Old Dorchester Bell Tower: St. George's Church, c. 1751

The Old Dorchester bell tower is the brick tower of St. George’s Anglican Church, built around 1751 in the colonial town of Dorchester, South Carolina, and it is the only structure from that town still standing. The church it belonged to was begun in 1719, burned by the British in 1781, and let fall. The tower had four bells in 1766. It has none now, and the record does not say where they went. You can see it any day of the year at Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, 300 State Park Road, Summerville, for three dollars.

I have stood under it more than once. This is what is known, and where the knowing stops.

When was the bell tower built?

Around 1751, with a caveat. The state park’s marker says a bell tower with four bells was added in 1751. The National Register, the more cautious document, says only that the tower stood before 1753 and held four bells by 1766. I use “c. 1751” and let the register have the last word.

The church came first by a generation. The colony created St. George’s Dorchester as an Anglican parish in 1717, eleven years after it established the Church of England as the official faith of South Carolina. Construction of a brick church began in August 1719 in the middle of a town that had been founded by Congregationalists, and the Congregationalists were taxed to pay for it. The building measured fifty feet by thirty, with a chancel fifteen by five, and was finished in 1720. It was enlarged in the 1730s to fit a parish that was getting rich on rice. The tower went up two decades later, when the parish could afford bells.

What happened to the church?

The Revolution. Dorchester was a patriot depot early in the war and then, after Charleston fell in May 1780, a British and Loyalist outpost. The British held the town until December 1, 1781, when cavalry and infantry under Colonel Wade Hampton and General Nathanael Greene drove them out. On the way out the British burned their surplus stores, and the fire took St. George’s Church and the free school with it. The National Register says the church was partially repaired and used afterward, which is easy to forget when you look at it; people kept coming here to worship for some years after the war. Then the congregation moved away, mostly to Summerville, where its members eventually founded St. Paul’s. The church was left to the weather and to neighbors who wanted brick. A traveler in 1788 described the ruins of an elegant church. By then the town around it was empty.

What happened to the bells?

I do not know, and I have not found anyone who does. The whole of the written record as I can source it is this: four bells in the tower in 1766. After that, silence. The British burned the church in 1781, and an army leaving a town it has lost does not usually leave bronze behind, but no source I have opened says they took the bells, and none says they did not. They may have gone in 1781. They may have been sold by a parish that could not afford to rebuild. They may have cracked in the fire and gone for scrap. The marker, the National Register, the South Carolina Encyclopedia, and the park’s walking tour all describe the tower in detail and none of them follows the bells out the door.

What is certain is this: the tower has been empty of bells for longer than it held them.

The earthquake

The tower nearly did not survive the nineteenth century. On August 31, 1886, the Charleston earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 to 7.3 event, struck with its epicenter a few miles from Dorchester, near Summerville. The quake collapsed the belfry and split the tower top to bottom. Early in the twentieth century the South Carolina Society of Colonial Dames put steel ties around the brick to hold the two halves together, and those ties did the job for more than fifty years until a permanent repair was made. Look closely and you can read the history in the masonry.

Why is it the only thing left?

Because brick is worth stealing and tabby is not. Dorchester had 116 town lots, houses, stores, a tavern, a wharf, a school, and a fort. After 1788 the neighbors salvaged brick from walls and foundations, and some of early Summerville was built from it. What they left was the tower, perhaps because a church tower is harder to take apart than a house, and the fort, because tabby, a concrete of lime, sand, and oyster shell, is useless as salvage. The two things standing at Old Dorchester are the two things nobody could carry off. Everything else is under the ground, which is why the archaeology is so good.

Archaeology around the tower

The South Carolina Encyclopedia calls the site’s archaeological record “remarkably well preserved,” and the digs have been going on for decades under the state park service. The current excavation is on lot 52, which a 1742 map assigns to a planter named Blake; it has produced a brick floor, a foundation, and eighteenth-century artifacts from what looks like living quarters and a cookhouse. The churchyard around the tower is the parish cemetery of St. George’s, with legible stones going back to Seth Prior, who died June 16, 1708, aged sixty-five, and James Postell, buried April 8, 1777. Visitors are welcome to watch the digging.

How to see the bell tower

Where: Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, 300 State Park Road, Summerville, SC 29485, off Dorchester Road (S.C. 642). About twenty miles northwest of Charleston.
When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily during daylight saving time, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. otherwise.
Cost: $3 adults, $1.50 S.C. seniors, $1 children 6 to 15, free under 6.
Also on site: the tabby fort and powder magazine footprint (1757-1760), the wharf timbers at low tide, the interpretive trail, and the active dig.
Phone: 843-873-1740.

The tower is a short walk from the parking lot. You can stand where the church was and look up through where the bells were. The tower was photographed for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1940, and the Library of Congress holds the record.

The official position is that the bells are lost. In the dispatch called The Tower with No Bell, somebody in St. George hears them anyway. The county history and county map will get you to the river, and the main Colonial Dorchester page covers the rest of the town.

The Bell Tower of St. George’s, Old Dorchester: What Stands, and What Is Missing