Sarah Friday's 1810 Granby Drawing
Friday Arthur House
Some recent work was completed to figure out the original land plats for the Arthur Plantation, which grew to almost 650 acres before it was sold in the late 1890s. By then, it seems the Arthur family name had become almost extinct in this area. Archaeologist Jim Michie must have been doing work on the old plantation land just before the construction of the museum. I don't think he was digging, but he noted that ceramics were everywhere on the ground.
Although no old plats were found for the Arthur property, references to it showed it being 350 acres and adjacent (south) to a Guignard plat. The 1839 Guignard plat is very nice. It shows the new Columbia Bridge (Gervais St) and the Old State Road going to a point a block below the bridge. This was the Columbia Senate Street ferry site. The plat shows the old State Road (exactly where it is today) and the Road to Augusta. These roads split apart at the northern end of Granby. Plats had already been put together for the area below the Arthur property, which included land for the Friday family. When you consider the adjacent Friday properties and the length of the Guignard property, the rectangular area between them is exactly 350 acres, so this, very likely, shows the original Arthur land.
Hargrove (the most well-known of the Arthurs) was only two years old when his parents were killed by Indians in Virginia. His older brother William (older by 25 years) apparently raised Hargrove and brought him to the area in the 1770s. William may have been attracted here by the heroics that occurred at Fort Congaree II and the handling of the Indian problem. William married the daughter of Martin Friday. Martin originally owned all the Friday property. By the 1820s, it appears the Fridays had all left, and the Arthurs had acquired their property because the Arthur cemetery was created at that time on what was originally Friday property.
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