Camp Tales

Eighty-five years ago, a handwritten document was signed that would decide the future of Seabrook Island and the preservation of its natural beauty. It was in 1938 that Victor Morawetz, once a high-powered New York lawyer who had counted Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan among his clients, signed a handwritten codicil to his will directing that at the death of his younger wife Marjorie, the couple's several hundred acres of Seabrook Island would be deeded to the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina for use as a summer camp for Charleston-area young people.

The Morawetz "Clubhouse" on the beach

The couple, who had arrived in Charleston in the late 1920's, famously bought and restored Fenwick Hall as a winter residence. But in 1937, they purchased several hundred acres of the southern portion of Seabrook Island, then completely undeveloped, and converted an old Boys Club camp building on "Seabrook Beach", near where today's Pelican Watch Villas stand, into a cottage for beach weekends. Both Victor and Marjorie were ardent conservationists and feared Seabrook would be decimated by unregulated timbering if it wasn't protected.

Marjorie Morawetz

Victor died a month after making his bequest to the Episcopal church. Thirteen years later, in 1951, Marjorie Morawetz honored her husband's wish and deeded over eight hundred acres of Seabrook Island to the church and its new Camp St. Christopher, reserving the couple's by-then substantial beach "Clubhouse" for her use during her lifetime. She passed away in 1958, leaving the ownership of Seabrook Island to the diocese, which set about creating Camp St. Christopher. With mounting maintenance costs and tax assessments, the diocese in 1970 sold all but 314 acres to the Seabrook Island Development Partnership, the ancestor of succeeding development entities that eventually led to the Town of Seabrook's incorporation in 1987.

SINHG members visit a slough at the Camp

SINHG has enjoyed a long relationship with Camp St. Christopher and its Barrier Island Environmental Education Center. Not long after SINHG was established in the early 1980's, members funded the first boardwalks along the Camp's fresh-water sloughs and provided reference materials for the Camp's library, along with the first computers ever used at the Camp. SINHG continues to partner with Camp St. Christopher and the Barrier Island Center by periodically including the Camp in its annual schedule of SINHG Trips for members. We're fortunate to have this reminder of Seabrook's less-developed past literally on our doorstep, thanks to the foresight and generosity of a northern couple who, like so many of us, fell in love with the Lowcountry.

Fancy Footwork

Its exact origins may be obscure, but it's a fact that South Carolina's official state dance, the Carolina Shag, has deep roots in the Lowcountry. In the pre-Rock and Roll era, dance clubs up and down the South Carolina coast packed them in for nights of fancy footwork under the stars to the smooth, jazz and blues-inflected rhythms of what everyone called beach music.

The Shag's adaptability, from a simple six or eight-step pattern to a complicated array of quick shuffles and spins, most likely grew from the jitterbug and The Charleston craze of the 1920's. Those, in turn, were adapted from the dances brought to the Lowcountry by enslaved Africans.

"Shagging" was undoubtedly assimilated into mainstream culture during the first half of the twentieth-century, although in its mid-century heyday it was mostly confined to young, white enthusiasts who had "jumped the Jim Crow rope" by visiting Black dance clubs to watch and learn. As one "shagger" remembered, "We were totally integrated because the blacks and whites had nothing in our minds that made us think we were different. We loved music, we loved dancing, and that was the common bond between us." Ramshackle dance clubs, hastily constructed but always with a well-stocked bar and a resilient wooden floor, dotted the beaches of the coastal Carolinas by the late 1930's.

Shag Legend "Chicken" Hicks (left) and friends

With its air of illicit pleasure and the added benefit of adult disapproval, the Shag was soon popular enough to produce stars like Big George Linberry and "Chicken" Hicks, who smoothed out the initially jerky steps of what everyone called "fast dancing" and paired it with more laid-back, guitar-and-bass driven music. (One famous dance pavilion in Myrtle Beach, The Pad, installed outdoor walls to block the dance's risqué moves from prying eyes.) But by the 1960's, when the name "shag dancing" was first attached to give the dance its sexual undertones, the style had given way to other fads - the Mashed Potato, the Twist, the Locomotion, and others - spawned by rock and R&B music. Even more devastating was 1954's hurricane Hazel, which swept away many of the old dance pavilions for good.

But the dance's fans never totally died away, and by the 1970's it had stirred back to life in competitive dance circuits centered on the North Carolina coast. In 1984, it was named South Carolina's official state dance. And next month brings the National Shag Dance Championships in Myrtle Beach. But you don't have to travel that far to learn to shag. On March 4th, join the Southern Dance Party at Lake House, where expert Denise Hull will teach you all you need to know to keep the state dance alive and well.

FIRST ON THE WATER

Today may be "Black Friday" for many of us, the unofficial opening of the Christmas gift shopping season, but a less commercial designation also belongs to this day after Thanksgiving - Native American Heritage Day, proclaimed in 2008 by President George W. Bush to commemorate the role of pre-European peoples in shaping American history.

Here in the Lowcountry, evidence of pre-Colonial and prehistoric peoples are still present in the shell rings and middens scattered among the barrier islands (see our earlier post on shell rings), while more fragile traces of these early peoples are occasionally discovered, including a 4,000-year old dugout canoe found buried in the pluff mud of the Cooper River. As reported by the Post & Courier's Adam Parker, the canoe has become a rallying point for Lowcountry and Upstate Native Americans from the Wassamasaw, Catawba, Waccamaw and Yemassee Indian Nations.

The canoe was discovered in 1997 by an amateur diver who illegally removed it before it was confiscated under state law and put into storage for nearly two decades before serious restoration efforts began at Clemson University's Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston (where the CSS Hunley is also undergoing preservation).

Members of the Yemassee Indian Nation touch part of their history, Photo courtesy The Post & Courier

Only fragments of the canoe remain, mostly pieces of its bow and stern, but even with these few pieces radiocarbon dating has yielded an age of about 4,200 years, known to archeologists as the Late Archaic period, contemporary with the dating of shell rings like Fig Island. Fashioned from a hollowed-out cypress log, the fragments show clear signs of scraping and firing to create a watercraft that was the common means of transportation for these early peoples, who migrated seasonally between the Upstate and the coast.

The preservation process will be a long one. The canoe currently resides in a trough of fresh water at the conservation center as preparations are made to soak it in a solution of glue-like polyethylene glycol to stiffen the wood, a process that can take up to a year to complete. The canoe will then be freeze-dried before consultations with southeastern Indian nations for a permanent and respectful display site. As Chief Lamar Nelson of the Eastern Cherokee, Southern Iroquois and United Tribes of South Carolina told the Post & Courier, "Any Native descendants in South Carolina, or North Carolina, could be related to the people who built that canoe."