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.

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.