JOSEPH MELLICHAMP, BLUFFTON'S DEERTONGUE DOCTOR
Gillisonville, the frontier crossroads town in St. Luke's Parish, where Joseph Hinson Mellichamp was born in 1829, would become the Beaufort county seat in 1840. Twenty-five years later the town would be burned by General Sherman's troops, along with Beaufort county's records, which had been loaded onto wagons to take to Columbia. Luckily, the Mellichamps, had moved years before to James Island, near Charleston, where his father, Stiles Mellichamp, became minister and rector of Saint James church on James Island.
Mellichamp graduated from the college of South Carolina with a concentration in literature, and then graduated from the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston in 1852. Upon graduation he came to Bluffton, where he was invited into practice with a young physician named James L. Pope. Mellichamp practiced with Dr. Pope for two years, before leaving for Europe to broaden his education and his horizons. He spent considerable time in England, Germany, Switzerland and six months in Dublin at Trinity College. Afterwards he spent a year in Paris, returning to Lowcountry in 1856, as a man of culture, on an English ship, as its physician.
Within a year or so after his return to Bluffton, Joseph married Sarah Elizabeth Pope, the sister of his business partner, James. When James became ill and died soon after, Mellichamp inherited his busy practice, tending to the medical needs of the wealthy planters and their dependents, which included the enslaved plantation work force. Dr. Mellichamp lived on Bridge Street, behind the Heyward House.
Though his skills as a doctor brought him success and notoriety, his true love was for plants. He spent countless hours foraging in the woods along the May River bluff for specimens and new discoveries. Mellichamp's tireless botanical studies of the insect-digesting Pitcher Plant, earned him the honor of having a variety of the species named for him. In a letter written to a friend, Mellichamp shows his articulate and passionate regard for nature and specifically for a local plant referred to as deertongue; "While returning from Savannah River alongside the sandy bluff I find Trilisa odoratissima, the deertongue, with its tall purple spikes, some of them deeply colored. I wondered at the great number of large and brilliant butterflies hovering over, and overhead the autumn sky all producing a sense of exhilaration and happiness".
Deertongue, as a plant was known, grew plentifully in the sandy soil around Bluffton, and Mellichamp gathered it on his long walks and dried it for sale to the perfume and the tobacco industries. Deertongue probably provided the first commercial industry in Bluffton, and there was a major buying center in nearby Statesboro, Georgia. The tobacco companies, in a practice that was not revealed until many years later, ground the dried plant and blended it with tobacco to produce an aromatic vanilla-like flavor. The practice was stopped in the 1970s, when it was discovered to have carcinogenic characteristics.
In 1895 Dr. Mellichamp was visited in Bluffton by the famous naturalist, John Muir, who spent an afternoon with Mellichamp talking in front of a blazing fire. Later, Mellichamp would visit the Muirs in California, where he experienced the "sequoia big trees" that he had always yearned to see.
As one of Mellichamp's colleagues eulogized after his death, "He was beloved by the poor people of the district who in a touching way mourned in the loss of their old doctor as his body was borne to the grave." A street in Bluffton is named after Mellichamp, and he is buried at the side of his wife, Sarah, at the St. Luke's churchyard in Pritchardville.
Kelly Logan Graham is the Executive Director of the Bluffton Historical Preservation Society, which owns and operates the Heyward House Museum, which is the official Welcome Center for the Town of Bluffton.