Elizabeth Covan Grier: A Coastal Matriarch of the Waccamaw

Elizabeth Coven Grier (1800-1873)
Restored from a tintype portrait by Josh Dukes
Elizabeth Covan (1800-1873)—known in her family as “Betsy”—was the only child of Mary Tillman and a Frenchman identified in family records as Mr. Covan. Her early life was shaped by both loss and continuity. Her father died when she was very young, and after her mother remarried, Elizabeth was largely raised by her grandmother at Petersfield Plantation. It was there that she spent her formative years.

Family lore preserves a story about her parents’ courtship. At a Halloween gathering before her marriage, her mother Mary Tillman is said to have seen in a mirror the image of a dark-haired young man leaning on an open trunk. Months later, while traveling north with her mother, she reportedly encountered both the trunk and the man in a store. The two later met again at a ball and were soon married. From that union came Elizabeth, their only child.

Elizabeth herself was born on a wet and stormy night. On that same night, James Marion Grier—then married to his second wife—was returning from business upriver and sought shelter from the storm at the Covan plantation. There was no room in the house, so he was accommodated in a warmed washroom. The following morning, he asked to see the newborn child. He held her, asked her weight, kissed her, and went on his way. Fifteen years later, he married her.

Elizabeth was married three times over the course of her life, with James Marion Grier being the first. He was a merchant in Georgetown and owned a large rice plantation on the Waccamaw River, as well as a summer house on North Island. Though he maintained an overseer on the plantation, he primarily lived in Georgetown.

One of the notable events during Elizabeth’s married life was the great storm of September 1822, remembered locally as “the big storm.” On Election Day, her husband had traveled by sailboat from North Island to Georgetown. As the storm intensified, he was unable to return. Meanwhile, on North Island, residents from smaller cottages sought refuge in the Grier house and the lighthouse. Waves battered the house throughout the night, and most other houses on the island were washed out to sea. Only the lighthouse, the Grier house, and one other sheltered structure survived. The house creaked and groaned under the force of wind and water but held together.

All three of Elizabeth’s husbands were wealthy, and each left his property to her. As a result, she had ample means. She married second to George Gibson (1788-1847) and third to Thomas Duke (1786-1855) She had several stepchildren, whom she loved dearly, but only one biological child—her son, Thomas Rothmahler Grier, later known as Squire Grier.

Thomas Rothmahler Grier and wife Margaret Johnson Grier
Restored from two original tintypes by Josh Dukes
In her later years, after the death of her last husband, Elizabeth was persuaded to break up her household and move to the home of her only son, Thomas Rothmahler Grier. Her stepchildren urged her to remain at Petersfield and promised to manage the plantation for her, but she chose instead to move. 

She left her house furnished just as she had lived in it, intending that her son would send for the furniture. He did not, and the old home later burned, destroying its fine furnishings—pieces that were remembered as valuable and of great quality.  By that time, Elizabeth was herself a grandmother. Her own grandmother, blind and elderly, lived with her during these years. Elizabeth provided her care until the old woman’s death.

Elizabeth Covan Grier’s life bridged generations and eras—born into a world of plantation society, married into coastal mercantile wealth, and later presiding as matriarch of a prominent South Carolina family. Though the surviving account preserves more family memory than formal record, it offers a portrait of a woman who inherited, endured, and sustained a family line through wealth, widowhood, storm, and change.

Source: Memoirs of Judith Grier (manuscript donated by Stan Barnett, descendant of Judith Grier).

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