A family footnote to history

Once in a while, if you are really lucky and paying attention, personal history meshes with the broader picture.

Our family recently spent our annual “beach week” at Kiawah Island, South Carolina. At the end of the week, when everyone else had left, Steve and I decided to linger a few more days in Charleston.

Charleston is great for history geeks like us. Although we have made annual trips there for decades, there’s always more to see. (Last year we went back to Fort Sumter, here.) This time around we decided to drive to Boone Hall Plantation, home of this legendary Avenue of the Oaks (Trust me, it’s this stunning, although the plantation was a bit of a let-down). Getting there took us past Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan’s Island, where we stopped to explore a family footnote to history.

A bit of background

Constructed to protect Charleston Harbor, Fort Moultrie was still unfinished when it was attacked by British forces in 1776. After a nine-hour battle Revolutionary forces led by William Moultrie turned back the British and Charleston was spared. The fort was seriously neglected in subsequent years, but when England and France went to war in 1793, the U.S. determined to tighten waterfront security and a second Fort Moultrie was one of 20 new fortifications. The second Fort Moultrie was destroyed by a hurricane in 1804. Congress next ordered a third Fort Moultrie, this time built of brick, completed in 1809. In 1860, Charleston Harbor was protected by Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter, Battery Johnson and Castle Pinckney. In December the Federal Garrison abandoned Fort Moultrie for the newer Fort Sumter. A few months later, Confederate troops shelled and captured Sumter. The rest is Civil War history.

Getting personal

In 1936 Fort Moultrie was the first place my father-in-law, a newly-minted ROTC officer from the University of Georgia, was stationed. (By then the fort had been equipped with more modern weapons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then largely disarmed after WWI. It continued, however, to play a key role in coastal security.)

We shared this bit of personal history with the Park Rangers there, and they enthusiastically pulled out some photos of the facility in that era and directed us to the few remaining buildings, some still bearing their Army signage but now converted to high-end condos. My father-in-law would be so amused. In his day it was just a hot, humid post. I think of him walking the streets of what must have been a tiny town in a swampy backwater. Lou was from New York City. Even after those years at the university in Athens, Georgia, Sullivan’s Island must have seemed the ends of the earth.

It’s amazing to think that one army installation was repeatedly called into service for more than 175 years. At some point it changed from an Army fort to an Army/Navy reservation and encompassed most of Sullivan’s Island. Fort Moultrie was decommissioned in 1947 and turned over to the National Park Service in 1960.

We’ve spent so much time in South Carolina without really exploring this exact area. Our visit on this occasion as somewhere between accidental and spontaneous, but I’m so glad we got to look at this piece of the past.

Thanks for coming along. See you next time!