Mullet Hall

We're fortunate in having the Johns Island County Park just down the road, with its equestrian center, hiking trails, dog park and 3-D archery range. But all that activity lays on top of what was once one of the largest plantations on Johns Island.

Riding trails cross once-fertile farmland

The county park still bears the name Mullet Hall, bestowed on 600-acres along the Kiawah River acquired by one Thomas Mullet in 1791; but a century earlier, early British settler Thomas Stanyarne had been the first European owner of vast acreage along the Kiawah and Stono rivers granted to him by the colony's Lords Proprietors. By the 1780's, the property had passed from the Stanyarnes through Thomas Mullet to the Legares who, with other substantial land holdings to the north and west, came to own nearly two-thousand acres bordering what is now River Road. It was James Legare who built the first permanent structure that bore the name Mullet Hall. Rice and cotton were the prominent crops grown with enslaved labor.

Excavating the faint traces of a slave cabin

Archeological excavations carried out in 2017 and 2018, when the western portion of the once-vast plantation has been sold to the company that would create today's Kiawah River development, revealed little more than a few clay floors and bricks from ramshackle slave houses that dotted the property. No trace was found of Mullet Hall itself, any remnants of which would have long been plowed under and broken up during the property's long agricultural history. The live-oak lined track leading to the site's hiking and riding trials may be the only sign of a once prosperous plantation.

An archery lesson at Mullet Hall

The Legares owned and managed the plantation right up until the early 1900's, when financial backers foreclosed on the acreage and sold its 1700-acres to a management company, which rented it out in small parcels to local farmers until Julian Limehouse bought the land in 1942 for $12,000. It remained in Limehouse hands, passing to Julian's heirs, until 1994, when the heirs conveyed to Charleston County the 738 acres that comprise today's county park. The remainder of the property was eventually sold for development as Kiawah River, on which Limehouse land is still farmed as the only reminder of Mullet Hall's rich history, buried deep underfoot.

Chapels of Ease

The name sounds soothing, peaceful, an apt description of the many crumbling ruins of abandoned small churches that dot the Lowcountry, most of them hidden in isolated wooded sites that were once bustling with activity. These surviving chapels of ease served as houses of worship for plantation owners and workers who lived far from their parish's main church, saving them hours of travel over muddy, rutted paths on a Sunday morning.

Pon Pon's Front Facade

Closest to us is Colleton County's Pon Pon Chapel, between Jacksonboro and Walterboro along what was once the main road between Charleston and Savannah. ("Pon Pon" is thought to be adopted from Native Americans' name for the Edisto River.) Built in 1725 as a wooden structure and rebuilt thirty years later in brick, it's said that Washington himself stopped here to worship during his 1791 Presidential tour of the Lowcountry as he traveled toward Walterboro, then the county seat. Other famous visitors included John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church, who gave two sermons here in 1737. Pon Pon survived until 1832 when, after a series of fires, it fell into disrepair. What remains is the front facade, stabilized and restored in 1975, along with the graveyard where locals continued to bury their dead long after the chapel had fallen to ruin.

St. Helena's Chapel of Ease

Somewhat more intact is the chapel of ease on St. Helena's Island, some twenty miles from downtown Beaufort. Constructed between 1742 and 1745 using the mixture of oyster shells, lime and sand known as tabby, the chapel served as a house of worship for members of downtown Beaufort's St. Helena's Church who lived and worked on the surrounding rice and cotton plantations. Its walls shone so brightly on sunny days that it became known as The White Church. During the Reconstruction period, it was used by Northern educators who came to the Sea Islands to teach reading and writing to freed Blacks at the nearby Penn Center. The chapel was abandoned after extensive fire damage in 1886.

The Fripp Mausoleum

But it survives with a whiff of the supernatural, from events during the Civil War when invading Union troops broke open the door of the graveyard's mausoleum containing the remains of chapel founder Edgar Fripp and his wife, hoping to find treasure. Workers after the war bricked up the entrance again, but returned the next day to find the bricks removed and neatly stacked. Convinced that "haints" had been at work, the workers never returned and the empty vault stands today with its entrance still gaping.

Shipwreck Churches

For the historically minded, Bohicket Road and the Parkway form a time tunnel through some of Johns Island's earliest history as a settled community, embodied in two structures that bracket the island's colonial history and its post-Civil War struggles.

Johns Island Presbyterian

The earlier of the two is Johns Island Presbyterian Church, one of five such churches established in the early 1700s by Archibald Stobo, a Scottish minister stranded in Charleston when the ship carrying him home from missionary work in Panama was wrecked in a hurricane while docked to take on supplies. Undaunted, the Reverend Stobo set about establishing Presbyterian outposts around the barrier islands, including on Johns Island. The original church was built in 1719 and was enlarged in subsequent years, serving both white planters and their enslaved Blacks - although Blacks were only allowed to join the church after their masters certified they were "of good character" and were confined during worship services to the balconies above the sanctuary.

The Rev. Ishmael Moultrie

The second and later landmark is the Hebron Center, formerly the Hebron Zion Presbyterian Church, established as a freedman's church after Reconstruction when Black parishioners were expelled from what became a whites-only congregation at the older church. They set about establishing their own house of worship, a makeshift structure further south on Bohicket Road made from rough pine and palmetto fronds. The congregation was led by Ishmael Moultrie, the first Black ordained as a minister by the post-Civil War South Carolina Negro Presbytery. When news came in 1865 of a schooner wrecked on Deveaux Bank with a load of timber, Moultrie sent congregation members in rowboats and barges to retrieve the cargo; and soon a handsome clapboard church built from the wreckage rose to serve the congregation until 1965, when a new brick church was built next door.

The sturdy building, converted to a senior citizens center in 1980, survived hurricane Hugo nine years later, although it was knocked partially off its foundations and had to laboriously be hauled back upright and partially reconstructed. It stands today with St. Johns Presbyterian as two of the oldest surviving buildings on Johns Island, both born in their separate ways because of shipwrecks.