On the night of August 27, 1893, a hurricane came ashore near the Georgia line and drove the Atlantic across the South Carolina Sea Islands. Somewhere around two thousand people drowned, almost all of them Black families living on land they had bought after emancipation. It is the deadliest night in the state’s history, it is nearly forgotten outside Beaufort County, and it is the source of the Lowcountry’s most durable ghost story. This page is the history first, and the ghosts after, which is the order we think they belong in.
What was the Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893?
A major hurricane, probably a strong Category 3 at landfall and possibly stronger, that tracked up the coast from Florida and struck the Georgia and South Carolina line on the evening of Sunday, August 27, 1893. The eye passed near Savannah; the worst of the wind and water fell on the islands between Savannah and Charleston, with Beaufort County taking the full weight. There was no warning system worth the name. The Weather Bureau’s forecasts did not reach the islands, and most of the people living on them had no way to leave if they had.
The storm surge is the number to hold on to. Clara Barton, who arrived afterward, reported a surge of sixteen feet. Modern modeling suggests some low spots saw more. The Sea Islands are flat; much of St. Helena, Lady’s Island, Hilton Head, Daufuskie, Edisto and the smaller islands in between sits only a few feet above the tide. Sixteen feet of Atlantic, arriving at night on top of a high tide, simply went over them.
How many people died in the 1893 hurricane?
Nobody knows precisely, which is itself part of the story. Contemporary estimates ran from one thousand to well over two thousand, and modern historians generally accept something around two thousand, which would put it alongside Katrina among the deadliest hurricanes in American history. The uncertainty exists because the dead were poor, Black, and living on islands the state did not count carefully. Bodies were recovered from marshes and creeks for weeks. Many were buried where they were found.
Who were the victims?
Overwhelmingly, Gullah families: the descendants of enslaved people on the Sea Island cotton plantations who, after the Union occupation of Beaufort in 1861 and the land sales that followed, had become some of the first Black landowners in the South. By 1893 the islands held tens of thousands of them, farming small plots and working the phosphate mines along the rivers. They lived in low wooden houses, often raised only a foot or two off the ground. When the water came, there was nowhere to go but the roof, and then the trees, and then nothing.
The phosphate industry, which had been the Lowcountry’s biggest employer since the 1870s, never recovered. The dredges and washers on the Coosaw and Beaufort rivers were wrecked, and the industry drifted to Florida over the following decade. The storm, in other words, did not just kill people. It removed the economic floor from under the survivors.
Clara Barton and the Red Cross
The state’s response was slow and thin. The federal government’s was almost nonexistent. What relief the islands got came from the American Red Cross, then eleven years old, under its founder Clara Barton, who was seventy-one. She reached Beaufort at the start of October, five weeks after the storm, set up a warehouse of food and clothing, and stayed for ten months.
It was the Red Cross’s first hurricane relief operation and in some ways its founding one. Barton’s method was to refuse charity in favor of work: the islanders rebuilt their own houses with lumber the Red Cross supplied, dug drainage ditches for wages paid in rations, and replanted their fields with seed the Red Cross shipped in. By the summer of 1894, when the operation closed, the islands were housed and growing food again. The relief effort fed roughly thirty thousand people. Barton later said it was the hardest work of her life, and she had been at Antietam.
Did the 1893 hurricane reach Dorchester County?
Yes, though the county was spared the surge. The storm’s wind field was enormous, and it tore through the pine country from the coast to Columbia, flattening timber, downing wires and wrecking the rail lines. The Edisto River flooded for days afterward. Charleston, which had rebuilt from the earthquake of 1886 only seven years before, lost roofs and wharves and took water in the lower streets. Coming so soon after the quake, the storm cemented a sense in the Lowcountry that the decade was cursed, and that feeling is the soil the ghost stories grew in.
The ghosts of the 1893 hurricane
Who is the Blue Lady of Hilton Head?
The best-known legend. As it’s told, the keeper of the Hilton Head rear range light, a man usually named as Adam Fripp, was at his post the night of the storm with his daughter Caroline, a young woman of about twenty-one. The wind blew in the lantern-room glass; the keeper, struggling to keep the light burning, collapsed, by most tellings of a heart attack, and died. Caroline kept the lamp lit through the night in a blue dress, and died herself within days, of exposure or of grief, depending on who’s telling it. Ever since, on stormy nights, a woman in a blue dress has been seen on the lighthouse grounds and along the shore, still trying to keep the light.
We should be plain about what’s documented. The Hilton Head rear range light is real; it’s the 1880 iron skeleton tower that still stands in the Palmetto Dunes resort, the only surviving lighthouse on the island. A keeper named Fripp is not well attested in the records, and the story of Caroline appears in the island’s lore in the twentieth century, long after the storm. It may be a true story that was never written down, or a legend that attached itself to the right tower. The one thing it certainly is, is the islands’ way of remembering a night when two thousand people died in the dark and one light stayed on.
Other stories the storm left
They are quieter and more local. On St. Helena and Lady’s Island, where the dead were buried in haste in family plots and praise-house yards, there are stories of singing from the marsh on August nights. Along the Coosaw, where phosphate workers drowned at the dredges, fishermen have reported lights on the water where no boats are. And across the Sea Islands the Gullah tradition of haint blue, the pale paint on porch ceilings and window frames meant to keep spirits out, took on a particular weight after 1893, when there were so many more spirits to keep.
None of these are tourist attractions. They’re the kind of stories told on a porch, by people whose great-grandparents were in the water. That is the difference between the Sea Islands’ ghosts and Charleston’s, which we take up at Charleston Ghost Tours: How the Business Started and What It Leaves Out.
Visiting
- The Hilton Head Rear Range Light, Palmetto Dunes, Hilton Head Island. Private resort grounds; the tower is visible and sometimes opened for tours.
- Penn Center, St. Helena Island. The historic Gullah school founded in 1862, with a museum that covers the islands’ history including the storm. The right place to start.
- The Beaufort History Museum, in the Arsenal downtown, for the Red Cross relief and the phosphate era.
- The Chapel of Ease ruins on St. Helena, which stood through the storm and are covered on our page about the Lowcountry’s tabby ruins.
Beaufort is about an hour and a half from St. George down U.S. 17 and U.S. 21.
Why this storm matters to County Line Confidential
Our stories are set upriver, in Dorchester County, where the 1893 storm arrived as wind and flood rather than surge. But the storm is the clearest example in Lowcountry history of the thing every dispatch is about: a catastrophe the record didn’t bother to count, remembered instead by the people who lived through it, in stories that outlast the records. The Edisto Keeps Its Own is the dispatch that sits closest to it. The river in that story has been keeping things since long before 1893, and it took a great deal that August.
For the county’s own storm, see our page on Hurricane Hugo, September 1989, the one everyone here still measures the others against.
Sources
- Explore Beaufort SC, “The Deadly Sea Island Hurricane of 1893.”
- Post and Courier, “The Great Sea Island Hurricane devastated Beaufort County 130 years ago,” August 2023.
- Clara Barton, The Red Cross in Peace and War (1899), chapters on the Sea Islands relief.
- Bill Marscher and Fran Marscher, The Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 (2004).