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.

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.