School's Out?

You may have noticed a "Save The Walnut Hill School" sign on the parkway, just north of Kiawah Town Hall. The call to arms is about another part of Johns Island history in danger of being lost to development, a one-room schoolhouse originally built in 1868 to teach children of once-enslaved families on the island.

The Walnut Hill School Museum, in better days

The school's first home was further to the northeast, near River Road; but, threatened with demolition in the 1990's as Bohicket Road was widened to form the Parkway, it was moved to its present site by Seabrook Island native and historian, Betty Stringfellow (1921 - 2017), who turned it into a museum dedicated to the history of John's Island. Now once again derelict, the old schoolhouse has avoided destruction for decades but is now threatened once again.

Another reminder of Johns and Seabrook Islands' educational history would hardly attract a

Promised Land school, 1955

second glance today, although it played a crucial role in providing educational opportunities for Black children in the days before desegregation of public schools. It's a modest concrete-block section incorporated into the former Chez Fish restaurant on the Parkway, the structure once standing on its own as a Rosenwald school for African-American children named the Promised Land Elementary School.

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington

Rosenwald schools were the result of discussions in the early decades of the 20th-century between philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, then the president of Sears Roebuck, and Black educator Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama. The two men established the Rosenwald Fund and a matching grant model in which local African-American communities would supply the labor to build each school based on plans developed by Tuskegee faculty. Some five-thousand such schools were built throughout the South, including two along River Road in addition to the Promised Land school near Seabrook Island. Their purpose diminished by desegregation, only about ten per cent of the schools are still standing, so we're lucky to have this one small reminder of former struggles for educational equality.

Paved Over History

As residential and commercial development continues its rapid pace along Maybank Highway, it's hard to imagine that this approximately twenty-mile stretch of cross-island roadway was once a rural byway threading together James, Johns and Wadmalaw islands; and even earlier, was a racetrack for champion-bred racehorses.

The equestrian history of what is now SC route 700 goes back to the mid-eighteenth century and Fenwick Hall, which remains an anchoring presence along the road and its intersection with River Road. It was Edward Fenwick who, in 1747, inherited the estate along the Stono River from his father and set about creating the Johns Island Stud. Over the years, Fenwick imported from England many of the founding Thoroughbred bloodlines of American racing and exercised his horses along a grass track from the Stono River along what is now Maybank Highway. Because of the Fenwicks' British loyalties, the estate was seized after the Revolution by the victorious Americans, went through several subsequent ownership changes, served as a Civil War hospital for both Union and Confederate troops, and was saved from complete ruin by Victor and Marjorie Morawetz, a wealthy New York couple who bought and restored the property in the 1930s (and who once owned most of a pre-development Seabrook Island).

One of Rockville's stately homes

Maybank Highway's westernmost segment across Wadmalaw Island passes the Charleston Tea Garden, America's only working tea plantation, and dead-ends at Bohicket Creek and the village of Rockville, first settled in the late 17th-century and once an important maritime base for the Lowcountry's shrimping and fishing industry. Encompassing only 1.5 square miles, the village's many stately homes along dirt roads have been in the same families for generations, with the entire village population numbering barely 140 at the most recent census. Today, Rockville is famous for the annual Rockville Regatta organized by the Sea Island Yacht Club during the first week of August.

Stono River and Paul Gelegotis Bridge

Heading northeast from Wadmalaw Island and crossing Church Creek onto Johns Island, Maybank Highway's stretch between Main Road and River Road, where Edward Fenwick's horses once raced, is now under intensive development, passing what remains of Fenwick Hall and crossing over the Stono River to James Island via the Paul Gelegotis Bridge, named for a James Island businessman who established South Carolina's first EMS ambulance service in 1973. The Gelegotis bridge replaced an earlier swing drawbridge that had been there since 1928.

Burton Maybank and FDR

Maybank joins with Folly Road at its eastern end, crossing Wappoo Creek over the swing bridge named, as is the entire roadway, for Burnet Maybank (1899 - 1954), whose political career included serving two terms as Charleston's mayor, as South Carolina's governor until 1941, and in the U.S. Senate for more than a decade as a powerful ally of Franklin Roosevelt. Maybank once pondered in an essay "Who Is The South Carolinian?" that "there is a deal of kindness about him. A neighborly spirit prompts him to render service with a scorn for remuneration."

Field Days

The official start of spring is almost upon us, but the agricultural year is already in full swing on Johns Island. Fields are being readied for planting to yield the late spring and summer bounty of vegetables and leafy greens.

1928: The Annie Moore heads up the Stono River to market

Truck farming is a relative newcomer to the Lowcountry, which until the Civil War was famous for its long-staple cotton and for rice. The intense labor and high toll on soil quality associated with rice cultivation soon led to the decline of the crop. As for cotton, the devastation of the Civil War and the boll weevil infestation of the 1920's put an end to the cotton economy. Among the victims was Mullet Hall, which had been so profitable in its heyday that it warranted its own post office and commissary. Its fields had successfully produced bumper crops of cotton for the many decades of the late nineteenth century that the Legare family farmed it; the weevil brought foreclosure in 1923, when Julian Limehouse bought the property at auction and began growing vegetables for local kitchen tables. Soon, he was loading his produce onto trucks, or onto boats docked on the Kiawah River or Bohicket Creek, for shipment to downtown restaurants. Limehouse Produce still transports the fruit of Lowcountry soil all over the greater Charleston area.

During the Depression, potatoes were a lifesaver for many truck farmers

Some farmers in Limehouse's day tried shifting to more weevil-resistant short-staple cotton, but prices fell too low to make the business profitable; the last major cotton crop was harvested on Edisto in 1918. The Andells, who owned much of Seabrook Island in the early years of the last century, farmed a small plot of sea island cotton as late as 1930, in addition to their cattle and dairy operations, but gave it all up shortly after William Andell's death in 1932. Not long after, the Andells sold the island to Marjorie and Victor Morawetz as a private beach retreat.

Truck farming has never reached the economic heights of either cotton or rice, but it still defines much of Johns Island south of Maybank Highway, not to mention Edisto and Wadmalaw islands. Even so, the islands' rich agricultural heritage is in danger of disappearing to development and competitive pricing from corporately-owned agribusinesses. As one longtime Johns Island farmer observed, "The land is grown up because many of the natives are not farming." Even so, as summer's crops begin appearing at farm stands all over the islands, shopping local can help keep the Lowcountry green.