The Horlbeck family of Charleston, where a downtown alley bears their name, is sharing a family legacy that dates back to 1764 and the city’s early expansion within a robust British empire.
Their history includes the Horlbeck brothers, John and Peter, who signed a 1768 contract with a London stonemason to acquire architectural features for the Exchange Building, the first of many colonial-era structures they designed and built in Charleston.
Another set of Horlbeck brothers, John and Henry, in 1817 bought Boone Hall Plantation, where they lit fires in antebellum kilns to bake millions of bricks that built the Lowcountry from clay dug near Horlbeck Creek. The kilns cooled when their source of free enslaved labor dried up after the Confederate’s lost the Civil War.
During that war, Charlestonian Henry Gerdts mailed an Aug. 27, 1863, letter to his wife, Wilhemina Gerdts, in Athens, Ga., where she and their daughter Alice found refuge during the Union’s siege of Charleston. In the letter, he told her he saw the CSS Hunley, describing the Confederate submarine as a “fish-like thing.” After the war, Alice married John Schnierle Horlbeck.
These are some of the eye-popping accounts that leap from thousands of meticulously-preserved and time-stained photos, letters, diaries and legal documents that the Horlbeck family recently has donated to the South Carolina Historical Society (SCHS).
Six generations of historical records
The Charleston City Paper is the first media outlet to review the trove of history that forms an unbroken chain of six generations of Horlbeck’s family presence, including a peek into the lives of people they enslaved, sold and later employed at Boone Hall.
Barbara Horlbeck and her younger sisters, Joan Horlbeck and Ellie Horlbeck Thompson, all of whom have longtime family ties to Charleston, donated documents and family mementos to the SCHS, which is expected to open the Horlbeck Family Collection later this year to researchers and genealogists.
The collection is currently protected in gray archival boxes stacked on the shelves in a cool, climate-controlled room in the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston. The papers were scattered through the Horlbeck family home on Wadmalaw Island where the Horlbeck sisters feared they could be lost to mice, hurricanes and humidity.
“I knew we had a lot of old important family papers, but they were tucked in different places” throughout the house, Barbara Horlbeck told the City Paper. After their mother, Ellie Greene Horlbeck, died in April 2025, the sisters realized they needed to donate the papers to the historical society, Horlbeck said.
John Adam Horlbeck, (1729-1812), the younger Horlbeck brother, is the sister’s fourth-generation great-grandfather. He and his brother, Peter, arrived in Charleston in the mid-18th century from Saxony, present-day Germany.
“Everything was saved [apparently to satisfy] a sense of recording the story of where you come from” and even to document the mundane events of daily life in Charleston, Horlbeck said. “There is also that German thread of preserving history. I have a bit of that in me,” Horlbeck said with a chuckle. She is a retired college-level art historian who works as a global study leader for the National Trust of Historic Preservation.
SCHS’s Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth Chew said “we are grateful to the Horlbeck family for entrusting (us) with their remarkable collection. Very rarely does such a group of materials come down through the generations intact. The Horlbecks have long possessed the archival gene.” The collection, she added, documents the family’s influence on South Carolina history.
Although the first Horlbeck brothers quickly assimilated into the Charleston society, they wrote letters in German to relatives in Saxony, said Virginia Ellison, SCHS’s director of collections and chief operating officer. A detailed and large volume of papers don’t surface often, she said. “The way they passed it down from generation to generation” makes this collection unique, she added.
After Ellison and Molly Silliman, SCHS’s senior archivist, met with Horlbeck at the family’s Wadmalaw home, an appraiser recruited Charleston archivist and author Harlan Greene to assess the collection’s significance.
After the collection was moved to the SCHS’s headquarters in the Fireproof Building on Chalmers Street, Greene touched every item in it.
“This is not one of the largest I’ve ever seen,” said Greene, who wrote a 60-page summary of the collection. “But it certainly is one of the largest family collections to emerge in a generation,” he said.
Greene said he was impressed with “all of the hard-to-believe and little-known vignettes of enslaved people that (surges) out of these documents.”
Interesting stories
One of those stories involves an enslaved couple faced with a secret that could cast doubt on their daughter’s fate as she matured into adulthood.
In 1840, Charleston magistrate Daniel Horlbeck wrote to a friend to share the story of a “Negro man who approached the mayor with a story he wanted to confess.”
Many years before, the man’s wife and two of their children were sold to a new owner. At the time of the sale, the mother did not carry their six-month-old daughter, Martha, to the auction block, assuming the baby would soon die of the measles. But Martha lived.
For the next 17 years, her mother concealed Martha somewhere on the Charleston Neck, away from White people. The father was compelled to reveal the secret to the mayor, fearing his daughter would soon be an adult and have no White owner and no proof she was free. Her parents knew people would ask about her status and whether her original owner had been cheated from the income due him, if she had been sold along with her mother.
Daniel Horlbeck offered a solution. Even though he was impressed with the parents’ honesty, integrity and love for their daughter, he suggested they find a good owner for Martha and come up with the money she would bring on the market. In the interim, the city took “possession” of her. Greene said this document in the collection and others like it suggest “the kind of materials that will trigger historians to do more research to fill in fuller stories.”
Finding ancestors at Boone Hall
The Rev. Louis Jefferson, pastor of Triumph Church House Ministries in North Charleston, said the collection has “the weight of gold, and it means a lot. It will bring about an understanding to voids” in his family’s history when there are no records to verify events at Boone Hall.
“My auntie, Viola Jefferson Shiver, was born over there” in the 1930s in one of the brick slave cabins that line the entrance to the property, Jefferson said. He remembers her happy childhood memories of Boone Hall. Her parents worked at Boone Hall. However, Jefferson said his wife Alice McKnight Jeffeson’s ancestors lived at Boone Hall before 1865.
Damon Fordham, an author and adjunct professor of history at The Citadel, said when the collection is available he will comb through it to learn more about his family. His great-great-grandparents, Jackson and Selena Maxwell, were enslaved at Boone Hall, he said.
So many of the stories of Black Charlestonians, Fordham said, are lost to the graveyard. This collection, he said, “is of major importance (to) piece together what we can find from the generations that are no longer with us.”
A generation after Fordham’s ancestors were enslaved at Boone Hall, his great-grandmother Rebecca Maxwell took his mother, Pearl Maxwell Fordham, to the fields at Boone Hall to pick tomatoes. The work provided extra money, he said, during the Depression when business was slow at the family’s general store in Mount Pleasant, operated by his great-grandfather James Buchanan (J.B.) Maxwell.
A resource for the future
Barbara Horlbeck said slavery was “a horrific institution, but in the 21st century we can make (the collection) available so people can learn from it.”
Horlbeck said her father, Frederick Henry Horlbeck, inherited many of the papers from his parents. In the last few years of his life before he died at age 95 in 2023, she started to clean and organize them.
Hearing the family’s oral traditions as a child makes her ancestors’ stories part of her present. Last fall, when she walked through the old Horlbeck family plot at Magnolia Cemetery she looked at the names on the headstones and she knew who they were.
She said she regrets she didn’t meet them, especially Daniel Horlbeck, who she credits with saving much of the family’s history. As she recently looked at his headstone, she said, “Thank you, thank you, for saving this. Thank you, Daniel.”
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