The Legares of Charleston

It's would be difficult to travel anywhere in the greater Charleston area without encountering the name Legare or to having your pronunciation corrected to the proper Charlestonian's "LeGREE". There's Legare Farms and Legareville Road here on Johns Island; downtown's Legare Street (above), one of the historic district's most beautiful streets; and Sol Legare Island, the small barrier island between James Island and Folly Beach. But it's hardly surprising the name's so common, for the Legares are among the earliest European families to have settled here.

The Legare ancestor is Francis Solomon Legare, a French Huguenot whose family was driven from France late in the 17th century during that country's persecution of such French Protestants under Louis XIV. By the time the family arrived in the colonies, Solomon had dropped his first name, had become a silversmith and jeweler in Boston, and had so provoked his father's anger by marrying an English woman that he was disinherited and started a new life with her in Charleston, where he flourished at his trade and soon became one of the city's wealthiest merchants and planters, buying up property along today's Legare and Tradd Streets. By 1729, he'd bought the small island now known as Sol Legare Island as pasturage for his dairy herd and to cultivate rice.

The Seashore Farmers Lodge, now a museum

Traces of the plantation's slave cabins have been uncovered, as well as reminders of Civil War battles related to the siege of Charleston by Union troops. After the war, freed Blacks purchased or were given small tracts of land for farming, and the island ever since has been noted for its predominantly Black population, its circa 1915 Seashore Farmers Lodge where crops were bartered and sold, and for Mosquito Beach, a summer refuge from the city for Blacks who were barred from the whites-only beaches of Folly and James Islands until the civil rights period.

Legareville, about 1840

About the time Solomon purchased the island, he also acquired several hundred acres of land along the Stono River, where it meets the Kiawah River, as a summer retreat. It soon became known as Legareville and grew into a summer colony for white planters. Nothing remains of it today except a street name, for it was burned to the ground during the Civil War to prevent it from falling into Union hands.

But not far away is Legare Farms on River Road, first planted by Solomon in 1725 and still owned by direct descendants of the family. Solomon died in 1760 at 85 years of age, and is buried in the graveyard at downtown's Circular Church, which he helped to found.

Maroons

The Lowcountry's swamps and creek beds harbor many secrets with their inaccessibility and isolation, but archeologists are uncovering at least part of that hidden history with research into the societies of escaped slaves who found shelter and freedom in such formidable surroundings. Called "maroons" by antebellum plantation masters (the name likely derived from the Spanish cimmaròn, meaning 'wild' or 'fierce'), these fugitives concealed themselves deep in forbidding terrain, often finding high ground on which small villages were built, surviving by hunting, fishing, occasional raids on plantation storehouses and trading with Native Americans.

Excavations in the Great Dismal Swamp

It's been estimated that as many as fifty such hidden enclaves existed in the Lowcountry during the two hundred years between European settlement of the coastal southeast and the outbreak of the Civil War, from as far north as Virginia and as far south as Florida. In South Carolina, maroon communities were long-established deep inside swamps along the Congaree, Ashepoo and Combahee rivers, as well as Goose Creek and Bear Creek in Dorchester and Colleton counties, respectively.

As early as the 1730's, South Carolina's colonial government was offering a reward of twenty pounds for the return of a maroon, or ten pounds for the scalp of a murdered one. During the Revolutionary War, many maroon communities established relationships with, and fought alongside, the British in the belief a British victory would bring their freedom to live openly. One of the most famous maroon communities established on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River in those times called themselves "the King of England's Soldiers", but were attacked and scattered by white colonialist militias soon after the war ended. Most notorious to white colonials was "Forest Joe", who led a band of maroons in raids along the Santee River until he was captured and executed in 1823. Similar violent confrontations thundered up and down the Lowcountry before the Civil War, including near Georgetown in 1820 and Jacksonboro two years later.

The Savannah River maroon fortress figures prominently in George Dawes Green's 2022 novel "The Kingdoms of Savannah". Green, a Savannah native, grew up listening to family stories of these secretive groups and is now spearheading an effort to locate the "King's Soldiers" site thought to be along Bear Creek, which flows into the Savannah River from South Carolina. No sign of the fortress has turned up so far, but Green says that's fine with him. "I like the fact that it's been two-hundred-and-thirty-five years," he told The New Yorker, "and it doesn't necessarily wish to be found."

The Wave

Weather, hot weather, is leading the news this summer (June was Earth's hottest month ever recorded, according to the NOAA), and although for us it's undoubtedly a Lowcountry summer out there, we're fortunate in having a nearly constant sea breeze to moderate temperatures somewhat during this typically warmest month of the island year. And it's been considerably hotter in past years on the island - near one hundred degrees back in 2015, for example. The highest temperature recorded to date in greater Charleston was 105 degrees on August 1st of 1999, the hottest the city's ever been since records started being kept in 1893. A close second was in June of 2021, at 102 degrees recorded at the airport.

Heat waves can be stubborn. Formed when a high pressure system forces warm air closer to the ground, that same system pushes other, potentially cooler systems aside until too much static charge builds between the systems and thunderstorms develop. And if that trapped warmer air continues to heat up for too long, the dreaded "heat dome" forms that can last for weeks at a time. So far, though, we're experiencing mostly average temperatures for the island thanks to coastal winds.

Acclimating to southern heat spells can be challenging, sometimes taking more than week of exposure to adjust. We all know, too, to keep outdoor activity to morning and early evening hours (just like our wildlife does) to avoid the signs of pending hypothermia - profuse sweating , nausea and red, sensitive skin. And, of course, stay hydrated, even ifyou don't feel thirsty while you're outdoors, especially if you're jogging or otherwise engaging in physical activity. Make it a cool summer!