The difficulties and setbacks encountered by the little band were most harrowing and discouraging, but at last they reached the shores of what was to them the promised land, and disembarked at Charleston, South Carolina, April 14, 1764, from which city they made their way some 300 miles into the interior of the State where their grant was. Their difficulties were by no means over; indeed, to them it seemed sometimes as if they were only begun. The wild rugged wilderness where they were to establish themselves, they called by the names they had left in their beautiful France, New Bordeaux and Abbeville, and they set to work to clear land and plant the cuttings of grape-vines to make wine, and the cuttings of mulberry to carry on the manufacture of silk, which were their industries at home. It is hard for us now to realize what they had to encounter and endure--wild beasts, Indians, difficulties of transportation, of transforming the big trees of the forest into lumber suitable to building houses; but all these they conquered. They built homes, they planted vineyards and orchards and mulberry-groves, and succeeded in the manufacture of silk with their spinning-wheels and hand-looms. There is at the old home place in Abbeville now one of the little spinning-wheels with which the silk was spun, that the colony sent with pride as a gift to be made into a dress for the royal wardrobe of the Queen of England.
My great-grandfather was a man of executive ability and strength, with that personal charm which made him intensely beloved and revered by his little flock; and they prospered as long as he lived, but, alas, his life was cut short by an unfortunate accident. He had brought with him from France a devoted and capable attendant, Pierre Le Roy, who in this wilderness filled many and diverse offices; he delighted to vary the often very limited diet of the pasteur by preparing for him dainty dishes of mushrooms with which he was familiar in the old country. There are many varieties here unknown there, and any one who knows this delicious but dangerous vegetable, knows how easily confounded are the good and the poisonous; the deadly Aminita resembles very closely one of the best edible mushrooms; we know not exactly how, but one night the dainty dish proved fatal to the great and good pasteur, and his flock was left desolate in August, 1773, just nine years after their arrival in the New World.