Charleston calls itself the most haunted city in America, and that is probably true. People pay good money to walk its alleys at night with a lantern and a guide. Nobody on those tours ever asks where it all comes from.
The answer is about forty miles up the road. The two rivers that make Charleston’s harbor run through this county first. The earthquake that cracked every house on the Battery had its center here. The first colonists to go inland from Charleston built a town here, lived in it sixty years, and walked away from it. The first locomotive in the South blew up on the line that made this town. Charleston is where things end up. Dorchester County is where they start, and St. George sits in the middle of it, at the crossing.
What follows is the record. Everything with a date on it can be checked at the Klauber Building on Parler Avenue, where the county keeps its museum. Everything without one, you’ll have to take on faith or go and see.
1695. The first Dorchester.
The county is named for a town that isn’t in it. In 1695 a congregation from Dorchester, Massachusetts, came up the Ashley River about twenty-six miles above Charleston and laid out a New England township in the pines. A meeting house, then a brick church with a tower, then a fort with a powder magazine. They kept careful registers.
In 1752 they left for Georgia. Nearly all of them, inside a few years. The reasons given were land and fever, and those were real reasons. The British burned what remained in 1781 and nobody came back. The ruins are a state park now, outside Summerville. The church tower still stands with no roof on it. You will want to remember that.
The registers went to Georgia with the congregation. One leaf did not. It is in Columbia, and the last three entries on it are struck through so hard the pen went through the paper.
1801. A preacher’s journal.
Bishop Francis Asbury’s journal, the entry for his visit to Indian Field, where the Methodists had been meeting in the open since before the church was built. His journal is published and online. The entry is brief. It says he preached, and that the people were attentive, and that he did not sleep.
1810. A store at the crossing.
James George kept a store where the road to Orangeburg crossed the Indian trading path that became the Wire Road. He is believed to have been trading there as early as 1810, which makes him the first person in these pages to arrive on purpose.
1830. The Best Friend.
On Christmas Day, 1830, the Best Friend of Charleston pulled the first scheduled steam passenger train in America out of Charleston and up the line toward Dorchester. Six months later, in June 1831, it stopped at a platform. The fireman, a man held in slavery whose name the company did not record, was tired of the hiss of the safety valve and tied it down. When the engine moved again the boiler went. He was the first person killed by a railroad in this country.
The company rebuilt the engine and called it the Phoenix. The line kept coming. Nobody has ever written down the fireman’s name. We would like to.
The 1830s. George’s Station.
The South Carolina Canal and Railroad reached the crossing and James George gave the land for a stop. They named it for him. Everything that is now St. George grew up on either side of the track.
An invoice from a Charleston foundry to the railroad for one bell, cast, for George’s Station. Paid. The railroad’s own ledger shows it shipped, received, and hung. There is no bell. There has never, according to anyone in St. George, been a bell, and there is no bell on the water tower that stands where the depot used to be. The people who live near it would rather you didn’t ask what rings.
1848. Indian Field.
Five miles north of town the Methodists built their camp meeting ground: ninety-nine two-story wooden tents in a ring around a tabernacle that seats a thousand, every tent with a cook shed behind it and a privy beyond the road. The grounds have hosted a week of camp meeting every autumn since.
Count the tents and you’ll get ninety-nine. Everybody does. A hundredth family has held a tent since 1848 and has never missed a meeting, and nobody can tell you which tent is theirs, and on the last night of camp there is always one more cook fire than there should be.
1865. The army.
In February 1865 Charleston fell and the army that burned Columbia crossed the Edisto forty miles upstream of here. The rails through George’s Station went quiet. For a week the county emptied out, and the people who came back found the woods full of things that had been carried in and set down and left. Some of it is in the museum. Some of it is still out there.
A man named James Matthews, born on a plantation by Four Holes Swamp, had already gone. He hid in the swamp among cypress a thousand years old, where people had been hiding from slavery for generations, and then he went north and wrote down what it was like. His account survives. It is the only firsthand description of what the inside of Four Holes Swamp is like at night, and he did not think much of it.
1875. A town.
The legislature incorporated George’s Station on January 28, 1875. Population at the next census: 279.
August 31, 1886. The shake.
At ten minutes to ten on a hot Tuesday night the ground under Dorchester County moved. The epicenter was in the county, near Summerville, on a fault that lifted the earth a full meter. It was felt in Boston and Chicago and Cuba. In Charleston, forty miles off, sixty people died and two thousand buildings cracked, and that is the earthquake the lantern tours talk about. They do not mention that it was ours.
Up here the fields opened. Sand boiled up through the ground in craters. Chimneys fell for fifty miles. Aftershocks went on for weeks, and then for years, and there were three hundred of them in the first thirty years, and the ground has not entirely stopped since. People in the county still date things before the shake and after, and they are not always talking about buildings.
A note in a family Bible, St. George, dated September 1, 1886: House stood. Well is dry. The clock in the hall is running backward and I have not the heart to stop it.
1889. A saint.
The town re-incorporated as St. George’s, taking the name of the old parish and keeping the founder’s. The post office shortened it.
1894. The Klauber Building.
A mercantile store at 225 Parler Avenue to sell to the railroad trade. It is the visitor center and the county museum now, and most of the documents on this page are kept there. The woman at the desk is helpful. She does not go into the back room after four.
February 25, 1897. The county.
The General Assembly cut Dorchester County out of Colleton and Berkeley and made St. George the seat. A line on a map, drawn through land that had been there considerably longer, and which did not entirely agree to it. By 1910 the town had two banks, two hotels, several mills, and the courthouse. When U.S. 15 came through in the twenties it sat on the straightest road from New York to Miami, and for a while everybody in America passed through on their way somewhere else.
Some of them stopped. Not all of them left.
A hotel register, St. George, 1921 through 1960. The same name, in the same hand, on the same night every October for forty years. The handwriting does not age.
The 1920s. The Lourie.
David Gavin built a picture house on North Parler Avenue. It closed for the Depression, reopened, was remodeled in the fifties, ran cheap pictures into the eighties, and sat dark until the town restored it as a theater. In 2005 a fire took three century-old buildings beside it and did not touch it. The fire marshal’s report calls that fortunate.
June 1955. The clock.
Farmers and Merchants Bank put a three-faced electric clock on its building at 129 North Parler. The bank is gone. The clock was moved to a pedestal on the same spot and plays the Westminster chimes on the hour. It keeps good time. That is the official position of the town, and it is nearly always true.
1986. Grits.
A grocer named John Walters learned from his contacts at Quaker Oats that upper Dorchester County ate more grits per head than anywhere else on earth. The town took that as a mandate. The first World Grits Festival was held in April 1986 and has run every April since, except for two years of the pandemic. It draws tens of thousands. There is a recipe contest, a parade, a 5K, and until 2019 there was a contest in which people rolled in a vat of grits to see who could come up heaviest.
The recipe contest has had a judging table since the first year. The table has always been set for one more judge than the committee appointed.
September 1989. Hugo.
The hurricane came ashore north of Charleston at night as a Category 4 and went straight up through the county. Everyone here over forty has a Hugo story, and nearly all of them are about what was in the yard the next morning. Pines down in rows. A boat in a field with no water for a mile. And in a good many yards, things that had not been in the county the day before, and were not from anywhere nearby.
February 25, 1995. Indian Field.
On the ninety-eighth anniversary of the county’s founding, to the day, somebody set fire to the campground at Indian Field. Several tents burned. The arsonist was never caught. The tents were rebuilt. The count is still ninety-nine.
The Edisto.
The river runs the southern edge of the county, black and slow, the longest free-flowing blackwater river in North America. Four Holes Swamp feeds it from the north, sixty-two miles of cypress. At Givhans Ferry the river is wide and quiet and people have been putting in boats there since there was a ferry.
The county keeps a record of what the river takes and what it gives back. The second column is shorter.
Now.
St. George has about 1,800 people, a courthouse, a clock, a theater, a festival, a campground, a water tower, a river, and the Weeks Building on North Parler Avenue, where three generations of the Weeks family sold clothes to the county and rented the apartments upstairs to people who needed a place and the shop next door to a barber who needed one too. Mr. Charles Weeks looked after everybody on that block. Whatever else is said about North Parler on this site, that part is not in dispute.
Charleston has the tours. We have the county line, and the line is where things stop.
The dispatches cover the rest.
Send me the dispatches