First People

Today marks the start of Native American Heritage Month, a good time to remember the pre-colonial era people who once called the Lowcountry home and whose names are recalled in the rivers and tidal marshes that supported them. With no written language that has come down to us, our only knowledge of them comes from the descriptions written by the European settlers who first encountered them.

Planting corn and beans

The earliest records of these indigenous people are from the mid-to-late 16th century, when Spanish adventurers ranged up and down the coastline between present day Florida and North Carolina. It's in these descriptions that the names Bohicket, Stono, Edisto and Kiawah, or variations of them, first appear in documents. The Spanish encountered these tribes when they explored what is now Charleston Harbor (they dubbed it San Jorge) and the rivers that drained into it. They met a semi-nomadic culture, with the Lowcountry's First People spending winters in the upper coastal plains of central South Carolina and the warmer spring and summer months at the shore (which in their time extended some fifty miles further east than it does today). There were an estimated fifteen tribal groups described by Europeans, who initially relied on the natives for guidance in what crops to plant and game to hunt. In our immediate area, English explorers who came ashore near what is now Rockville were greeted and welcomed by the Cassique of a loose confederation of tribes that came to be known as the Kiawah.

A sculpture of the Cassique, Charles Towne Landing

Later, when the English had driven the Spanish south, a British visitor in 1682 recorded that the Native Americans he encountered were "of a deep chestnut color, their hair black and straight, tied various ways, stuck through with feathers for ornament or gallantry." He noted that they were superb hunters with bow and arrow or with reeds sharpened to a point. . Expanding plantations and the arrival of imported cattle began to alter the landscape that had supported indigenous cultures for thousands of years, and European diseases like smallpox to which the natives had no immunity further decimated tribal numbers. By the late 1700's, mention of these tribes had mostly vanished from the written record. Their settlements were easily dismantled for each season's move, leaving us little physical evidence of their presence. The evocative shell rings just off our contemporary coastline, and scattered shell middens along creeks, are all that remain.

The Charleston Museum has an excellent collection of artifacts from archeological explorations, including from the unearthed remnants of a Kiawah burial site uncovered during construction in the late 1960's at Charles Towne Landing. And a remnant Kiawah population survives in Tennessee, to where surviving tribal groups migrated in the late 18th century. They are known as the Guaymari Kiawah, or "Sacred People Of The Earth."

Crossing The Line

When you're driving back to the island on Main Road and cross the Limehouse Bridge, one of the twentieth century's engineering marvels spreads out to the right and left below. It's the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, of which Charleston Harbor and its feeder waterways are a part. Stretching from New Jersey and around the Florida Keys to Brownsville, Texas, the AIWW is a patchwork of lakes, rivers and dredged canals that allows both leisure and commercial boat traffic to travel the eastern seaboard sheltered from more dangerous open ocean, following the famous Magenta Line on navigational maps developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Although it's a twentieth century development, the roots of the Waterway go back as far as the early eighteenth century, when a fledgling United States government set out to facilitate waterborne trade among the states, still separated by thousands of acres of undeveloped wilderness from trading and shipping centers like Charleston and Savannah in the south and Boston and New York in the north. Part of the southeastern portion of the Waterway, for example, is along the Great Dismal Swamp Canal which crosses the border of Virginia and North Carolina, dug by enslaved labor along a route first surveyed before the Revolution by a young George Washington.

The southeast leg of the IAW

But it wasn't until the early 1900's, as motorized boating became practical, that the first charts were developed and published in a booklet called The Inside Route. It still required a good deal of by-the-pants boating until after World War Two, when the federal government invested millions of dollars in re-surveying, re-dredging, new charts, and a series of mile markers along the entire route of the new Magenta Line. The last section of the AIW was completed in Brownsville in 1949.

Today, the Waterway is busy all year-round with commercial shipping heading for coastal ports from inland mining and manufacturing sites, along with leisure traffic traveling south for the winter and north for the summer - and, of course, for SINHG members, who have enjoyed a day on the water as one of our SINHG Trips for members, exploring this blue thread connecting the Lowcountry to the wider world.

That's The Spirit

With Halloween approaching, Lowcountry ghosts are stirring, from downtown Charleston to right here on Johns Island, where two sites have a long tradition of spectral sightings.

The Angel Oak seems especially attractive to spirited presences. As recently as 2008, a young married couple made a moonlight visit to the Oak, under which they'd been married some months earlier, and reported seeing glowing lights amid the ancient tree's branches. The spirits became threatening, turning into flaming, mask-like faces, when the husband tried to carve his initials on the tree with a penknife. It wasn't until the couple hastily retreated that the faces disappeared and the star-like lights that they'd seen earlier returned.

Fenwick Hall, before restoration

Another, more unfortunate, couple are said to haunt the grounds of Fenwick Hall, the Georgian-style plantation home along today's Maybank Highway, built in 1730 by John Fenwick and inherited and enlarged by his son Edward. Famous for his racehorses and his Johns Island Stud, Edward became enraged when his beautiful young daughter Ann eloped with a Fenwick groom, hardly the socially acceptable union Edward wanted for Ann. The couple was found hiding in a log cabin in the marshes surrounding the estate. It's said that Edward ordered the groom mounted backward on a horse with a noose around his neck, and then cruelly forced Ann to strike the horse on the haunches, thus hanging her lover. Both Ann and the groom are said to walk the grounds of the former plantation; more alarmingly, the groom is said to be headless.

Lavinia Fisher, Charleston's first serial killer

Downtown Charleston is, of course, infested with ghosts. The restless spirits of John and Lavinia Fischer, the city's first serial killers, were hanged at downtown's Old Jail, where they are said to appear on certain nights. The couple owned a tavern and inn in what is now North Charleston, where they reportedly offered particularly wealthy guests poison-laced tea before robbing them and disposing of their bodies in the basement.

Actor Junius Booth, still appearing in Charleston

The Dock Street Theater has its own pair of ghosts - a young prostitute who threw herself off the second floor balcony of the building during its time as a hotel in the early 19th-century, sometimes joined by the ghost of famed actor Junius Booth, who frequently trod the boards at the theater during national tours of his Shakespeare recitals. Even though Junius died on a riverboat in Louisville, Kentucky, it's said his fondness for the old theater and admiring Charlestonian audiences draws his spirit back to the Holy City.