THE GOOSE CREEK BRIDGE

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Contents

Praise for Author.......................................................................VIntroduction............................................................................1Foreword................................................................................3About the Author........................................................................5Relevant Historic Markers:..............................................................7Chapter Number and Title – Historic Marker Title and Location.....................9Author's Notes..........................................................................13Acknowledgements........................................................................15List of Figures.........................................................................17Chapter 1 The Goose Creek Bridge........................................................29Chapter 2 The Yamassee War at Goose Creek...............................................46Chapter 3 Gateway to Sacred Places......................................................88Chapter 4 St James, Goose Creek Church..................................................121Chapter 5 Little Places.................................................................149Chapter 6 "The Bridge is Torn Asunder!".................................................176Chapter 7 Preludes To Reconstruction....................................................201Chapter 8 Reconstruction and Beyond.....................................................225Chapter 9 The Old Parish in the New South...............................................240Chapter 10 Goose Creek and its Sacred Places............................................278Sources.................................................................................301Index...................................................................................315The Author at the Wassamassaw Baptismal.................................................321Finale..................................................................................323

Chapter One

Moist sea breezes swept onto the south Atlantic shore and showered precipitation on the Carolina coastal plain, where Windsor Hill stood at the center of a peninsula formed by the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Rain falling at Windsor Hill pooled into Goose Creek headwaters and began a slow twenty-five mile course toward Charleston and the sea. From Windsor Hill, the broad shallow flood flowed northerly for almost five miles before turning east against two miles of wetland forests and then bending south toward its outfall. Goose Creek drained more than fifty square miles of forests into wide wetlands before channeling into a navigable tributary. Where the creek bottom fell away and the tea-colored flood deepened to traversable depths, the creek commenced a winding eight-mile track to the Cooper River. Along the way, the fresh water rinsed wide swathes of reeds, washed miles of clayey banks and diluted the briny three-foot pitch of undulating tides before it blended with the brackish Cooper River and emptied into Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.

For millennia, white-tailed deer and other animals skirted the banks of Goose Creek in pursuit of nourishing graze, and waded across the shallows upstream of the deeper waters. Indigenous hunters followed the animal trace until it disappeared at the waters edge where they too crossed in pursuit. Later, European immigrants forded the creek with packhorses laden with frontier essentials in search of the bounties of the Charleston hinterland. The fording place on the, "Broad Stately Creek ... (Goose Creek)" soon became a busy conveyance where long lines of burdened pack animals moving to and from the Carolina interior became common sights at all hours of the day. Packhorses trudged into the frontier with manufactured items imported from England, and back again with bundles of deerskins and peltry. Soon, equally long lines of enslaved Native Americans waded across the stream toward slave blocks in Charleston and sea captains bound for the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

Predictably, some of the first European families settled near the convenient crossing and cleared the forests, tilled the land, watered and grazed free-ranged livestock, and drove herds through the shallows to the markets in Charleston, sixteen miles south-east of the ford. As more families depended upon the shallow crossing, some envisioned a sturdy bridge at that place to link their rising homes, farms, settlements and sacred places to Charleston – an important portal to the British Empire.

THE MIDDLETONS AND SCHENCKINGHS

Brothers Arthur and Edward Middleton arrived in Carolina with early immigrant families and acquired large tracts of land on both sides of the ford. In 1678, the Lord Proprietors granted land called "Yeshoe" to Arthur and Mary Middleton on the western approach (later named Otranto Plantation) and awarded acreage to Edward Middleton and his bride, Sarah on the eastern side that they called the Oaks Plantation. Barnard Schenckingh, his bride, Elizabeth, two sons and three daughters emigrated from Barbados to work the forests between Red Bank Road and Goose Creek, south of the Oaks Plantation. A successful herdsman, he free-grazed cattle and sheep on the rich sub-tropical fauna and watered the herds along a convenient freshwater stream that nearly bisected his property. He forced the fattened livestock across the shallows and drove them along the narrow packhorse trail to butchers in Charleston, making the sixteen-mile route wider, muddier and deeply pockmarked by innumerable hooves.

Barnard and Elizabeth Schenckingh claimed the last tract of land along passable depths of the creek, but later arrivals coveted the fertile soils on the banks of its non-navigable headwaters, and others sought the deep woods on nearby Foster Creek and Back River. Couples Joseph and Jane Thorogood, Abraham and Marianne Fleury, Robert and Sarah Howe and James and Margaret Moore enjoyed no deepwater frontage. They drained their fields into shallow headwaters and reached their properties by way of the convenient ford that the Schenckingh cattlemen used to drive theirs herds to market.

JANE AND JOSEPH THOROGOOD

The Thorogood family forded the waist-deep water in 1680, and probably purchased a bull and some milk cows from the Schenckingh cattlemen near the crossing. With cattle in tow, the newest frontier couple walked two miles northwesterly along the "High Roade [sic]" to the nineteen-mile point, where they diverted due north along a gently ascending ridge two more miles to pastures above the headwaters of Back River. Joseph Thorogood resided on the land for two years before Governor Joseph West announced a proprietary award of 3,000 acres to him. The governor described the land as "near the head of a branch of a creek which runneth [sic] into Medway River, and called by the Indian name of Oola-Coll." To what the Native American title "Oola-Coll," specifically refers is unknown, but conceivably it referenced the freshwater swamp that emptied into Medway (Meadway) River, an early citation to Back River. Back River flowed five miles east of the granted property and continued six more miles to blend with the Cooper River nine miles above Charleston Harbor.

Opportunity to own land was the enduring dream that lured European settlers...