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.

Underground Quilts

During the years leading up to the Civil War, the Underground Railroad provided a path to freedom for hundreds of enslaved plantation workers in the Confederacy. But how did a fugitive slave saddled with the forced illiteracy imposed by many plantation owners learn of the stations along the route north, when to move or when to stay hidden, who was to be trusted and who to avoid?

One still controversial theory is that the quilts made by southern Blacks during slave times not only preserved the stories and symbols of their west African or Caribbean homelands but carried coded signals woven into their patterns. Draped over a front porch railing or hung on a wash line, such quilts would help escaped slaves find their way to the next station on the route or would indicate the quilt's owner was one of the Railroad's "station masters", providing food and shelter. The theory was first proposed in a 1999 book, "Hidden In Plain View", by art historian Raymond Dobard Jr. and Jacqueline Tobin, a college professor.

The Bear's Paw; "Stay on animal paths"

Examples of the quilted designs they identified were the Bear's Paw, warning escapees to only travel along animal pathways through forests and swamps and avoid human-made trails; the Log Cabin, a sign that a particular household would provide shelter and could be trusted; and the North Star, pointing the traveler toward that nighttime beacon and northward. A zig-zag Drunken Path, on the other hand, warned that slave hunters were nearby and avoidance maneuvers should be undertaken, while the Bow Tie suggested that the fugitive's ragged appearance was a dangerous giveaway and better, more disguising clothes were advisable.

The Log Cabin: "Food and shelter here"

Dobard's and Tobin's theory was based on the recollections of an elderly Black woman who claimed the oral tradition of coded quilts had been handed down in her family for generations; but the theory.has been much disputed, and even Dobard later admitted that his and Tobin's book was "informed conjecture, as opposed to a well-documented book with a wealth of evidence." Critics point out that elderly ex-slaves interviewed during the 1930's as part of a Works Progress Administration project never mentioned such a code, nor do they appear in the memoirs of such noted Underground Railroad figures as Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass. One critic went so far as to dismiss the theory as "fake history."

The North Star: "safe to keep heading north"

But the theory has supporters who believe just as strongly that the quilt codes are real historical artifacts, and wonder why critics seek written evidence from slaves who were prevented from learning to read or write and, even if they were literate, would never have committed the codes to paper. As a corollary to such coded messages, they point out that the hymn "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", generally considered to be about a hereafter free of slavery, was understood by enslaved Blacks to be about escaping along the Underground Railroad, guided by secret symbols pointing the way to freedom.