Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site: History & Visit

Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site preserves the remains of Dorchester, a trading town founded on the Ashley River in the 1690s by Congregationalists from Dorchester, Massachusetts, and abandoned by 1788. It sits at 300 State Park Road in Summerville, South Carolina, about twenty miles northwest of Charleston, and it is open every day for three dollars. What stands is a brick church tower with no church, a fort made of oyster shells with no garrison, and 325 acres of ground that archaeologists are still opening up.

I live in the county the town gave its name to. This page is what you need before you go, and what you are looking at when you get there.

When was Dorchester founded?

Sources differ by two years, and I will give you all three. The National Register of Historic Places says 1695. Wikipedia says the settlers acquired their land in January 1696 and that their minister, Joseph Lord, preached his first sermon on January 26 of that year; the park’s own marker says only “the 1690s.” The park’s current brochures and the South Carolina Encyclopedia say 1697. The likeliest reconciliation is that the land was acquired first and the town laid out over the following year or two. Whatever the date, the people were the same: a congregation of New England Dissenters who sailed south with their pastor, took up 4,050 acres on the north bank of the Ashley, and laid it out the way they had done things at home. A fifty-acre town of 116 lots around a market square, farm lots of forty-five to fifty acres beyond, a commons, a mill site, and a meeting house on the highest ground about two miles west, where the ruins of the Old White Meeting House still are.

They were Puritans in a colony that would establish the Church of England as its official faith in 1706. That mattered, as you will see.

What was the town like?

Small, and busier than its size. By the mid-1700s Dorchester was by some accounts the third-largest town in South Carolina, a river port where upper Ashley planters sold crops and bought goods. Richard Baker kept a wharf below lot 8 that could take two-masted ships. There was a tavern, a tannery, a carpenter, a doctor, and a free school, incorporated in 1724. Enslaved people lived and worked in the town as shoemakers, coopers, boatmen, and house servants, and the park’s records name some of them: Carolina, Prince, Simon, Jemmy, Manuel, Dick, Little Toney.

In 1717 the colony created the Anglican parish of St. George’s Dorchester, and in August 1719 construction began on a brick church, fifty feet by thirty, in the middle of the Congregationalists’ own town. It was finished in 1720 and enlarged in the 1730s. The Dissenters were taxed to pay for it and kept worshipping at their own meeting house two miles out. The bell tower was added around 1751; the National Register says only that it was standing before 1753, and by 1766 it held four bells.

Why was there a fort?

Fear of the French. In 1757, during the French and Indian War, the colony authorized a brick powder magazine at Dorchester and enclosed it in a wall of tabby, the Lowcountry concrete of lime, sand, and burned oyster shell. Work ran to about 1760. It never fired on the French, but in July 1775 the magazine was fortified again and Captain Francis Marion commanded the garrison. Thomas Sumter was also stationed here. The state park calls it the best-preserved tabby fortification in the country, and I have seen nothing to argue with that.

Why did everyone leave?

In two waves. The first was voluntary. Beginning in 1752 much of the Congregationalist community moved to St. John’s Parish in Georgia, where the colony granted them 31,950 acres as a buffer against the Creek and where they founded Midway, in what is now Liberty County. They took about 1,500 enslaved people with them and planted rice. The Midway Society they founded met until December 1865.

The second wave was the war. Dorchester was a patriot depot early on, holding troops, arms, and the colony’s public records. After Charleston fell in May 1780 the British took the town and built a redoubt outside it. On December 1, 1781, cavalry and infantry under Colonel Wade Hampton and General Nathanael Greene drove them out, and the British burned their surplus stores on the way, taking St. George’s Church and the free school with them. The church was patched and used a while longer, then left to decay as the congregation drifted to Summerville. A traveler in 1788 found the ruins of an elegant church and a few good houses and nothing else. The neighbors carried off the bricks for their own buildings. Then the 1886 earthquake, with its epicenter a few miles away, split the tower and dropped its belfry.

Visiting Colonial Dorchester

Address: 300 State Park Road, Summerville, SC 29485. Phone 843-873-1740.
Hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily during daylight saving time; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year. The office is staffed 11 a.m. to noon.
Admission: $3 adults, $1.50 South Carolina seniors, $1 children 6 to 15, free under 6.
From Charleston: about twenty miles northwest. State Park Road turns off Dorchester Road (S.C. 642).
Dogs: allowed outdoors on a six-foot leash.

What you will see: the bell tower of St. George’s, brick, held together for fifty years by steel ties the Colonial Dames put on it in the early 1900s and later repaired for good, standing in its churchyard with stones going back to 1708. The tabby fort, with the footprint of the powder magazine inside it. An interpretive trail with kiosks. The active dig on lot 52, which a 1742 map assigns to a planter named Blake; visitors can watch. At low tide, the logs of the old wharf in the river mud. Red-shouldered hawks near the fort. No wifi, which is as it should be.

The site has been in state hands since 1960, was donated outright to the park service in 1969, and was listed on the National Register on December 2, 1969. Theodore Roosevelt visited the fort in 1902.

The town that named a county

Dorchester County was created in 1897 and named for this place, a century after it emptied. The parish gave the county seat, St. George, its name as well. The town is gone and the name is everywhere, which is a Dorchester County habit. The dispatches on this site begin from the same river. The Tower with No Bell is the one set here, and the county history and county map put the ruins in their place.