William Gilmore Simms was a native South Carolinian who gained far-ranging literary acclaim in his day as the most prolific southern antebellum writer. Hailed as the man of letters of the Old South, Simms garnered the respect of readers in the North and South, including such contemporaries as Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper. Simms’ versatility and talent were evidenced in some seventy-two book-length works, including novels, short story collections, poetry, drama, literary criticism, essays, history, and biography. Among his better known works are The Yemassee, his most popular Indian novel; The Partisan, the first of seven Revolutionary War romances; Richard Hurdis, one of his eight Border Romances; and The Wigwam and the Cabin, A Collection of Short Stories. In later years, following the Civil War and after his death, Simms’ works fell out of favor.

His biographer, John C. Guilds writes: “Alone among American novelists of the nineteenth century, Simms perceived a national literary need, sensed his capability to fulfill it, developed a plan to attain it, and lived to complete it. Simms had vision, commitment, intensity, and perseverance—ingredients without which sustained literary accomplishment of first magnitude is impossible. Relatively early in his career, in 1845, Simms articulated his mission for artistic fulfillment with precision and comprehensiveness, and throughout his life he remained constant to that mission, neither altering its formulation nor wavering in his commitment. Simms’ vision of America depicted in his fiction extends from sixteenth-century Florida (Vasconselos and The Lily and the Totem); colonial South Carolina (The Cassique of Kiawah and The Yemassee); the Revolutionary War (Joscelyn, The Partisan, Mellichampe, Katherine Walton, The Scout, The Forayers, Eutaw, and Woodcraft); through the trans-Mississippi migration in the early nineteenth century (Guy Rivers, Richard Hurdis, Border Beagles, Confession, Beauchampe, Charlemont, Helen Halsey, The Wigwam and the Cabin, the Cub of the Panther, Voltmeier). To Simms, his writings about ante-colonial America, the English colonies, the Revolutionary War, and the rampaging frontier were part of a sustained, interconnected literary saga. He traced the development of American national consciousness through four centuries in two dozen books which, taken together, form a powerful, intense, highly readable epic and constitute a unique national literary treasure. Though Simms’ achievements are various and varied—his poetry [see “Among the Ruins”] in particular is important for both historical and aesthetic reasons—his vision of an American literature by Americans found its fullest expression in the novel; and it is here that his immortality is assured.”

Recent research by a core of southern scholars has revived interest in and appreciation of the writings of Simms. Since 1952, there have been a number of publications issued that support Simms’ prominence as a nationally significant author including six volumes of his letters, a collection of his poems, a biography and a series of critical publications about his work including Long Years of Neglect and William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier by John C. Guilds and The Poetry and the Practical by James E. Kibler, among other related works.

After the burning of Woodlands, the Simms and his family tried to farm the property with little success. William Gilmore Simms, Jr. eventually became Clerk of Court for Barnwell County in 1883. At the end of the century, Woodlands was rented to the Hunter family. It was not until the 1920’s that members of the Simms family tried again to live at Woodlands but were, again, unsuccessful. In 1930, the property was rented to the Ridge family. In 1940, the family once again reclaimed the property.