Follow this authorKathleen Parker's opinions

Amy’s great-grandfather, who married the famous writer, grew asparagus, among other things. Sorting through collections of found items on the back porch of her home, Amy pointed to a rusty implement once used to stack and bundle stalks with string, readying them for market. The gizmo could be adjusted to various sizes of freshly picked asparagus.

Today, adjacent fields hold dry stalks of cotton recently harvested. Driving around this part of the state, just south of Columbia and eastward toward the Lowcountry, you can’t get far without seeing 500-pound bales of compressed cotton sheathed in bright pink or yellow. I’ve stopped more than a few times to get a closer look at these mysterious creatures lined up single file as though they have a destination in mind. Oftentimes, miles of rural roads are flanked as far as the eye can see by “snowballs” — soft white cotton balls just like the ones that come in drugstore wrappers.

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When I drove up to the house Wednesday to pay my respects, the front porch was crowded with friends and family, several hunting dogs and Amy herself, tall and stalwart despite little food or sleep for several days. People roamed the grounds, their faces marked by sorrow as they prepared for what promised to be an epic celebration of Tom’s life after Thursday’s funeral. Inside the house, which resembles a stage set for an earlier era, native son Jimmy Williams, a former MSNBC commentator and close friend of Tom and Amy’s, chopped huge bunches of collard greens for a big-crowd salad. Best estimates were that a thousand people would flock to the 800-acre farm to comfort one another and wonder how such a thing could have happened.

A crowd of an estimated 600 — mostly men — gathered at St. Matthew’s Parish Church — a handsome collection of bow ties, ponytails and bearded men who personified the rugged, gentleman hunter-planter of the South that few outsiders ever get to see up close — gathered to honor Tom Hall. Larger than life, he was a legendary force of fun and fearlessness. His résumé seems too long for one person. He was a father, lawyer, musician, songwriter, horseback quail hunter, restaurateur, activist, documentary filmmaker, historian, writer and poet. Since 2001, he played guitar and sang with the Plowboys, a rock/folk band described as a hybrid of the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin and, thanks to Tom’s baritone, Johnny Cash.

In 2022, he created his fifth restaurant, a farm-to-table waterfront eatery in Georgetown, S.C., named Between the Antlers — after U.S. poet laureate and University of South Carolina professor James Dickey’s book “The Starry Place Between the Antlers.” Tom subsequently learned that George Washington once gave an address on the site. His favorite Dickey poem, “For the Last Wolverine,” was recited by his second son at the funeral. It ends with the words:

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Lord, let me die but not die / Out.

Another poem traditionally read at every Peterkin funeral since Julia Peterkin’s death in 1961, “Garden’s End” by Elfrida De Renne Barrow, was read at the burial site.

When a reporter once described him as a “serial entrepreneur” in 2017, Tom concurred. “A serial entrepreneur’ is probably correct,” he said. “I can’t stop doing it. I’d like to. Sometimes you want to not........

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