Philip Simmons and Pearl Fryar Garden

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The Philip Simmons and Pearl Fryar Garden is located at the rear of St. John's Reformed Episcopal Church (ca. 1850)

"This project represents an artistic collaboration between Charleston's master blacksmith, Philip Simmons, and Pearl Fryar, a self-taught topiary artist from Bishopville, South Carolina."

We do not think that Reverend John Bailey Adger, who organized the construction of the building, was an avid gardener. In My Life and Times he does mention the garden of his aunt, Agnes Adger Law. A wealthy woman who held seven human beings in chattel slavery in 1860, she funded the building of "Law Hall" at the Presbyterian Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. The seminary was built on the grounds of the Ainsley Hall mansion, known today the Robert Mills House in honor of its architect. (Ainsley Hall was a family connection of Reverend J. B. Adger's sister-in-law Margaret Hall Moffett, the wife of William Adger)

Agnes Adger Law wandered the streets of Columbia the night that Sherman's troops burned it to the ground, and Reverend J. B. Adger noted that:

"Where my aunt passed the next day and night she could not herself tell, and it was only on the second or the third day that some friends found her wandering through her old ruined garden, and she was, by them, removed to rooms in the Seminary building, which had been vacated."

Left destitute, she died shortly thereafter.

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