The Woman's Touch

March is National Women's History Month. Charleston and the Lowcountry can claim a significant place in the list of pioneering women who shaped the region's social, cultural and agricultural heritage. From Septima Clark's tireless campaigning for equality during the civil rights era, to the Charleston-born Pollitzer sisters' efforts toward women's suffrage, and the Grimke sisters' outspoken opposition to the slave economy during the Civil War period, women have been at the forefront of historically significant changes in in Lowcountry life.

The ruins of Comingtee's plantation house.

Lesser known are women who lived during the Colonial and Revolutionary War years, all the way back to the 17th-century, when Affra Harleston arrived in the Lowcountry from England in 1669. With her family's fortune ruined during the English Civil War, Affra took ship for the Carolinas with a two-year indentured labor contract in Charleston, on the completion of which she was promised one hundred acres of land. A budding shipboard romance with John Coming resulted in marriage and, on her release from her contract, a plantation along the Cooper River which the couple named Comingtee. By the time of Coming's death in 1694, the couple had acquired over 700 acres along the river, part of which was donated for the growing new city of Charles Towne, and which would eventually become the city's Harleston Village neighborhood. Before her own death in 1698, Affra had moved into town, built a house at Wentworth and Philips streets and donated seventeen acres to St. Philip's Church, the beginning of the church's downtown property holdings.

Johnston's portrait of Henriette Chastaigne (courtesy Gibbes Museum)

Charleston was home to America's first professional female artist, Henrietta Dering Johnston, who arrived in Charleston from Britain with her clergyman husband in 1706. The couple struggled financially, leading Henrietta to revive an earlier talent for drawing and painting and to build a reputation for society portraits done in pastel. Her commissions took her as far north at New York and saved the couple from penury. She and her husband are buried in the cemetery of St. Michael's Church downtown.

Martha Logan, early American botanist

Martha Daniell Logan, born in 1704 in St.Thomas Parish just outside Charleston, was the country's first female botanist, collecting and exchanging plants and seeds native to the Lowcountry with colleagues in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the colonies. By 1751, she was writing one of the nation's first horticultural columns, The Gardener's Kalendar, for the South Carolina Gazette.

Much of this history has been documented by the city's Preservation Society, itself founded by a woman, Susan Pringle Frost, in 1920 as the Society For The Preservation Of Old Dwellings. And as historian Harlan Greene once pointed out, even the city's official seal and motto, "She guards her buildings, customs and her laws," acknowledges Charleston's debt to her female pioneers.

Treasure The Oak

In your travels along Bohicket or Main roads, you may have noticed red-girded live oaks with a sign saying "Don't Chop Me Down." Given the rampant development on Johns Island, these sturdy symbols of the Lowcountry are, indeed, threatened. We shouldn't take them for granted.

Quercus virginiana is common from (as the name implies) Virginia all the way down the southeast coast to Florida. Ideally adapted for salty soil, humidity and the high winds of the hurricane season, these majestic trees provide crucial food and shelter for wildlife. Deer, squirrels and all manner of birds depend on the southern live oak's acorns during the winter months, while its strong, curving, moss-draped limbs provide ample nesting material and secure nesting sites.

Unlike its deciduous oak cousins further north, southern live oaks retain their leaves nearly all year-long, dropping old leaves as new ones replace them during a short blossoming season in the spring - as we all know while we reach for the leaf-blower from mid-March to mid-April. The trees' crowns, which can grow to as much as a hundred feet in diameter, bestow plenty of shade on sticky summer days; while thick trunks, deep taproots and extensive root systems mean these trees can withstand hurricane-force winds or winter droughts. The wood is incredibly hard and resistant to rot, which is how Old Ironsides got its name. Along with scores of similar naval vessels built during the late 18th and into the 19th centuries, Old Ironsides's hull and keel were built using the wood.

Angel Oak on Johns Island

Southern live oaks are long-lived, with two nearby examples thought to be at least several hundred years old. Johns Island's Angel Oak, just off Bohicket Road near Main Road, is thought be up to 700 years old, with a trunk circumference of over 28-feet and its crown shading an area of 17,000 square feet. Its name comes from prior owners of the property, Justus and Martha Angel, although local legend has it that the floating lights of "angel ghosts" of enslaved African-Americans can sometimes be seen in the tree's upper reaches. The site is now a public park owned by Charleston County.

The Middleton Oak

The Middleton Oak, on the banks of the Ashley River at Middleton Place, may have a smaller diameter trunk, at about 10-feet, but its canopy is truly impressive and served as a landmark and resting place for Native Americans traveling along the river in pre-Colonial times. Some botanists think the tree may be nearly 1,000-years old, still providing cool shade during a Lowcountry summer for modern visitors.

THE FIRST SHOT

Here's a great question for you next trivia challenge: where did the first bombardment of Fort Sumter that began the Civil War originate? No points lost if you incorrectly answered The Battery along downtown's sea wall or Fort Moultrie in Mount Pleasant, but the first shot on Sumter actually came from James Island's Fort Johnson, on the southern shore of the harbor's mouth and almost directly opposite Fort Sumter in mid-harbor (that's Sumter in the distance in the above photo).

Once called Windmill Point. there have been at least four military fortifications on the site, starting with a colonial-era British one erected in 1708 and named for the Proprietary Governor of the Carolinas at the time, Nathaniel Johnson. While any traces of this original fort have long disappeared, segments of the tabby walls of a second, pre-Revolutionary War fort built in 1759 can still be seen at the site. By 1775, an enlarged and better defended fort rose on the Point, at first occupied by colonial rebels but seized by the British during their occupation of Charleston and later destroyed by a hurricane. Yet another fort rose on the site as a second British invasion of Charleston seemed possible during the War of 1812. All that remains of this third structure are the stone base of a wooden observation tower, and a free-standing brick magazine which remains intact.

The c.1830 magazine remains intact.

Fort Johnson during the Civil War

By 1861, South Carolina troops had placed two 10-inch mortars on the point. On April 12, 1861 one of the mortars fired on Fort Sumter in the opening salvo of the war that split the nation. During the war, Confederate forces drove off two Union regiments that attempted an approach from nearby Morris Island, keeping the Fort in Confederate hands until the winter of 1865, when it was abandoned in the general withdrawal from Charleston as Union forces approached the city.

A post-war, federally operated quarantine station next occupied the site until the 1950's when the College of Charleston and MUSC took title to the 40-acre property, but by the 1970's most of the land had been transferred to the South Carolina Wildlife and Marine Resources Department, which continues to operate a marine research station there. The College's Grice Marine Laboratory serves as a research and teaching facility at the site, while MUSC sold its waterfront portion to the South Carolina Battlefield Preservation Trust, which has created a 20-acre park and historic site for the public.

On the point, with its sweeping view down the harbor toward Charleston, you can still walk where guns once roared and a war began.