In the summer of i935， three little girls were playing under their<br >house in Stateburg， South Carolina， escaping the hot sun and watch-<br >ing doodlebugs capture and eat ants. In the half-light Gery， Mary，<br >and Francine Leffelman happened to notice a cardboard box toward<br >the front of the house. When they crawled forward to investigate，<br >they found that the box contained some letters underneath what the<br >girls father later identified as a saw from a cotton gin. The twins，<br >Gery and Mary， had just learned to read and recognized that the let-<br >ters were old. They took them to their father， Lewis John Leffelman，<br >a forester educated at the University of Minnesota and Yale who had<br >recently come to Stateburg to manage a large timber plantation.<br >John Leffelman had always been interested in history， and he pre-<br >served the letters his daughters had discovered. More than forty<br >years later， in the spring of 1979， the South Caroliniana Library at<br >the University of South Carolina acquired the letters from Mrs. Gery<br >Leffelman Ballou. To bring those letters fully to light and to make<br >them available to any interested reader， they are published here for<br >the first time.<br >