THE FIRST SHOT

Another trivia question: where did the first bombardment of Fort Sumter that began the Civil War originate? No points lost if you incorrectly answered The Battery along downtown's sea wall or Fort Moultrie in Mount Pleasant, but the first shot on Sumter actually came from James Island's Fort Johnson, on the southern shore of the harbor's mouth and almost directly opposite Fort Sumter in mid-harbor (that's Sumter in the distance in the above photo).

Once called Windmill Point. there have been at least four military fortifications on the site, starting with a colonial-era British one erected in 1708 and named for the Proprietary Governor of the Carolinas at the time, Nathaniel Johnson. While any traces of this original fort have long disappeared, segments of the tabby walls of a second, pre-Revolutionary War fort built in 1759 can still be seen at the site. By 1775, an enlarged and better defended fort rose on the Point, at first occupied by colonial rebels but seized by the British during their occupation of Charleston and later destroyed by a hurricane. Yet another fort rose on the site as a second British invasion of Charleston seemed possible during the War of 1812. All that remains of this third structure are the stone base of a wooden observation tower, and a free-standing brick magazine which remains intact.

The c.1830 magazine remains intact.

Fort Johnson during the Civil War

By 1861, South Carolina troops had placed two 10-inch mortars on the point. On April 12, 1861 one of the mortars fired on Fort Sumter in the opening salvo of the war that split the nation. During the war, Confederate forces drove off two Union regiments that attempted an approach from nearby Morris Island, keeping the Fort in Confederate hands until the winter of 1865, when it was abandoned in the general withdrawal from Charleston as Union forces approached the city.

A post-war, federally operated quarantine station next occupied the site until the 1950's when the College of Charleston and MUSC took title to the 40-acre property, but by the 1970's most of the land had been transferred to the South Carolina Wildlife and Marine Resources Department, which continues to operate a marine research station there. The College's Grice Marine Laboratory serves as a research and teaching facility at the site, while MUSC sold its waterfront portion to the South Carolina Battlefield Preservation Trust, which has created a 20-acre park and historic site for the public.

On the point, with its sweeping view down the harbor toward Charleston, you can still walk where guns once roared and a war began.

SPOLETO RETURNS

We're fortunate to live so close to one of America's premier cultural centers, especially with the return this spring of the performing arts celebration that put Charleston on the international cultural map, Spoleto Festival USA. The Festival returns over the Memorial Day weekend and continues for 17 days, drawing performers and audiences from all over the world to multiple venues throughout the city for its 45th year. (The 2020 season was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic, but survived in a reduced series of radio and streamed events, "Spoleto At Home".

Gian Carlo Menotti

The Festival was the brainchild of Italian-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1911 - 2007) who in the mid-1970's began searching for a location for an American counterpart to Spoleto, Italy's, Festival Of The Two Worlds, of which he was the director. (The Pulitzer was for his opera "The Saint of Bleecker Street", but he's most widely known for "Amahl And The Night Visitors", written for television.) On a visit to the United States, he was invited to Charleston and noted that "It's intimate, so you can walk from one theater to the next. It has Old World charm in architecture and gardens. Yet it's a community big enough to support the large numbers of visitors to the festival." Promoted by Charleston's then-Mayor Joseph Riley and Theodore Stern, then the president of the College of Charleston, Spoleto USA opened its premier season in May of 1977.

The Festival has served as the setting for numerous world premieres of opera, theater and musical performance by artists such as Tennessee Williams, Phillip Glass, Laurie Anderson and many others. This year's Festival brings the world premiere on May 27th of "Omar", an opera by Rihannon Gibbons and John Abels, which tells the story of Omar Ibn Said, an early 19th-century West African Muslim scholar seized in his native village by slave traders, shipped to Charleston's Gadsden Wharf and sold into slavery for the rest of his life. The opera's based on Ibn Said's handwritten autobiography written in Arabic in 1831 and translated into English in the 1880's

Learn more about the Spoleto USA Festival, including performance schedules, here.

ALONG THE SANTEE

History and nature came together for us during a recent SINHG Trip to Old Santee Canal Park in Monck's Corner. The birdwatchers among us were impressed by our guide's remarkable ear for identifying birds strictly by their song, like the Prothonotary Warblers and Eastern Bluebirds, all busy tending their

Prothonotary Warbler (courtesy Old Santee Canal Park)

nesting sites in the cypresses and live oaks along the many boardwalks threaded through this Lowcountry National Historic site.

The Santee Canal, we learned, was the first canal built in post-Revolutionary War America, authorized by the South Carolina General Assembly in 1786 and completed in 1800. Its 22-mile length. with ten locks, provided a shipping route between Charleston's Cooper River, via the Santee and Congaree rivers, to Columbia, the new state capitol. But the canal couldn't compete with the new railroads that began crisscrossing the state in the early 1800's, and

A preserved canal lock (courtesy Berkeley Observer)

the canal had fallen into disuse by the time of the Civil War. Much of it disappeared by flooding when nearby Lake Moultrie was constructed. Remnants of the old canal's locks have been preserved, along with the Stony Landing House (seen above), built in in 1843 and now used as a meeting venue.

While SINHG Trips continue through May, the schedule of trips for the fall season is under development and will be ready soon. Stay tuned!