A builder friend and fellow bird hunter donated incorrectly ordered new glass square windows that Ben wanted to incorporate into the house. The idea resulted in a grand cupola over the dining area that enchants while letting in even more natural light.
Although Ben Kelly’s children are all grown up now, you can almost hear the sounds of youthful laughter and the scuffing of chalk on a blackboard echoing inside the timber-appointed walls of his Bamberg family retreat. If those walls could talk, they might tell you how the oldest male students gathered wood and stocked the school’s potbellied stove or that the floorboards creaked loudly when walked on. That’s because Ben’s sanctuary — and hunting lodge — is the loving restoration of an early 20th century rural school for African American children. “Often while turkey hunting, I would see the old school set in the woods next to a now abandoned church,” Ben says. “Every time I drove by, I thought it was a beautiful building. I wondered about its past. I hated to see part of history disappear.”
As it turns out, the school was built under the auspices of the aging church next door, the Claflin United Methodist Church of Branchville. Its 20-something congregation ceased holding services in the ailing building around 2020, leaving it empty and sadly vulnerable to the ravages of time and the elements.
Pamela Murdock-Huggins, a member and lay leader of the current church, says the old church was originally established in 1872 as Hickory Hill United Methodist Church. It transitioned into Claflin United Methodist Church in 1929. She is not certain when the congregation actually constructed the school, but many African American churches in the early 1900s built their own small schools. “During that time, if you lived in the area, you went to the Claflin School,” Pamela says. “There were no school buses, so the children all walked to school in a single file.”
Pamela’s first cousin, Ruthie Murdock Williams, now in her mid-80s, began attending the school in 1949, when she was 5 years old. “I remember the Claflin School as a two-room, wood building that hosted first through seventh grade,” Ruthie told Pamela. Each classroom had 20 to 22 students.
“There were two teachers,” Pamela says. “Miss Nolia Kearse taught first through third grade. She was from Midway, South Carolina. Vera Leven, from Branchville, taught fourth through seventh grade. No restrooms existed in the old school building, only outhouses. It was very scary to use the outhouses in the springtime because the students were afraid of snakes being in there!”
Asked to recall anything she remembers from attending the school, Ruthie commented that each day began with devotions and recitation of Bible verses. The teachers concentrated the curriculum on reading, writing, and math, but occasionally taught some science and geography. At the end of the school year, the students would stage a play, and the parents would come see them perform on a stage that was built into the larger of the two classrooms.
Pamela says the school closed in 1955 after a man named William Carter bought an old school bus to ferry students to the nearest public school — Richard Carroll Elementary — in Bamberg. That school is still in operation today.
After the Claflin School closed, it was purchased by a former local S.C. House of Representatives member named Thomas Rhoad. The building sat empty for a few years, and then a family lived there, using it as their primary residence for four or five years. After the family moved out, Rhoad eventually used the declining structure to store tobacco.
By the time Ben made inquiry into purchasing the derelict building, Rhoad was prepared to let it go for just $1,000. Ben bought the building and four years later made arrangements to have it moved about a mile and a half away to his property, where he had taken up temporary residence in an old sharecropper’s house which he used as a makeshift hunting cabin. He says friends would visit and offer to work on the shack during downtime between hunts on his sprawling, fecund property.
Not much was accomplished but fun was had. As he began plans to renovate the schoolhouse, Ben was determined to maintain the structure’s integrity as well as honor its history. He conducted a great deal of research on the area and the time period.
“I am a South Carolina history buff and a Lowcountry history buff. I have never taken on a project like this,” he says. “I was able to get a picture of the original church building from the S.C. Insurance Archives. It was insured through the state insurance system. I was so happy to find it.” The school site, it seems, had been fairly barren while the school was in use. “They used to sweep the lawn. There wasn’t a blade of grass on it!”
Taking Shape
Being a broker, developer, and principal at NAI Columbia with more than 30 years in the commercial real estate industry, Ben knew many contractors qualified to do the heavy lifting of physically transforming the building into a home, but chose a local craftsman, Lowell Fralix, who was willing to source and transform reclaimed materials to complete the project. And while he had ideas and knew what he liked, he wanted a professional to make the inside stunning.
So, he called longtime friend Steven Ford of Steven Ford Interiors. “I have known Steven for a long time and used him on several projects in the past,” Ben says. “I thought he was the best one to put it all together. He has been to the property several times, and I thought he really got the vibe of it.”
Steven immediately appreciated the diamond in the rough. “When I first saw the house, it was empty. All the wood had been finished,” he says. “Ben wanted usable bathrooms for guests, and he wanted them to look updated but not out of place. That was our goal.”
Steven’s first order of business was to establish a color scheme that would enhance and flow throughout the interior. Steven knew it had to include some hue of blue for multiple reasons. Ben is a Citadel graduate and a lover of Bulldog blue. Also, indigo was a staple crop in South Carolina’s history, so blue gives a nod to that as well.
“Personally, for me, there is a lot of wood, but it’s my job to make that wood look like a million bucks. You need color to break up all the wood,” Steven says. “I chose colors based on Ben’s likes. We have used blue before, and I really liked it.” The interior designer marvels at the array of family heirlooms scattered throughout the house, including mounted ducks that Ben hunted as a child placed high above the fireplace. “These are little pieces of history,” he says. “Those things look good with the period of the place, balanced out with functional things that still look like they could have been there.”
An 1860s rocking chair that Ben found truly looks at home in the living room. “He brought the rocker in here and said, ‘Can you fix this?’” Steven says. “We had it recovered. It turned out even better than we anticipated, introducing color with its linen fabric.”
Making Do
Much of the wood from the original school building unfortunately was in various stages of decay and could not be used in the renovation, but Ben was resolute about using as many reclaimed materials as possible to complement the spirit of the structure. “I didn’t want any Sheetrock,” he says, “so we used wood reclaimed from several sources, including several old barns Lowell sourced and salvaged in and around Bamberg.”
Serendipitously, Ben was able to obtain some exquisite wood beams recovered from the Republican Meeting House in Aiken, circa 1802. Those beams are prominently featured in the ceiling of the living room, as are recovered scraps of heart pine. The mantelpiece over the fireplace is a reclaimed, hand hewn cypress beam from a former sharecropper’s home on the property. Ben was able to reclaim a large amount of shiplap from the school which was taken down, planed, and reused. Ben enjoys pointing out the greenish paint layers visible between the refinished slats, noting that Steven dubbed that color “public school cafeteria green.”
Ben also delighted in preserving a portion of the school’s original tin roof, which provides a charming-yet-subtle outcropping visible just beneath the high ceiling of the living room. Most of the lodge still has its original pine floors, and the ceiling is original.
“I wanted to save all the windows, but they were too expensive to rebuild,” Ben says. “They were shot.” Accordingly, new windows were installed throughout while saving the original high transoms on the front. Ben added transoms not original to the school but consistent with the original structure. A good builder friend and fellow bird hunter donated misordered new glass square windows that Ben wanted to incorporate somehow into the house. That idea resulted in a grand cupola over the dining area that enchants while letting in even more natural light.
In describing the project, Ben sounds a lot like an architect, comfortably conversing in language of the trade. He notices every construction detail and pursues ways to design authentic elements into the structure. “I really am just a frustrated engineer,” he says.
The refurbished retreat features a traditional hunting lodge-inspired living room, replete with a gigantic fireplace that covers most of one wall, a large wrought iron chandelier, and handpicked furniture — some family favorites as well as other items selected for their aesthetic compatibility with the time period. The kitchen is a chef’s dream with high-end appliances, a muted blue slate color scheme, a farm sink looking out of a tranquil wall of windows to the forested outside, and a massive island with quartz countertops. In honor of the building’s roots, Ben installed a blackboard with chalk and an old-timey pencil sharpener along one wall facing the kitchen. It is one of Steven’s favorite features in the house.
The home has three bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom. One of the bathrooms features a striking claw-foot bathtub that was unexpectedly discovered and salvaged from woods on the property and restored. All of the bathrooms have modern walk-in showers tiled in slightly antiquated hues reminiscent of old country living. The closets are lined with intoxicatingly fragrant cedar.
Steven feels fortunate that Ben trusts him to make design decisions, giving him virtual carte blanche to bring the home to life. “I always say in my career that some people give you a lot of freedom. Others have tight parameters,” he says. “Ben is a man who has done a lot of thinking on things. He is decisive. He will say up front if he doesn’t like something. He is very direct but respectful. It’s quite an interesting house, and I really enjoyed working on it.”
According to Ben, the structure’s renovation has been a labor of love spanning nearly a decade. He says, in fact, that it remains a work in progress as he ponders adding a mother-in-law suite and other new elements. Ben plans to keep the property in the family and use it primarily for family gatherings and small hunting parties, but he also will use it and its outbuildings, including a massive, refurbished storage barn, for occasional company retreats. Additionally with Claflin Church now abandoned, he would like to see it repaired in place and used again for worship services.
Asked how much he invested in the transformation, Ben chuckles. “I don’t want to know because my business side might come out,” he says. “There are so many intangibles. Really, I couldn’t quantify.” Ben hunts turkeys about six weeks out of the year and joshes that he often has company on those outings. “The joke is I don’t have many friends until turkey season!”
