Keep Them Yankees Out!

Old Times are indeed not forgotten down here, but seems to be taking it an extreme.

It appears that the Northern invasion of the South is complete — at least it is on a patch of land known as Delta Plantation in Jasper County.There, a diehard rebel named Henry E. Ingram Jr. made his last stand against the onslaught of Yankees, only to be thwarted by a man from Long Island, N.Y., and now — gasp — a French Canadian.

Ingram promised to keep Yankees out of Delta Plantation in Jasper County when he bought 1,700 acres there in 1998. His resolve to keep them out still is strong, but the covenants he put on the land don’t seem to have any teeth.

Those covenants did, however, scare Canadian-raised Bluffton resident Louise Legare a bit as she was close to signing a contract to buy a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house on the land from Bluffton Home Builders.

The list of rules she got from the builders was missing the first pages, so she went to the Jasper County Courthouse to get the missing ones. There, she found the covenants, or rules, that Ingram demanded of buyers:

1. They could not be Yankees.

2. They could not have the last name Sherman (an obvious reference to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman).

3. And the land could not be sold or leased to those whose last names could be rearranged to spell Sherman.

The lawyers at the Volokh Conspiracy have more about the legal aspects here.