A Lowcountry Fall

The autumn equinox arrives this year on September 23rd (at 2:50am, to be exact), when the sun crosses the ' equator on its way south. Of course, that's our earth-centric view of what is really the seasonal northward tilt of the earth, shifting the northern hemisphere away from an immobile sun until the winter solstice in December, when the process reverses and carries us toward another spring and summer.

While those in other parts of the country may enjoy a more colorfully spectacular autumn, our shift is more subtle. Salt marshes change from summer green to gold as the spartina grass dies back, and the cordgrass loses its flowering parts and drops its seeds for the benefit of migrating birds, who depend on it for a food source. At the beach, migrating shore birds like pipits and plovers forage in the pluff mud to refuel before resuming their journey south. Cooling waters bring the start of oyster season, as the warm-water fueled reproductive season comes to an end and harvesting can begin (with the blessing of the state's DNR). Those cooling waters also bring a welcome end to the traditional hurricane season, as storms are deprived of the warm ocean that gives them energy. (Although climate change and a more continuously warm Atlantic can now bring storms as early as the spring and as late as the winter.)

It's a season of change, however gentle that change may be in the Lowcountry, and traditionally a time to pause, rest, re-evaluate. It was a time of great ritual significance for ancient peoples who built monuments like Stonehenge or the mounds of the American Midwest to mark and observe the changing of the seasons. For the Gullah Geechee, with the Lowcountry's more gentle seasonal shift, it's a time for harvest feasts and traditional crafts like basket-weaving during the cooler winter months to come. For others, it was a time of myth-making to explain the fiery change in the trees, at least for more northern First Peoples. The Wyandots, one of the Great Lakes tribes, said the change was because of the blood of the Great Bear, wounded in a celestial fight with the Great Deer, which falls to earth each year and covers the trees in brilliant red, orange and yellow.

The Carolina Bay Mystery

Who doesn't like a mystery? Geologists and natural history enthusiasts have been trying to solve one for decades - the origin of an ancient collection of elliptical features called Carolina Bays, scattered over the Lowcountry coastal plain. The nearest to us is one in Francis Marion Forest, one of an estimated 4,000 such features throughout the state, according to the South Carolina DNR, ranging in size from just a few hundred feet across to the size of a small lake. No one knows where they came from.

Carolina bays are always oriented northwest/southeast

They all share some intriguing similarities. They're all oriented along a northwest/southeast axis, and most have sand banks built up on their northeast and southeast edges. Erosion on the northwest and southeast edges have caused a general migration to the northwest. When supplied with water from underground aquifers, Carolina Bays support a plentiful array of wildlife and rare plant species along with loblollies, cypresses and sweet bay trees; drier bays have allowed geologists to date their formation through bedrock samples to as early as 20,000 years ago.

John Lawson's account of his explorations of the Carolinas

They remain mysterious even though they were first described in the late 17th century by a European explorer, John Lawson, during a months-long trek with Native American guides that took him from Charleston as far north as present-day Washington DC. Traveling up the Santee River, Lawson noted what his guides called "pocosins", swampy areas that, he wrote, were always studded with huge bay trees. The association eventually gave the features the common name we use today.

Theories abound about the origins of Carolina Bays. The most popular current theory is that they were created by the southwesterly winds of the late Pleistocene era that swept and buffeted left-over water from receding seas into the shapes we see today. Until recently, though, the bays were thought to have been created by a meteor impact somewhere near the Great Lakes, spewing debris south and east and creating depressions that retained water from the retreating ocean. Or they may be glacial in origin, gouged out of the earth as glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. But no one really knows, and the mystery remains.

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.