South Carolina - Day 11 - Ft. Moultrie, to Poinsett St. Park

Poinsett State Park, Wedgefield

Sunday, 21 May 2023

On our 2nd walk this morning at the Charleston KOA, rain started and continued.  Since I had some sightseeing and a lot of driving planned for the day, I hoped it wouldn't last.

This KOA has a lot of hydrangeas in bloom, and it's a measure of how disorganized my mind is that it took me 3 days to remember their name.  And I don't know how much longer it would have taken me if I hadn't heard someone talk about them on the radio this morning.

today's route

We started from north of Charleston, drove southeast to the coast at Sullivan's Island where Fort Moultrie is, then retraced our route north, splitting off due north after we'd left town.

We passed a school with this sign: "What do you call fake potatoes?  Imitater."  

We got stopped at a drawbridge - the Ben Sawyer Memorial Bridge over the Louis Stitler Memorial Causeway (I had plenty of time to read the signs) - and this one was the kind of drawbridge where the deck rotates, rather than lifts into the air.  Interesting to watch.

The rain stopped while we waited, which was nice.

On Sullivan's Island, the lantana were blooming - and I remembered that name right away.

I was surprised at the number of cars parked at the Fort Moultrie visitor center, especially when I watched most of the folks walk past the building and around the corner.  I thought maybe there was some attraction I didn't know about.  But I later realized there was a Catholic church divided from the visitor center by some thick trees, and these folks were going to church on a Sunday morning.

I'm glad I saw exhibits about Fort Moultrie at the state museum, because the ones here were, in my opinion, skimpy, poorly arranged, and very hard to see if you're shorter than about 6' tall (as I am).  The visitor center was so dim, most of my photos came out very blurred, because I couldn't hold the camera still enough for long enough to get the exposure.  And I couldn't even read quite a few of the informational panels because of them being so high up.  But here're the basics:

Charleston Harbor - Charleston's peninsula is the one coming in from the top left.
Fort Moultrie is marked with a red square in the upper right. 
Fort Sumter isn't even shown but would be almost a dot in the water
southeast of Ft. Moultrie and smack in the middle of the lane of boat travel.

Like I said - blurred.  The main point is
the description of the construction technique of the palmetto fort.

A model of the palmetto construction.

If you gave up on the blurriness, here's what the National Park Service says:

The first fort on Sullivan's Island was built in 1776 to prevent British naval incursions into Charleston Harbor.  The palmetto log walls readily absorbed shot and shell when nine Royal Navy warships attacked on June 28, 1776.  Colonel William Moultrie and his 400 men fought a day-long battle that ended with the heavily damaged British ships being driven from the area.  This decisive American victory galvanized the patriots' cause for independence.

 Things were different at the start of the Civil War.

And the NPS's version says:

On December 26, 1860, six days after South Carolina left the Union, Fort Moultrie's small Federal garrison abandoned the fort, moving to the unfinished but more defendable Fort Sumter.  State militia troops occupied Fort Moultrie the next day.  Confederate Fort Moultrie participated in the April 12, 1861 firing on Fort Sumter that began the American Civil War.  Heavily damaged by Federal bombardments that commenced in 1863, Fort Moultrie remained in Confederate hands until February 1865.

So South Carolina fired on Ft. Sumter because Union troops were there and looked vulnerable, I guess.

And here's a little information about WWI:

I've never seen this WWI photo before - a soldier
comforting a weeping woman. 
This scene has been repeated worldwide since
the beginning of mankind.

The NPS says during this period, new technology along with threats of submarine and aerial attacks made Ft. Moultrie's defense capability obsolete.  In 1947, the fort was decommissioned.

The visitor center also had a room and other exhibits that explained and honored the situation of Black people brought here to Charleston.

Dext and I walked out to the grave of Col. Moultrie near the water.

This sign honors Col. Moultrie.

A view of the sogginess of the land around here.

Looking the other direction, you can see all the private piers.

I'd managed to find a recycling dropoff center on Sullivan's Island, so we headed there from Ft. Moultrie.  It turned out to be several unlabeled dumpsters behind the fire station, but a parking cop came along and told me this was the right place.

A local trash facility called Trash Gurl had a sign on their truck: "Wrinkles Mean You Laughed."

Quite a few front yards had signs: "STOP: Time Shares on Sullivan."  Likely a losing battle but good luck to them.

I saw many Martin houses suspended above the marshy areas, of which there are many on this island.

Skirting Charleston, I was following - or trying to follow - Google's instructions, but both Google and South Carolina failed to identify the names of the streets I should turn on.  Well, Google didn't give me useful names and SC didn't bother posting signs in the first place.  So I ended a few miles down the wrong road, turned and tried to go back to where I thought I was supposed to be, got that wrong and wandered around for a bit and finally, in desperation, I stopped in the large parking lot at a fire station to connect to the internet and discovered that by sheer luck I'd ended on the right road.  That one didn't have the sign Google said it would have either, but it was still the right road.

A sign down the road told me to turn left for "Summary Court."  I wondered if they'd misspelled it and intended Summery Court - you know, something bright and positive.  But an internet search told me that in South Carolina a Summary Court is the equivalent of a Magistrate court that hears traffic offenses and preliminary hearings for more serious cases.

Once I got past the city suburbs, we passed very thick, very extensive woodlands.

We came to the town of Bonneau, "Where the Living is Easy."  And then there was Paxville, "A Peaceful Village," founded 1889.

And all along the way were woodlands and small towns and intermittent potholes and rough roads.

Near Manning we came to the plant for Bicycle Corporation of America.  They say they're bringing bicycle manufacturing back to the US.

There were churches in every town we passed - even the very small ones that looked like there weren't enough people to support a church.

We saw corn growing in many fields - very tall corn in some places.  And we passed strawberry farms.

At one point I slammed on my brakes to keep from hitting a wild turkey.

A sign urged "Stop Corruption in Sumter County."  I couldn't find what that was about.  In 2018 a grand jury indicted a Sumter County official for embezzlement and related crimes, though I didn't see how that came out.  In another case, the state DA declined to prosecute a Sumter county sheriff who was accused of rape because, "there is insufficient evidence to merit criminal prosecution."  In other words, he-said-she-said.  That DA might think about putting that kind of case before a jury anyway because, in these Me-Too days, juries sometimes think her word is enough, depending on what she says.  But that's not the way the system usually works, I'm sorry to say.

After I'd checked in at the office at Poinsett State Park, Dext and I walked around the lakeside area a bit.  A woman asked if I'd seen the Black Rat Snakes in a nearby boathouse, and she showed them to me.  Two of them were perched on rafters a couple of feet over my head.  She said she's originally from rural Kentucky (and her accent agreed) and learned about these snakes when she was young.  They typically wait in areas like those rafters, she said.  Online I learned that they're really beneficial critters because they eat rats (hence the name I guess) and mice and similar unwanted animals.  This trip has certainly been a learning experience for me.