Hilton Head History Day

Today was HISTORY and NATURE day on Hilton Head.  It was to be only in the low seventies Fahrenheit so we figured swim suits would be out anyway. We packed our lunch and drove out to the east end of the island to visit the Discovery Museum, the area historical and natural history center.  This is a free (donations accepted) former hunting and vacation home for several families who began here by working the farm originally on site.

Called Honey Horn, a possible confusion with the original owners name, Hanahan, by the Gullah speaking natives of Hilton Head, the name stuck. Today Honey Horn is a museum, a children’s nature center, an arboretum, wetlands sanctuary and butterfly aviary.  It’s a great place to have a picnic too.

Inside we learned about the quiet life of the island since the Civil War. The plantations could not be productive again and many of the freed slaves who had come here seeking safety from the Union military camps on the island stayed after the war and developed communities around the original island Gullah culture.

Gullah is a word the first Negroes who lived here called themselves and may come from a derivation of one of their homeland names, Angola.

Into the 20^th century many wealthy white men created scattered hunting lodges on the island. After WW 2, white businesspeople and their families began coming onto the island by boat for vacations and began bringing friends down. In the 1950’s the building boom began with well planned, well laid out ‘plantations’ of new vacation and some permanent homes. Hilton Head Town was growing.  Then came the bridge.

Today there is a 4 lane tollway the lengthy of the island to get express southbound tourist traffic to Harbourtown, a shopping center with a faux lighthouse, faster. There is still the original business route four lane route 278 but it has dozens of red lights. 

The setting for these roads and all streets on the island is green and lush, with all construction mostly hidden by the plantings and huge live oaks but there is no denying Hilton Head is nowhere near the quiet farm and fish community it was before the bridge.  And even today new construction, and bridge expansion on the mainland, will be bringing more drivers and homeowners and tourists onto this once sleepy island.

From the Discovery Center we followed a driving historical site map of Hilton Head.  Most of these sites are at the north end, where we are staying, so I expected we might be back at the pool by the time the temperature warmed up a bit to at least make the hot tub desirable.

First stop was the Civil War earthwork Fort Mitchell which was saved from destruction by 100 years of total neglect, and the jungle that covered it till well into the 1960’s.  Located on the northwest shore along Skull Creek this artillery battery was set up to assist in keeping Confederates from the Bluffton and Savannah area from retaking Hilton Head from the Union Army . It was never attacked.

The Federal military had attacked Port Royal Sound early in the war and taken Beaufort and all of the sea islands north of and including Hilton Head and present day Parris Island. The Confederates, however, held onto Savannah and the further south islands till near the end of the war.

Next a short drive much farther back in time took us a couple of miles to the Green Shell Enclosure prehistoric Indian site.  Here, and at a similar site on the south end of the island, about 30 miles away, Mississippian Indians lived and worshipped for hundreds of years.  Possibly ancestors of the Yamasee, who greeted Europeans in the 1500’s, nothing but some crude pottery and stone implements and these shell mounds scatted on sea islands up and down the low country coast remind us they were here. But the same is true for the Yamasee, who were driven off the islands violently by this same white men.

Mona asked to be driven back to the resort for some pool time but I was on the hunt for several more Civil War sites and they were eluding all of my detective senses.  And my maps & GPS.

I wanted to find the large Confederate Fort Walker which had stood on the northeast corner of the island and fought bravely along with Fort Beauregard across the bay against thousands of shells fired into them by the Union fleet that ultimately took Port Royal Sound in what the Gullah people of the island called “The Big Shoot Up”.

Fort Walker was on the maps but all roads which led to it, and actually right through the Barony Resort property where we are staying,  ended up dead ends.  Finally I asked at the Port Royal Administration Building (this end of the island is one large private home development area for summertime cottages, villas, and mansions named for the Union Military Town built here during the war) and learned that only Port Royal owners and their guests may view the fort.  But if I’d like to sign up for a Discovery Museum every Wednesday $12.00 tour I could see it then.  Too late. We leave Sunday.  Boo Hoo.  A price the public may pay when gated communities come to your town, or island.

So I headed back to the central north area of the island, where the small regional island airport serves private and some commuter traffic to find a fort built to protect Mitchellville, a community of escaped slaves who began arriving as soon as Union soldiers showed up on the island. Fort Howell is still there and open to the public... for FREE.

 You may remember previous posts I wrote about Corinth, Mississippi several months ago.  There escaped slaves, called contraband of war, also began showing up by the hundreds and then thousands in the Union lines and they were placed productively in first the Contraband Camp at Corinth and then communities around Memphis, Tennessee, and elsewhere.

Here on the sea islands of South and North Carolina many of them stayed and were hired to care for and feed the army, and after the war received land grants for small farms.  Towns sprung up or existing Gullah towns grew. These were the owners of the lush and expensive acres that by the 1950’s white businessmen would buy for a few dollars to sell for thousands of dollars later on when the bridge to the mainland would be built.

  

Here I found the large tract which was once called Mitchellville, after the Union general who helped the former slaves settle into their own community. Here I found also the site of Fort Howell, built near the end of the war to keep expected Confederate raids from destroying Mitchellville. The war ended before any raids occurred. 

The most historic thing about Fort Howell is not that it is an old fort, but that it was built by a locally recruited South Carolina Colored regiment working alongside a white regiment from up north. But it would not be until the late 1940’s till President Truman would finally order the complete integration of all armed services of the United States.

The fort is an archeological site now, and I met Roger Horsey there doing his own legal metal detecting.  We spoke for half an hour about our experiences in the Civil War centennial 50 years ago.  We had both fought the Battle of Gettysburg then, he at 15 and I at 13 years old, with our dads.  We were young re-enactors, I in the First Pennsylvania Light Artillery and he with a South Carolina unit.  I wonder if we saw each other over that old stone wall on cemetery ridge, July 3^rd, 1963?

Roger carries a few of his battlefield finds with him to periodically check his detector.  As we spoke about the Honey Hill site, which we visited several days ago up near Ridgeland, he said he had a friend who owns property on the battle field and gets to search it sometimes.

Roger reached in his pocket and pulled out an authentic Union Williams self-cleaning, zinc lined minie style bullet fired during that attempt to take the Charleston to Savannah Railroad.  He handed it to me and said, "I've got hundreds.  Now you have one." How about that!

Mitchellville is an archeological site too, named for the Union general who helped the first freed slaves settle in it.  Except that people do live scattered in the now heavily wooded and wetland area not really fit for summer home development. Not yet, anyway.  The colonial period ‘tabby’ fireplaces from the Drayton Plantation still exist next to the high school playing fields. Proof that wealthy whites once found value in letting poor blacks live in this area.

The old original Mitchellville homes are gone, small cabins, really, rotted away as people have moved away as taxes have risen higher and higher. The first one room school has been preserved and the sight of it brought back memories of Pat Conroy’s autobiographical book, “The Water is Wide”.

In it he speaks of being the only white teacher on then all black ,and near to Hilton Head, Daufuskie Island. Like his school in the fifties this one was a pre-integration ‘separate but equal (NOT)’ all negro school. And these children’s parents had to pay for school supplies and add to the teacher’s salary so she could afford to teach at all. Such was not the case in the white schools of the islands or mainland.

Now an archeological park is planned to honor the memory of this first freedman’s town in South Carolina.  I wonder if it will be a success? And if it is, will the remaining black and lower income white families of the Mitchellville area still be able to afford to live here?

I passed a public bus stop on the busy route 278 as I was heading back to the Marriott Barony Resort after visiting Mitchellville.  It was about 4:30 pm and the bus shelter was crowded with black men and women, presumably heading home after working all day in the predominantly white owned island businesses; from Target and Walmart to private clothing boutiques and restaurants.

The scene as I drove by reminded me of countless similar sites on Caribbean islands and in the Mexican Yucatan which we have seen on past vacations.  The poor come to the resorts to work, and at night must leave for they cannot afford to stay.

My thoughts and assumptions may be all wrong, and I truly hope they are.  For if they are not, the songs of freedom which the newly emancipated slaves sang in 1863, and since, must ring very hollow for many of those vocalists descendants now.

-Ken