Floride Isabella Lee Calhoun: A Legacy Rooted in Southern History

Basic Information

Early Life and Lineage

Floride Isabella Lee Calhoun was born as the American landscape was still recovering from the Civil War. She was born in New York City in 1870 or 1871 into a Southern political and cultural powerhouse tradition. The only grandchild of Thomas Green Clemson, who founded Clemson University, and the great-granddaughter of U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun affected decades of national discussion.

Her mother, Floride Elizabeth Clemson Lee, died during Floride Isabella’s infancy, leaving the child to be raised within the wider network of the Clemson and Calhoun families. The death of her grandfather in 1888, when she was a teenager, thrust her indirectly into the turbulence of one of the most significant inheritance cases in Southern educational history: the lawsuit surrounding the Clemson estate and the future of Fort Hill.

Even from a distance, her youth was touched by the gravitational pull of family legacy. Her great-grandmother, Floride Bonneau Calhoun, left her $15,000 in 1866—a sizable inheritance that symbolized not just wealth but expectation. In a sense, she was a seed planted in the soil of her ancestors’ ambitions.

Anchored in Family: The Calhoun and Clemson Connections

The story of Floride Isabella’s life is fundamentally a story of interwoven family lines—threads knotted together across generations of marriage, property, and Southern identity.

Core Family Network

Her marriage in 1895 to Andrew Pickens Calhoun II, her second cousin, further entwined the Clemson and Calhoun branches. Such marriages were common among elite Southern families seeking to preserve property, traditions, and social standing. Their union produced children who continued the family’s geographic and cultural migrations—from New York to Texas, and from Texas to Georgia.

Her household appears to have revolved around the quiet responsibilities of lineage: maintaining family properties, participating in inheritance settlements, and preserving the legacy of Fort Hill. Where her ancestors’ names rolled through the halls of Congress or the corridors of diplomacy, Floride Isabella’s influence pooled in more intimate spaces.

A Private Life and a Single Published Song

Compared to the public thunder of her ancestors’ careers, Floride Isabella’s own achievements took a gentler form. Records indicate no formal profession; instead, she appears to have lived a domestic life shaped by family obligations and inherited wealth.

Yet she did leave behind one creative fingerprint: her authorship of the lyrics to the song “The Hills of Home.” Set to music by Oscar J. Fox and recorded around 1930, the song captured a wistful longing for Southern landscapes—a fitting sentiment from a woman whose identity was rooted deeply in the past. With its lines describing the ache for distant hills and familiar earth, the piece echoes the experience of someone who grew up between regions and across the fault lines of post-war America.

The song was performed in art song circles, published in music collections, and circulated in early recordings. It remains the sole documented example of her artistic expression.

Geography of a Life: From New York to Texas to Georgia

Floride Isabella migrated across the map like Southern families adapting to new economic circumstances. She lived with her husband and children in San Antonio, Texas, circa 1901, according to census and regional records. Texas had long attracted Calhoun family landowners and cattle ranchers.

By the 1910s and 1920s, she and her family were back in the Southeast, maintaining ties to Georgia and South Carolina. Atlanta became her final home, the city where she died on June 4, 1935, at age 65.

Her remains were cremated, and though records note she is buried at Woodland Cemetery in Clemson, the exact location is ambiguous—possibly unmarked, a quiet resting place amid generations of Calhouns and Clemsons.

Descendants and the Echo of Heritage

Though Floride Isabella lived a largely private life, her descendants bore forward the weight and legacy of their heritage. Her grandson, Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr., became a notable horticulturist celebrated for documenting and preserving heirloom apple varieties. His work, rooted in agricultural memory, carries a faint metaphorical resemblance to the family history itself—orchards of old names, carefully tended through time.

Though less prominent, her children stayed linked to Calhoun land and customs. Margaret M. Calhoun died in 1959 and was buried with family. Genealogical sources indicate that Patrick Calhoun and others lived modestly among extended family.

A Timeline of Floride Isabella Lee Calhoun

Floride Isabella’s life, though less dramatic than those of the political titans behind her, forms an indispensable link in the long chain of a Southern dynasty. Her story is a quieter chapter—one written in family histories, modest artistic contribution, and the slow passage of generational memory.