Forty miles north of St. George, where the Santee was dammed into a lake, there is a battlefield with a creek running through it that you cannot see, because the creek and the limestone springs that gave the place its name are under forty feet of water. The Battle of Eutaw Springs, fought on September 8, 1781, was the last major engagement of the Revolution in South Carolina. Around the lake they will tell you the British threw their gold into the swamp as they retreated. This page is about what the record shows, what it doesn’t, and why the lake is the real mystery.
What happened at the Battle of Eutaw Springs?
By late summer 1781 the British hold on the South Carolina interior was coming apart. General Nathanael Greene, who had spent the year losing battles and winning the campaign, had pushed the British out of the backcountry forts one by one, and the last field army they had outside Charleston, about two thousand men under Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stewart, was camped at the springs on Eutaw Creek, a few miles from the Santee River, in what is now Orangeburg County.
Greene came at them on the morning of September 8 with about 2,200 men: Continentals from Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, state troops, and militia under Francis Marion and Andrew Pickens. The British foraging parties, out digging sweet potatoes, were captured before the fight began. The American militia went in first and held longer than militia were supposed to, the Continentals went in behind them, and the British line broke and fell back through its own camp.
Why did the Americans lose a battle they had won?
Because of the camp. Greene’s men, who had been marching on short rations for months, reached the British tents and stopped to loot them: food, rum, officers’ baggage. While they were at it, two British positions held. Major John Marjoribanks had a battalion in a thicket of blackjack oak along the creek, and Major Henry Sheridan had put men inside a two-story brick house with a walled garden at the edge of the camp. William Washington’s cavalry charged the thicket and was shot to pieces; Washington himself was wounded and captured. The American artillery brought up against the brick house was taken. Marjoribanks counterattacked out of the thicket into the looted camp, was mortally wounded doing it, and the American army, disordered and drunk, gave way.
Greene pulled back seven miles to Burdell’s Plantation with his wounded. Stewart held the field for a day, buried his dead, broke up what stores he couldn’t carry, and marched for Charleston, leaving seventy of his wounded behind. Both sides claimed the victory. The casualty figures, which are disputed, put the British at something like 85 killed, 350 wounded and over 400 captured, and the Americans at around 120 killed and 380 wounded, roughly a quarter of each army. By the standards of the war it was one of the bloodiest afternoons of the Revolution, and it ended the British as a field force in South Carolina. They kept Charleston, and nothing else.
Is there really lost British gold at Eutaw Springs?
Here is the story as it’s told around Eutawville and the lake: that Stewart’s army, retreating toward Charleston with Greene’s cavalry behind it, could not move its payroll chests fast enough, and sank them, along with the officers’ plate and whatever had been taken from the plantations along the Santee, in the sinkholes and swamp pools along Eutaw Creek, meaning to come back. The British never came back. The gold is still there, under the lake, and on foggy nights the men who were left to guard it are still at their posts along the creek bank.
We went looking for the paper on this and did not find any. It isn’t in the British or American accounts of the retreat. It isn’t in the National Register nomination for the battleground. It isn’t even in the catalogues of South Carolina ghost stories that collect everything, which is where a tale this good usually turns up. That doesn’t mean nobody tells it; every battlefield in America has a payroll in a swamp somewhere nearby, and the retreat from Eutaw Springs, hurried, in the rain, through country full of creeks, is exactly where one would grow. But if you go to Eutawville expecting a documented legend, be ready to find a treasure-hunter’s story instead. We’d rather tell you that than dress it up.
The one treasure at Eutaw Springs that the record does confirm is the British camp itself, with its rum and its baggage and its officers’ tents, and the only people who ever got their hands on it were Greene’s soldiers, for about half an hour, and it cost them the battle.
What is actually under Lake Marion
This is the part that is true and stranger than the gold. In 1939 the state began the Santee Cooper project, damming the Santee and Cooper rivers to make electricity and two enormous lakes. Lake Marion, the larger, filled in the early 1940s and covered the valley of the Santee for forty miles, including Eutaw Creek and the limestone springs the battle was named for. You cannot stand at Eutaw Springs. The springs are at the bottom of the lake.
- The springs and the creek. The limestone that fed them is forty million years old and still feeds a cement works nearby. The water that gave two armies a reason to camp there is now part of a reservoir.
- Wantoot Plantation. The house where the British carried their wounded after the battle, and where Major Marjoribanks died, is under the neighboring Lake Moultrie.
- A British major’s first grave. Marjoribanks was buried at Wantoot. When the lakes came, his remains were moved to the battleground park, where his grave is the one thing in the park besides the marker. He has been buried twice, forty miles from the nearest British soldier, and the ground he was first buried in is gone.
- Most of the battlefield. The park preserves a few acres on the shore. The rest of the ground the two armies fought over, the thicket, much of the camp, the line of the creek, is under water or under the highway.
The same flood took the lumber town of Ferguson, a few miles up the lake, whole. We’ve written about it at The Sunken Town of Ferguson. Between the two, Lake Marion covers more documented history than any body of water in the state, and all of it was put there on purpose, by the people who live here, within living memory. That’s a better Gothic than lost gold.
Visiting Eutaw Springs Battleground Park
Where: Old Number Six Highway (SC 6), about two miles east of Eutawville, on the north shore of Lake Marion. The park is small, shaded, and open year round with a walk-through gate; there is no visitor center, gift shop or staff. You’ll find the historical marker, a monument, Marjoribanks’ grave, and a view across the water toward where the creek used to run. Go in the late afternoon, when the light comes across the lake, and give it half an hour.
From St. George: about 45 minutes north on U.S. 15 and SC 6, through Holly Hill. Nearby: the Eutawville Guard House and the Church of the Epiphany in Eutawville; the Santee National Wildlife Refuge across the lake; and Ferguson, reachable only by boat and only at low water.
Why a Dorchester County site cares about Eutaw Springs
Two reasons. The first is that the same British army had held Fort Dorchester on the Ashley earlier in the war; the garrisons that fought at Eutaw Springs and the ones that abandoned Dorchester were part of the same collapse, and the tower with no bell at Old Dorchester is what their war left behind in our county.
The second is the shape of the story. An army retreats through the Lowcountry and leaves something behind that nobody can quite account for. That’s Eutaw Springs, and it’s also our dispatch Sherman’s Last Letter, about the other army that crossed this country going the other way, eighty-four years later. Read that one, then The Edisto Keeps Its Own, which is about what rivers do with what they’re given. Everything we publish is on the dispatches page.
Sources
- Journal of the American Revolution, “Eutaw Springs and the Ambiguity of Victory” (2023).
- National Register of Historic Places, Eutaw Springs Battleground Park (listed 1970); American Battlefield Trust, Eutaw Springs.
- SC Picture Project, “Eutaw Springs Battlefield Park,” on the park, the Marjoribanks grave and the Santee Cooper flooding.
- The lost-gold legend: oral tradition around Eutawville and Lake Marion. We found no documentary source for it, and we say so above.