb the courtyard wall and is much more concerned with the forthcoming blossoms than with the ancestor who planted the roots. She has a back-drop as glorious as an old tapestry, but it is hung where it belongs—back. She attends St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s for today’s devotions and tomorrow’s salvation, which are the richer for yesterday’s haunting footsteps. And only Charleston can truly appreciate—though the rest of the nation may admire and cherish—the old square house in King Street whose red-brick walls and shining white portico are framed by ancient trees at the curbing; the house Miles Brewton built; the house Charleston knows as the “Pringle House.”
Miles Brewton was not primarily a soldier. His father and his grandfather had been for forty years custodians of gunpowder in Charles Town, but the colony’s preliminary fighting had mostly been done by that time. When the combined forces of the Kings of France and Spain were driven out of the harbor forever in 1706, the colonists settled back to a half-century of peaceful commerce. The powder magazine on Cumberland Street was not often called upon to repel the invader, and the powder receiver’s duties, though honorable service, were not over-exacting.
So Miles came into the dual inheritance of a quiescent military tradition and an active fortune. Naturally enough, since he had just married Miss Mary Izard, his thoughts turned on building a house; his taste suggested a beautiful house; his wealth permitted a house which Josiah Quincy described as “superb, ... said to have cost him 18,000 sterling.”