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Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

A Little Mansplaining from Lawson

10/6/2015

9 Comments

 
Last post we talked very seriously about serious topics. Not today. Today, about the very serious topic of the unimaginable floods in South Carolina, I give you Lawson's response to similar floods 315 years ago.
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Downtown Charleston isn't usually a canoeing destination. Not much more to say. IMAGE: CHUCK BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Two boys toss a football as they kayak in their back yard in Isle of Palms, SC. That's just outside Charleson; Lawson visited. IMAGE: MIC SMITH/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
One of the things Lawson appears to have been about was Doing the Science. He took classes at Gresham College in London, where the brand-spanking-new Royal Society met, and everything about his life indicates that he wanted to science. He traveled to Carolina; he undertook his enormous trip; he gathered botanical specimens for one of the greatest collectors of the day, and his specimens remain in the Natural History Museum as part of the founding collection of the British Museum.

Except.

He kind of missed some of the point of this whole science thing. The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullius in Verba," or, roughly, "don't take anybody's word for anything," demonstrating the society's commitment to experimentation and data rather than authority and pronouncement.

Which makes Lawson's interpretation of the "freshes" of the Santee and its resulting flooding somewhat charming. We all saw the rain come down in the last week -- we saw the radar and the photographs and so we understood. Lawson, in 1701, got to the mouth of the Santee River, found it with a significant current and in flood, and didn't know what caused the flooding. Evidently they didn't get 20 inches of rain, or surely he'd have mentioned that. Just the same, lack of evidence didn't stop him from surmising that the Santee flooded -- every year at this time, he was told -- because, well, because it snowed up in the mountains (the sources of the Santee do in fact stretch all the way to the Blue Ridge), so that meant that the snow built up without help of the salty sea to melt it, and then when a warm breeze came in it all melted at once and came rushing down the river.

In January.

It's not Lawson's greatest mansplain ever (he imagines at one point that flowing over marble is what makes Carolina water blue: "The Springs that feed these Rivulets, lick up some Potions of the Stones in the Brooks; which Dissolution gives this Tincture, as appears in all, or most of the Rivers and Brooks of this Country." Carolina Blue jokes to come). Just the same, it's a pretty good mansplain and he deserves credit. Good description of the flood, not so good on its causes. Here, anyhow, are Lawson's own words: "The next Morning very early, we ferry'd over a Creek that runs near the House; and, after an Hour's Travel in the Woods, we came to the River-side, where we stay'd for the Indian, who was our Guide, and was gone round by Water in a small Canoe, to meet us at that Place we rested at. He came after a small Time, and ferry'd us in that little Vessel over Santee River 4 Miles, and 84 Miles in the Woods, which the over-flowing of the Freshes, which then came down, had made a perfect Sea of, there running an incredible Current in the River, which had cast our small Craft, and us, away, had we not had this Sewee Indian with us; who are excellent Artists in managing these small Canoes.

"Santee
 River, at this Time, (from the usual Depth of Water) was risen perpendicular 36 Foot, always making a Breach from her Banks, about this Season of the Year: The general Opinion of the Cause thereof, is suppos'd to proceed from the overflowing of fresh Water-Lakes that lie near the Head of this River, and others, upon the same Continent: But my Opinion is, that these vast Inundations proceed from the great and repeated Quantities of Snow that falls upon the Mountains, which lie at so great a Distance from the Sea, therefore they have no Help of being dissolv'd by those saline, piercing Particles, as other adjacent Parts near the Ocean receive; and therefore lies and increases to a vast Bulk, until some mild Southerly Breezes coming on a sudden, continue to unlock these frozen Bodies, congeal'd by the North-West Wind, dissipating them in Liquids; and coming down with Impetuosity, fills those Branches that feed these Rivers, and causes this strange Deluge, which oft-times lays under Water the adjacent Parts on both Sides this Current, for several Miles distant from her Banks; tho' theFrench and Indians affir'm'd to me, they never knew such an extraordinary Flood there before."

9 Comments

Fan Mail from Some Flounder

9/10/2015

8 Comments

 
PictureIt's beginning to look a lot like the coastal plain. This image is actually the Piedmont still, but you can see how the land has flattened out.
Greetings from Wilson, North Carolina, where the Lawson Trek is four hiking-days from its arrival in little Washington and the completion of this journey. 

I want to tell you all about Wilson, a small city struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of the loss of tobacco farming and other traditional rural vocations that made it a coastal plain capital. Wilson is working hard on its downtown, encouraging the arts, and looking forward. 

I want to tell you about Clayton, a smaller city (Wilson has close to 50,000 people; Clayton is closing in on 20,000), which is trying to combine a downtown focus on small business with the advantages it has by being part of the metropolitan Raleigh tech hub. I want to tell you about how it's felt to walk away from even the last hills and into the coastal plain, where the clouds put on a show every day and the land spreads itself out before you like a beach blanket. I want to tell you about the fried bologna sandwich I had in Papa Jack's, in Buckhorn Crossroads and the barbecue I ate at Parker's in Wilson, about what seems to be Lawson's crossing of the Neuse River and what may or may not have been Wee Quo Whom, a waterfall whose location has always presented a significant problem for route tracers.  

And yet instead I need to address an issue I thought we had resolved already. I'm talking, once again, about the possible hanging tree in Salisbury, which sparked a discussion -- a highly respectful discussion on all parts, I might add -- about the confederate flag and the history of racism in the Carolinas. (I updated things a bit here.)

Once again: by far the most delightful aspect of this discussion -- at least in these pages -- is the decency with which it's been carried on. I have spoken with people who vigorously support the flying of the confederate flag and people who think (as I do) that the flag represents a legacy of hatred and white supremacy. And we shook hands and we kept our voices modulated and we listened and smiled. We didn't change our minds much, but we engaged in civil discourse.

So then yesterday I got this comment on the blog.

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PictureThis is John Jeffries. Lawson speaks with adoration of Eno Will, the finest of his Indian friends. I think I know how he felt. I'll tell you more about Mr. Jeffries in time.
I hate to allow Mr. Mathews, whoever he is and wherever he comes from (the return address on his comment came up as "server unknown" or some such), to kidnap this discussion, but I found it so heartbreaking that I wanted to put it out there rather than bury it: I've always believed that you expunge corruption by exposing it, not by hiding it.

It's scarcely worth pointing out the tide of irrationality in his comments -- he seems to think that his ancestors stole the land of the United States from the Indians fair and square (and tried to seize it again through treason) so that means those of us who don't share that background are somehow, I don't know -- well, gutter degenerate filth, so the United States is his country and not ours. We see so much of this now and I find it heartbreaking. I will point out that the word "gutter" is commonly attributed to Louis Farrakhan about Judaism (whether he ever said it or not is another entire question. And meanwhile, the Nazis famously despised "degenerate" art, so once you're using code words like degenerate and gutter, you're aligning yourself with some pretty troubling things.

I need to tell you this: I have sat across from Peggy Scott of the Santee Indians, who was kind and decent and delightful, across from John Jeffries of the Occaneechi, who was kind and decent and delightful. (I haven't been able to tell you about him yet, but take a look at this until I can.) If anyone -- anyone -- could complain about people showing up and ruining a country -- well, you know. The point is, Mr. Mathews is spewing a kind of vicious, ignorant, cowardly hatred that pollutes everything it touches, and it hurt my spirit to leave it rotting in the comments thread of this blog, and it hurt even worse to delete it, as though I were afraid of it. 

So I'm sharing it here. And in that spirit I also say, once more: the vast majority of people with whom the Lawson Trek has interacted -- in fact, simply everybody else -- has shown such kindness and generosity that this ugly attack so near to the end of the project serves only to underscore that. I am grateful for that more than I can express.

To cleanse the stain of Mr. Mathews' vileness from our spirits, I will do something I should have done much more of throughout this project but only just thought of literally this very second: I'm going to share a bunch of photos and captions to show what it's looked like from the Lawson Trek the least couple hikes. Thanks for reading. And as for Mr. Mathews and his ilk, I suggest we just do what his favorite song asks us to do anyhow: look away.

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The last low hills of the Piedmont as the Lawson Trek moved from Morrisville towards Raleigh.
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What would Lawson have made of kudzu?
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I just loved the name. The gentlemen inside decided that what Lawson would find most different from his time was paved roads.
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On the road from Raleigh to Clayton this little gazebo offered a place to rest and reflect. Thanks, whoever put it up.
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Crossing the Neuse felt important; it's kind of my Home River. Does everybody feel like that about their closest big river?
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Downtown Clayton has some cool stuff going on.
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This mill is where Val Green, my greatest source of information on Lawson't journey, believes Lawson described a roaring waterfall. The owner doubts there was ever much of a waterfall there. It's a complicated world when you're trying to retrace a journey 315 years old.
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If I said the person selling this house was Flem Snopes, would anybody get the joke?
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A day -- or, in Lawson's case, 315 years -- too early for the Wilson County Fair. Next time.
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"A well-humour'd and affable People"

2/4/2015

6 Comments

 
In my first two treks I spent quite a bit of time with the descendants of the French Huguenots, settlers along the lower Santee River who welcomed and housed Lawson after he had made his way down the coast and started up the Santee. Just like their ancestors, the Huguenot descendants fed me, found me places to sleep, directed me, and wished me well.

From the Huguenot settlement Lawson continued north, likely following an Indian path along the edge of the swamp on the northeast bank of the Santee River, now called the Santee Swamp. The first native people he met there were the Santee Indians, whom he described as "a well-humour'd and affable People; and living near the English, are become very tractable."
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Lawson talks about Santee skills in making corncribs, on stilts and daubed with mud, that kept out rodents, thus enabling them to leave them unguarded, "always finding their Granaries in the same Posture they left them."  They needed significant corn storage, "there being Plantations lying scattering here and there, for a great many Miles [along the Santee River]." Especially beans and corn, the Santee, whose name means something like "river people," were great farmers in the rich bottomlands near the Santee River.

Says Lawson, "They came out to meet us, being acquainted with one of our Company, and made us very welcome with fat barbacu'd Venison," and let me promise you, Carolinians have been welcoming visitors with barbecue ever since. 


All of this is to say, from the wonderful hospitality of the Huguenots (which their descendants recreated with me), Lawson advanced to the wonderful hospitality of the Santee, and I was anxious to see if I could meet their descendants and see how time had treated them. I was thus thrilled when Chris Judge of the Native American Studies Center of the University of South Carolina-Lancaster gave me contact information for the current chief and vice-chief of the Santee, Randy Crummie and Peggy Scott. Chief Crummie was working seven days a week keeping body and soul together, so he asked me to reach out to vice-chief Scott, whom I now think of as Peggy and regard as a friend, and who welcomed me to her region just as openly as her ancestors did centuries ago.
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Vice-chief Scott at the South Carolina State House. Red, black, and white are Santee colors.
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Peggy Scott, vice-chief of the Santee Tribe, drove up in a Mustang and greeted with a hug. Wherever Lawson and her ancestors are sitting around retelling old stories, they're probably happy.
We had invited Peggy to meet us on the road, and to walk along with us for a while as part of the Trek. But schedules grew complex and we ultimately met Peggy in our luxe cabin at Santee State Park, named for her ancestors.

Peggy shared the life of a modern member of the Santee Indian Tribe, and let me tell you, it's not all barbecue and affability. "We're the only race to have to prove who you are," she says of American Indians as a minority group. By the way, like many I've spoken with, Peggy tells me she perceives Indian and Native American as equally inoffensive terms; I use the two interchangeably. 
Given that the U.S. government has a Bureau of Indian Affairs, I'm loth to get offended on anybody's behalf. And when I asked Peggy whether she'd grown up identifying as a Santee, she said, "We were identified as a derogatory name, that I don't choose to repeat."

She attended an Indian school, segregated and denied resources to the point where she says "I didn't know what a gymnasium was. I didn't even know what a library was." A couple of her friends went to the high school but were treated so badly they left. She says when she was in fourth grade the Indian school closed and she moved into the middle school, where she describes a segregated system having white and black drinking fountains. If an Indian child was thirsty? "The teacher or principal would go get you a paper cup of water."

It's no surprise, of course. Indigenous peoples like the Santees were already reeling from the results of European contact by the time Lawson met them in 1700. Smallpox had devastated them, rum had taken them unawares, and they had been not only uprooted from their land but commonly enslaved -- Indian slavery was such an enormous undertaking that before 1715, Charleston actually exported more Indian slaves than it imported African slaves. The Santees numbered around 1000 in 1600 but declined as precipitously as their neighbors. In 1711 they fought with the British against the Tuscarora (who had killed Lawson), though by then their number was so reduced that according to The Indian Slave Trade they sent only a portion of a group of 155 that comprised at least seven tribes' worth of warriors. in the 1715 Yamassee War in South Carolina that finally sealed the fates of the Southeastern tribes, they fought with their Indian neighbors against the colonists, but it was basically over when the Yamassee lost. The remnant of the Santee (80 or so people in two villages) moved up the river to join the Catawba or melted into the swamps, just trying to keep away from the colonists, over the years mixing with other outcasts like escaped slaves and poor whites. The wonderful Those Who Were Left Behind tells the story of the South Carolina tribes who remained, explaining how the current Santees may descend from a group of indeterminate Indian background who found themselves a small piece of land southeast of the Santee River in the mid-1700s and have been around there ever since, reasserting the name "Santee" in the 20th century. Exactly what blood runs in whose veins is a subject for debate -- constant debate, given that the Santee Tribe is currently recognized by South Carolina but not the federal government -- but Peggy has no doubts.

"I was born in the middle of my tribe," she says. "My father and the elders delivered me in my mother's bedroom."
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Things changed for Peggy when her father, in the military, served at Fort Polk in Louisiana. The Army famously sees only green, so for the first time in her life she was taught history and encouraged -- even allowed -- to ask questions. "When you are not educated, when you do not understand your history," she says, "you're lost." She talks about discovering Lawson's book in college: "He is like a huge part of my life," she says of Lawson, who described her ancestors kindly and with admiration. "It's like the whole world opened up when you have access to your history."

It's still complex. She has a son. "The old saying is you have to have one to put in this world and one to put in the other world," she says -- a child for the Tribe and a child for the greater society. For her part, she has embraced all aspects of her complicated background, though that's not always the case. She talks of tribe members who feel no need of tribal culture, seemingly buying into the old image of Indians as uncivilized. When her son was born, her father urged him to take advantage of his light skin, but Peggy smiles. "I raised him differently." He lives in Charleston, fully integrated into the world at large. But now engaged, he wants to be married on tribal land and include Santee tribal customs in his wedding.

She's worked much of her life for the betterment of her tribe. She's taken the special training you have to take as you try to work your tribe towards federal recognition, she's traveled to pow-wows hither and yon, and she has spent years of her life helping her tribe get, literally, back on the map. "We have land," she says. The U.S. Forest Service had an unused fire tower near Holly Hill, South Carolina, she says, and "We got an idea." 

She worked it, eventually getting the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources to donate the land, and the Orangeburg County Council provided money for a building, which opened in 2013.
Of that new building, Peggy told a an amazing story. Much of our discussion had to do with persecution, with the difficulties of gaining recognition, with the troubles of growing up Indian in a country that has never known what to do with you. "Even as a child it used to irk me," she recalls. "You came here, you tell us we're savages," she says. And then, when you try to get recognition for your tribe, "now, hundreds of years later, they say go find your history, your heritage -- that we took from you."

Some of it they can't have, though. 

"I'm part of the South Carolina Native American Ladies Traditional Dance group," she says. There was a time, after a significant accident, when Peggy could barely function, much less dance. But as her rehabilitation continued, she ended up able to dance, and a dance was scheduled at a pow wow the Santee hosted.

Let her tell you about it.
The Santees have waned and waxed again, growing stronger in recent years -- from only a few in the 1700s back to near a thousand now, the Santees remain by the river. Peggy brought us their welcome, and we certainly can be no less grateful for it than Lawson was.
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More Huguenot Awesomeness

1/12/2015

2 Comments

 
So I wrote a few days ago about the Lawson Trek's delightful afternoon with the family Guerry, direct descendants of Pierre Guerry, one of the original settlers of the French colony on the lower Santee. It was not until I returned and spoke with the redoubtable Val Green, who knows more about John Lawson's journey than any other person living, that I realized to what degree our afternoon created a sort of historical reenactment.
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Douglas Guerry, direct descendant of Pierre Guerry, who would have been around during Lawson's trek, and Jean Guerry, who married into the family and traces her own local ancestry only back to the 1720s because she just can't be bothered to trace further back.
That is, Lawson didn't just stay with French Santees. He probably spent an evening with a direct ancestor of our hosts. 

Here's the tale, as I understand it from Val (and my Huguenot sources, Susan Bates and Cheves Leland).

We finished our first journey at the homesite of Mons. Daniel Huger, where Lawson spent his first night after getting out of his canoe, having begun his trip up the Santee. His second night he spent with someone he calls Mons. Gallian the elder, whom historians have identified as a Monsieur Joachim Gaillard and his wife, Ester Paparel, who lived in what Lawson calls "a very curious contriv'd House, built of Brick and Stone." We passed near the site of this house in our wanderings in the Francis Marion National Forest and probably slept not more than a couple miles from its site, wherever it actually is. The next day we had cake and coffee with the Guerrys, and that night we spent warm and dry on the padded pews in the St. James United Methodist Church, which they hospitably opened for our use.
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The St. James United Methodist Church, where the Lawson Trek spent a very happy and dry night.
The morning after his stay with Mons. Gallian, Lawson was ferried across the engorged Santee by an Indian guide, whereas Katie and I just walked across the Route 17A bridge, though the river was plenty high for us too. As we continued walking we stumbled into some kind of farm development that included horses and a lake that was completely not on the map and had to scramble around to figure out where the hell we were. At approximately this point Lawson too found himself stuck. With the Santee in enormous flood, his group of six explorers and their lone guide (they had left their four canoe guides behind when they began walking) disputed about the way to the home of Mons. Gallian the younger, evidently one Barthelemy Gaillard,.

Lawson and two associates remained behind on a knoll, while the others paddled along to see if they could find their way. "We had but one Gun amongst us, one Load of Ammunition, and no Provision. Had our Men in the Canoe miscarry'd, we must (in all Probability) there have perish'd," Lawson says.

Six hours later the Indian did come back in the canoe -- "being half drunk, which assur'd us they had found some Place of Refreshment." That place was Mons. Gallian the younger's, where one drunken canoe ride later ("several Miles thro' the Woods, being often half full of Water") Lawson found "our comrades in the same Trim the Indian was in." They passed a merry evening there. 


Val tells me that this house -- of Bartholomew Galliard -- was soon inhabited by a young woman who married Bartholomew. A daughter of the Guerry family, into whose family the house passed. Which is to say, there's great likelihood that the blood of Bartholomew Gallian (or Galliard) and his Guerry wife flowed through the veins of our hosts as we drank coffee and ate cake.

I suppose it's not an enormous deal, but it feels like one to me. We didn't get drunk with the Guerrys -- Lawson and his party were so drunk leaving their party that as they walked that night towards a Santee Indian camp, one of his compatriots fell off a log that was the only way across one of the creeks -- probably what is now called the Wee Tee. Lawson, "laughing at the Accident, and not taking good Heed to my Steps, came to the same Misfortune: All our Bedding was wet." Served him right, of course, but a cold northwest wind blowing "prepar'd such a Night's Lodging for me, that I never desire to have the like again." Which makes our snug night safe from downpours on the padded pews of the St. James Church all the more delightful in retrospect.




I set out along Lawson's path to see if I could have the kind of fun he did. I had no idea.
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Hospitality

1/7/2015

4 Comments

 
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Not recycling my pack, but this was the only shelter around.
We found shelter from a steady downpour beneath the overhang of the Shulerville used oil recycling center. Katie and I managed to exchanged soaked capilene for dryer materials from our packs without scandalizing any passersby, and then we waited for our new friend, Douglas Guerry, to drive by to pick us up.

I had heard from Douglas during the previous segment of the trip. Douglas was a descendant of one of the original settlers, Pierre Guerry, one of the original Huguenots who settled the lower Santee in the 1680s. He wondered whether as I approached Jamestown, currently mainly a crossroads near the end of my trail in the Francis Marion National Forest, would I like to see the site of the original town of the French Huguenots among whom Lawson spent a few days, the site now owned by the Huguenot Society of South Carolina.
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Well, yes, I would.

So we kept in touch, and when I headed down for the next segment we texted back and forth. I have lived in two countries and eight states, so the idea of spending time with a man who was born not two miles from where his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather hacked his home site out of raw forest was very exciting. Plus, like Lawson, I was traveling through to see what I could see; like the Huguenots of 1700, he was offering hospitality. It sounded like a fit.

Ecologist Katie Winsett and I planned to meet him on the second afternoon of our hike. We awoke that morning in our Francis Marion State Forest campsite and began our day by finding our complicated way to what are called the Blue Springs, one of the sources of the Echaw Creek that eventually feeds the Santee River. The springs are not on the map, and the roads through the forest are anybody’s guess, though with enough maps and texts we found them. Though the swamp was too high for the springs to be blue, we did find the swamp, perhaps the loveliest of the cypress-tupelo swamps in the forest. Katie has been astonished at how similar these swamps are to the ones she's studied in Texas and hopes to compare them. The wide bells of the cypress trunks, the knobby knees emerging out of the black water like serpents, the swaying spanish moss all made this one seem like a swamp right out of central casting. We refilled our water jugs.
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An absolutely breathtaking cypress-tupelo swamp. Lawson never mentions how beautiful they are. Then again, Lawson didn't have gore tex boots.
From there we made our way down forest roads deeper into the woods, through a stand of longleaf pine as lovely as any we'd ever seen. Katie teaches a trick in a stand of longleaf or any fire-managed trees: allow your eyes to lose their focus and see the fire line emerge. The trick works just as well in the swamps -- allow your eyes to relax and there's the water line, the highest level the water commonly reaches. You can tell by where the moss ends, but the tree trunks change, the color of the bark lightens, too. Learn the trick and you begin not just to see but to perceive.
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Let your eyes relax and there it is -- the water line, about two-thirds of the way up the picture where the tree trunks get light.
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Same here -- this exquisitely managed forest shows its fire line. It's a beautiful world.
What causes the swamps to rise is of course rain, and rain we'd had plenty of the night before -- and the area had had for the last few weeks. So we kvelled over the swamp, took pictures, absorbed the water line, and as the rain began again, instead of turning deeper into the forest for more exploration we started heading out to the road, where we could message Douglas, who planned to take us to see the Huguenot memorial at the site of the original town.
We know Lawson went to the original town only because he mentions it in a backhanded way. Across the Santee from the Huguenot town, he mentions that his group "lay all Night at a House which was built for the Indian Trade, the Master thereof we had parted with at the French Town, who gave us Leave to make use of his Mansion." So Lawson must have been to the French town, though he found nothing there worthy of note. He does tell us the French settlers treat him and his friends very courteously: "a very kind, loving, and affable People, who wish'd us a safe and prosperous Voyage." The French ferry him across the limitless creeks through the swamp in dories, feed him and offer nights' lodging. We've already had enormous assistance from our friends Cheves Leland and Susan Bates of the Huguenot Society, so we were excited to meet Douglas and continue the tradition of kindness to wanderers by Huguenots. We emerged from the forest road looking for shelter, and found it at the oil recycling station.

Douglas drove up twenty minutes later, with his brother, Mark, and his mom, Jean, in the car with him. They piled cheerfully out and announced that we wouldn't be able to see the original plot of land after all -- it's right on the Santee River, but surrounded on all sides by another property owner who is touchy about people crossing his land. About what may cause the owner to fear for the outcome if we were allowed to cross his land you may draw your own conclusions.
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That's Mark Guerry to the left, Jean in the middle, and Douglas on the right. It was because Douglas reached out that we got to have a wonderful time with the Guerry family -- and a dry night in the St. James United Methodist Church.
Anyhow, the rain stopped and we stood in the parking lot with the Guerrys, chatting about the Huguenots and three centuries of hanging around in the same spot. Mark, 57 and working in the energy industry, figures the French Huguenots ended up on the Santee because the English didn't want them in Charleston. "They said, we'll send you up here, and you fight the Indians and the Spanish." The Huguenots, Protestant refugees from religious persecution in Catholic France, surprised them by surviving -- and, in fact, thriving. In the very preface to his book Lawson describes French industry and capability: “In this Point, the French outstrip us,” he says of observation, but his passage praises the French highly. The Huguenot Society in South Carolina is proud of its heritage, and Douglas is a member. He’s a ninth-generation resident, he said, and when my eyebrows shot up, Jean smiled: “The Guerrys are long-lived.” To be sure.

We conversed briefly about the history of the Santee River. Its waters were mostly diverted into the Cooper, towards Charleston, in the 1940s, creating Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, but the diversion compromised the Santee ecosystem and filled Charleston Harbor with silt. A rediversion canal was built in the 1980s, which is helping, but the mingled waters of the Santee and the Cooper will never be the same as the rowdy, untamed Santee floods Lawson describes. Steamboats plied the Santee until the lakes were built. About the family denying us access to the Huguenot site Jean said only of their tenure in the community, “They’re not old.” She narrowed her eyes and nodded: “I know.” And mind you, Jean is herself a relative newcomer: she can trace her family only back to 1720 -- she’s the longest-standing member of the South Carolina Historical Society, but she hasn’t made the cut for the Huguenot Society, though her sons have, on account of their father. And when our good friend and sometime guide Eddie Stroman from McClellanville stopped by, it took her only a moment to connect with his people and place him with approval. So if Jean says a family isn’t old enough for her, Jean gets the win.

Then she invited us over for cake and coffee.
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Yes, yes, Lawson had it good with the French Huguenots and the Indians. I think Katie and I had it pretty good with the Huguenot descendants. Lawson never says a word about bundt cake.
She brought us into her immaculately clean home: wide hardwood floors, oriental rugs, traditional wooden furniture. Even the books on the bookshelves were neat, though the copy of Lawson Jean had been reading in preparation for our meeting lay open on the sofa.

Jean made us coffee and brought out a bundt cake. “Welcome to Jamestown,” Douglas had said, “population 74 -- when Mark and I come home it goes up to 76.”

We had a lovely time. We discussed that in South Carolina, whose legal system is based on English Common Law, only the coroner is empowered to arrest the sheriff -- regrettably, the point had become germane recently. We talked about whether the misguided commingling of the waters of the Cooper and the Santee hadn’t accidentally protected the Santee from development, keeping much of the land of the national forest pristine. We talked about the area churches -- the first recorded Episcopal clergy appeared in 1687 (Lawson talks of being assisted across the creeks by “very officious” French settlers, “whom we met coming from their Church”), though no trace of that church remains. A newer one went up on the old Georgetown road in 1768 -- it’s a red brick church that still stands on the old dirt road, with lovely cylindrical brick columns and cypress pew boxes. Jean told us that in its early days mistrust between the French and English settlers obtained: “the Huguenots used the back door -- the English used the front.” We discussed the Peachtree Oak, a live oak hundreds of years old on the nearby Peachtree Plantation, which stood until the 1930s, when it died. “If it hadn’t,” Jean said, “Hugo would have got it.” You can’t talk for more than 15 minutes in South Carolina without Hurricane Hugo coming up. 

Anyhow. We probably stayed with Jean and Douglas and Mark (and Mark’s daughter, who showed up for a bit) for a couple hours. We ate cake and drank coffee, and we even chatted about political and social topics about which we very agreeable didn’t particularly agree. I would call it one my most delightful afternoons ever -- exactly what I left home for. Probably why Lawson left home, too.
PictureWe loved the St. James United Methodist Church as a place to eat and sleep. When the skies opened up in the middle of the night we appreciated it even more. Thank you, St. James United Methodist Church!
Jean and Douglas opened up the St. James United Methodist Church around the corner for us, where warm and dry we planned out our next day’s walk and slept in comfort on padded pews. Along with the delightful Nina Gilbert, who had allowed us to park Katie’s car during our trek in front of her church in the tiny SC burg of Lane, the Lawson Trek felt plenty of love from the churches of the lowlands this time -- more than enough to offset our sadness at people closing their land to us or fencing in an area we had hoped to traverse. When the skies opened that night and the church protected us from the downpour, we were pleased to note that one of our correspondents cited Psalm 55, verse 8, “I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.”

As we stopped to take a picture on our way out the next morning, Jean’s sister pulled up to meet Jean for church. She showed us a picture of her great grandchild, Malachi James, born in December. That makes him a Lawson Trek baby, and we hope the hospitality his ancestors showed rebounds to him all his life. Jean’s sister, by the way, introduced herself as Hazel. “Hazel Hughes,” she said. “No kin to Howard.” Rich just the same, if you ask us.

Picture
Hazel Hughes and young Malachi James. Welcome to the world, Malachi James! The Lawson Trek wishes you the results of the hospitality of your ancestors. Times a million.
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