My first tour of duty in the Navy was at the Naval Hospital in Beaufort, in an area of South Carolina known as the Lowcountry. During the years 1973 to 1978, I spent many off duty hours wandering about the mainland and nearby islands, exploring Lowcountry culture and history, and attempting to make that history come alive. Some of what I experienced has become very dear to me over the years and remains strong in memory even now.
Although there are numerous noteworthy historic sites in and around Beaufort that warrant
attention, foremost among the sites that particularly held my interest were the old Confederate
forts and church ruins. Of the latter, the one that most often comes to mind
is the lovely little Chapel of Ease on St. Helena Island.
Isolated by the hauntingly beautiful physical barriers of tidal marshland, salt water creeks and the Intercoastal Waterway, St. Helena Island, in the Sea Islands area off the coast of Beaufort, evokes a feeling of stepping back in time. The island is truly a land that time forgot--of small farms and bordering dense forests of palmetto palm, pine and oak--of sometimes blacktop, but often only dusty, treeshrouded dirt roads. Before the Civil War, sprawling plantations whose lands were worked by African slaves graced the island. Today, owing to the physical and cultural isolation of the descendants of those slaves, St. Helena still retains a pronounced 19th century feeling, reminiscent of a time when the island's plantations grew indigo and the finest cotton then known.
In the midst of this rural splendor, in a clearing on Land's End Road, stands a structure that was once a part of that plantation tradition. It remains a palpable relic of an earlier time, and as such is a living lesson in history.
Built between 1742 and 1747, when the only access to the churches of Beaufort was by boat--and that at some distance--the Chapel of Ease provided a convenient place for the Episcopal plantation owners on St. Helena Island to worship. It is a small structure, with brick arches over doorways and windows, and tabby walls. Tabby, incidentally, is a form of construction using a cement made of lime, sand and oyster shells. There was an early tradition of using tabby construction along the South Atlantic coast, particularly by the British in the Beaufort area and the Spanish along the Florida coast near St. Augustine (see link above).
[Tabby Closeup Pictured Below]
Interestingly, and as an aside, I also found Spanish era buildings on Guam made of the same material.
I initially thought this to be a curious anomaly in areas so widely distant--until I considered the fact
that on Guam, as along the South Carolina and Florida
coasts, lime generating seashells were an indigenous, abundant and inexpensive building material.
The Spaniards simply
brought the technology with them to the island and used it there as well.
But a forest fire in 1886 ravaged the building, and today the tiny Chapel of Ease stands in ruins.
Today all that is left are free-standing walls set among
Spanish moss draped trees, with the sky vaulting overhead for a ceiling and
gaping apertures where windows and doors once were. Still, this once-proud little
chapel, where birds now sing the only anthems breaking the eerie silence of the forest,
remains a magical, mystical place for me and a peaceful place to which I return often in moments
of solitude.
Dating from 1748, Old Sheldon Church is another quiet and serene set of ruins, but on the mainland, on the route I used to take from Aiken to Beaufort during the time I was stationed there. Located between Yemassee and Gardens Corner, South Carolina, the historic ruins are all that remain today of one of the South's most interesting old churches. The church was burned the first time by the British in 1780 and once again by Sherman's army in 1865 during his "march to the sea."
Of special note there is the graveyard, containing stone slabs and grave markers dating
back to the Indian Wars and before. Interestingly enough, the cause of death is often inscribed
on these markers, sometimes with flowery, poetic tributes to the deceased.
