For the next 45 years, the sealed cabin at the end of the row stood where Augustine Ravenel had left it. Henrietta Ravenel, who lived until the winter of 1907, never spoke of it. Her surviving children, Clotilda and Augustine Jr., grew up knowing only that their father had ordered the cabin sealed because of fever and that it was not to be touched. When Clotilda married a Charleston physician in 1868 and moved away, she did not look back at it. When Augustine Jr. inherited the plantation in his mother's last years, he did not look at it either.
The cabin was whitewashed a second time in 1881 during a general repainting of the outbuildings and a third time in 1899 when the plantation was first put up for sale. Each time the workmen were told by the estates overseer, an old man named Clayborn Huger, who had served the Ravenals since before the war, that the cabin was to be painted over but never opened. Clayborn Huger died in 1906. He took what he knew with him. Decades passed.
The fields grew up in pine saplings and broom sedge. The main house, grand in 1849, settled and sagged on its foundations. By 1908, the plantation had changed hands again and was in the hands of a timber company out of Savannah that had no use for it except to harvest the last of the live oak and pine, and then subdivide the rest for small farms. The timber company hired a local foreman named Edgar Fripp to tear down the outbuildings and Edgar Fripp hired a crew of five men.
On the morning of October 27, 1908, that crew came down the old packed-earth lane between the rows of collapsed cabins and arrived at the one at the end of the row. The one whitewashed three times, standing slightly apart from the others, the one no one in Beaufort County could remember ever having seen opened. Edgar Fripp, a practical man not given to superstition, told his crew to knock it down. He did not know about the wall built on the inside. He thought it was just another slave cabin of which there were dozens on dozens of abandoned plantations up and down the coast and that it would come down in 20 minutes.
The first blow of the crowbar against the outer wall of the cabin came just after 11:00 in the morning. The plank splintered easily. The wood was old cypress cut from the river bottom 60 years before, and it gave way with the dry crack of something that had been waiting a long time to fall. The second blow took down a second board. The third exposed what at first seemed to be a second wall, perhaps 18 inches behind the first, nailed up from the inside with boards of the same cypress plank, seams sealed with black tar, hardened to the consistency of stone.
The men paused. They had all seen the outside of the cabin whitewashed three times over, but none had expected a second wall. Edgar Fripp stepped forward, ran his hand along the inner wall, pulled back his fingers, and smelled them. Then looked at Solomon Pinkney, the oldest man on the crew and the only one who had been alive in 1863. The younger workers, who had started the morning joking about how quickly the job would go, had fallen completely silent.
One, a man named Jessup, took off his hat and began to turn it slowly in his hands. Another, the youngest, a boy of 19 named Caleb, stepped back from the cabin without seeming aware he was doing it. The autumn light fell slant through the pines. Somewhere in the distance, a mourning dove called three times and stopped. Solomon, who had been waiting for this moment for 45 years, said nothing.
He took the crowbar from the younger man nearest him, walked up to the inner wall, set the bar against the seam between two boards, and pulled. His hands, grown old on their own schedule, were shaking. He had to set the bar a second time to get leverage. When the board finally came loose, it came away with a long tearing sound, like cloth being torn in half. The smell that came out was not the smell of fever, nor of any illness Edgar Fripp had encountered in his 41 years.
It was the dry, dusty, faintly sweet smell of something sealed in darkness for nearly half a century, carrying the particular and unmistakable weight of the human dead. It was, Edgar Fripp would later say in an interview, never published, a smell a man could recognize, even if he had never smelled it before, because some part of the human mind knew it the way the body knew hunger or thirst. Solomon Pinkney, who had smelled it before in the hospitals of the war years, took two steps back from the opening and sat down on a fallen log. His face had gone gray. Edgar Fripp ordered the crew to stop.
He sent the youngest worker, Caleb, running on foot two miles through the pinewoods to the nearest telephone at the general store at Green Pond with instructions to call the Beaufort County Sheriff and the county coroner. Then Edgar Fripp and Solomon Pinkney and the three remaining men sat down on the ground 20 feet from the cabin and waited. No one spoke. Solomon, according to an account later given to a reporter from the Charleston News and Courier, took off his hat, held it in both hands, and did not put it back on for the rest of the afternoon. Jessup, a Methodist, prayed quietly under his breath.