Shifting Sands

One of the northern hemisphere's most crucial nesting sites for both migrating and sedentary shorebirds is practically within swimming distance of our island's beaches - Deveaux Bank. Its 215-acres of shifting sands and marine scrub brush lies at the mouth of the North Edisto River, between Seabrook and Edisto Island. With an average elevation of just three feet, much of it is submerged at high tide, and it completely disappeared in 1979, washed away by hurricane David, re-emerging three years later as it slowly rebuilt itself with the help of shifting currents.

Whimbrels settle on the Bank for the night

The Bank, a protected bird sanctuary overseen by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, serves as the largest nesting site for brown pelicans on the East Coast and as a critical way-station for, among others, Hudsonian whimbrels, which travel each year over 7,000 miles between wintering sites in South America and summer breeding grounds in Canada. Whimbrels use the island to nest overnight after days spent flying thirty miles or more to forage in salt marshes for crabs. Resting on the Bank for several weeks, they continue their seasonal journey north or south, taking to the skies in whirring clouds at dawn by the hundreds. They're joined by black skimmers, red knots, oyster catchers, terns, plovers, willets and gulls. Of the 57 species of shore birds identified by the state as of "greatest conservation need," nearly all are found on Deveaux Bank.

Although the Bank was only officially documented by the state in 1921, it was known as a navigation hazard to early explorers attempting to enter the North Edisto River. It's thought to be named for Andrew Deveaux, a British loyalist and seaman based in Beaufort whose knowledge of potentially treacherous shoals like Deveaux elevated him to the rank of Major in the British navy during the Revolutionary War's Siege of Charleston, which required British troops to land on Simmons Island (as Seabrook was then called) to begin the march north.

In the early part of the 20th-century, the island was used as a bombing range by the U.S. military until a local ornithologist, Alexander Sprunt, raised an outcry and led the effort to have the Bank protected as a bird sanctuary in the 1930's. Access is still strictly controlled by the DNR, with public landings only allowed by permit and foot traffic restricted to below the high water mark; although illegal landings - especially by violaters who bring dogs with them - disturb nesting flocks and crush eggs underfoot. Flyovers by drones are another source of disturbance. Efforts to further restrict access to this immensely important wildlife conservation site continue.

History Under Our Feet

All of us at SINHG mourn the loss of historian Doug Bostick, who was to present November's Evening Program on the history of Seabrook Island. We offer this much abbreviated history in his honor.

We don't know the name given by indigenous people to the barrier island they began visiting as long ago as 1400 BCE before it gained its first European-bestowed name. It was one of the many coastal sites that provided these first people with a rich harvest of seafood, deer, boar and fruit for thousands of years. By the mid-17th century, British explorer and adventurer Robert Sanford encountered a thriving community of Native Americans when he arrived on what is now Seabrook Island in 1666, at the height of European explorations of the (to Sanford) New World. Bohicket, Stono and Kiawah tribes were clustered in small, connected villages along the shores of the rivers which now bear their names.

Sanford was in the vanguard of British expeditions under the patronage of Charles II, who had granted rights to a group of wealthy traders and aristocrats, the Lords Proprietors, to any land claimed for Britain in what is now North and South Carolina, Georgia and (in direct conflict with Spanish colonial ambitions) in Florida. The local tribes were soon induced - sometimes by alluring trade goods, sometimes by force - into ceding their lands to the Lords Proprietors, who then began selling off large parcels to settlers arriving from Europe.

Today's Haulover Cut

Our island's first European owner was Thomas Jones, who named the island after himself. It was Jones who dredged and deepened what he named the Haulover Cut (just north of today's traffic circle), connecting the Bohicket and Kiawah rivers. His endeavors greatly improved the transportation of lumber and agricultural products downriver to the Atlantic and to markets in Charleston. At the same time, Jones turned a blind eye to thieves who raided ships (especially Spanish ones) passing on the Edisto River, bursting on their targets from hiding places along what we still call Privateer Creek.

Jones Island's name changed when Ebenezer Simmons bought it from Jones' heirs in 1753. Simmons was a successful Charleston merchant and slaveholder who, like his predecessor, named the island after himself, continuing the cultivation of indigo, rice and cotton for his Charleston buyers. Simmons died ten years later at the age of 63. Soon swept up in the American Revolution, Simmons Island became an important staging point for British troops who used its timber to build the flat-bottomed boats carrying supplies inland. During the war, a major skirmish between British and American soldiers took place at what is now the intersection of River and Bohicket roads.

After the war, the island was purchased in 1816 from Simmons' heirs by William Seabrook, whose name would remain attached to the island from then on. Seabrook, who also owned vast acreage on Wadmalaw and Edisto islands, was the first to grow long-staple cotton. The greater length of the staple made it especially valuable for weaving fine-textured cloth for shirts, trousers and bedding. Fortunately for us, Seabrook drew much of his cotton from his other plantations and left our island relatively uncultivated and its lush maritime forests intact.

The Battle of Haulover Cut

The island remained in Seabrook family hands at the outbreak of the Civil War, but in 1863 it was sold to textile magnate William Gregg even as Union and Confederate troops fought up and down Johns Island and at the river crossing between Johns and Seabrook islands during the Battle Of Haulover Cut, a three-day battle that left thirty-four dead. Gregg refrained from giving the island his name, as did William Andell, who bought it from Gregg in 1881. And like Ebenezer Simmons and William Seabrook, the Andells left much of the island intact, using part of it - mostly today's Jenkins Point - for their dairy herd but leaving most of the island's timber untouched. It's to these early landowners that we owe our island's still-green canopy.

Marjorie Morawetz

The Andells' ownership ended in 1938, when they sold the island to Victor and Marjorie Morawetz, conservation-minded New Yorkers who had fallen in love with the Lowcountry and hadbeen spending their winters at their Johns Island home, Fenwick Plantation. Still, they wanted a beach house for weekend use and to entertain guests and Seabrook Island fit their wishes. They were devout Episcopalians, so much so that Victor's will directed that Seabrook Island be deeded at his death in 1938, not long after he bought the island, to the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina for use as a summer camp for children, while also granting Marjorie use of the island for her lifetime. Marjorie died in 1957. During the next decade, the church discovered that its tax exempt status did not extend to a large portion of the still mostly undeveloped island. Yielding to the financial strain, the diocese deeded all but 230 acres of the island, which remains astoday's St. Christopher Camp, to the Seabrook Island Development Corporation, the first entity to begin turning Seabrook Island into the residential and recreational community we know today.

Ghosting

It's Halloween weekend and 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.