The Watcher In The Woods

You may never see one unless you're very lucky, but the reclusive bobcat (Lynx rufus) is a highly adaptable Lowcountry resident. Named for its truncated tail, the bobcat is most active from twilight to about midnight, and again from just before dawn until a few hours after sunrise, spending the rest of its time hidden away in a main den or in secondary lairs in hollow logs or dense thickets. It scent-marks its territory, which can vary from less than a square mile to over a hundred square miles, and will leave claw marks on prominent trees throughout its home area. Here on Seabrook, territories are toward the smaller end of the scale due to the island's human and residential density.

The bobcat's solitary nature adds to its aura of mystery, although males may tolerate other cats along the fringes of adjoining territories, and females may sometimes share a territory. The cats are opportunistic hunters, but here on the barrier islands the most common prey are rats and mice, rabbits and small birds. It will also attack snakes of all sizes, and even smaller deer. Like most cats, it hunts by stalking in deep cover, crouching motionless, then springing when the prey wanders closer.

Mating takes place during late winter and early spring, with litters of two to four kittens born in April and May, which the mother raises alone. The youngsters are weaned within five weeks and learn to hunt by following and watching Mom, usually striking off on their own by the time they're a year old. Bobcats can live up to ten years, although the oldest known wild bobcat survived to sixteen.

Unfortunately, the bobcat population on Seabrook and Kiawah plummeted due to the once widespread use of pesticides known as second generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGAs), which proved fatal when bobcats consumed mice and rats that were infected with the chemicals. The town governments of both Seabrook and Kiawah have joined the Bobcat Guardian Program, intended to raise awareness among residents and business owners about the effects of SGAs on wildlife. Happily, most pest control companies that service both islands have subscribed to the "Save Our Bobcats Pledge" to use alternative, less toxic chemicals. You can learn more about the Bobcat Guardian Program, and which companies have signed the pledge, here.

Although you might not see a bobcat, you will often see their tracks and scat while walking SINHG's Bobcat Trail. Look out for the claw marks on larger trees adjacent to the trail, and know that out there somewhere, a bobcat may be watching.

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."