The Lowcountry’s ruins are mostly tabby, a concrete of oyster shell, lime and sand that colonial builders poured into forms and that outlasts everything built on top of it. When the house or church burns, the walls stay. Five of those wall sets are listed below, two in Dorchester County and three in Beaufort, with what actually happened to each and what people say happens there now. All five are open to the public. Go late in the day.
What is tabby, and why are so many Lowcountry ruins made of it?
Tabby is oyster-shell concrete. Builders burned shell to make lime, mixed the lime with whole shell, sand and water, and poured it in wooden forms a foot or two at a time, letting each course cure before adding the next. It was cheap on a coast with ten thousand years of shell middens to quarry, and it was fireproof, which turned out to matter. Spanish settlers used it in Florida, the English picked it up in Carolina and Georgia in the 1700s, and it went out of use after the Civil War. Nearly every tabby building in South Carolina has burned at least once. The walls are what’s left, and the walls are what the stories attach to.
1. The Chapel of Ease, St. Helena Island
A chapel of ease was a satellite church built for parishioners who lived too far from the parish church to get there on Sunday. This one went up in the 1740s for the planter families of St. Helena Island, who were a long boat ride from St. Helena’s in Beaufort. It served them for a century, was taken over by Union forces and used by freedpeople’s congregations after 1861, and burned in a forest fire in 1886. What remains is the tabby shell: the four walls, the window openings, a few headstones in the yard under oaks that have been growing since before the chapel was built.
The legend. In the churchyard stands a brick mausoleum built for the Fripp family in the 1800s. The story told on the island is that it could not be kept sealed: masons would brick up the entrance and the next morning the bricks would be on the ground. Eventually the family stopped trying. The tomb today is open, empty, and the first thing visitors photograph. The documentary record says only that it was vandalized and emptied in the twentieth century; the island says otherwise.
Visiting: Lands End Road, St. Helena Island, about seven miles east of Beaufort. Free, open dawn to dusk, no facilities. It’s a few miles from the Lands End Light, the ghost light legend we cover separately.
2. The Stoney-Baynard Ruins, Hilton Head Island
The remains of a plantation house built of tabby around the 1790s by Captain John Stoney, a Charleston merchant, on Braddock’s Point at the southern tip of Hilton Head. In the 1840s it passed to William Baynard, a planter from Edisto; the island story is that he won it from the Stoney heirs in a poker game, which is unproven and universally repeated. The house was occupied by Union troops after 1861 and burned, either during the occupation or just after the war. The tabby foundations, the chimney base and the outlines of the slave quarters and outbuildings are what you see now, in a clearing in Sea Pines.
The legend. William Baynard died in 1849 and was placed in the family mausoleum at the Zion Chapel of Ease cemetery on the other end of the island, a brick tomb built in 1846 that is the oldest intact structure on Hilton Head. At some point the tomb was broken open and its contents removed, and the island story is that a funeral procession, carriage and mourners, is seen on moonlit nights traveling the old road from the ruins toward the cemetery, as if Baynard is still being carried to a grave that won’t hold him.
Visiting: The ruins are inside Sea Pines, a gated resort with a day-pass fee for non-residents. The Baynard mausoleum is at the Zion Chapel of Ease cemetery at the junction of U.S. 278 and Mathews Drive, open to the public.
3. Old Sheldon Church, near Yemassee
Why was Old Sheldon Church burned twice?
Brick, not tabby, and the grandest ruin in the state. Prince William’s Parish Church was built in the 1750s as one of the first Greek Revival buildings in America, a temple front in the pine woods for the Bull family and their neighbors. The British burned it in 1779 because the Bulls were patriots. It was rebuilt in 1826. Then Sherman’s army came through in 1865 and it burned again, or, by a persistent local account, was stripped for materials by freedpeople and neighbors after the war and only looked burned. Either way, the roof never went back on. The brick columns and walls stand in a grove of live oaks, with the Bull family tombs inside.
The legend. Quieter than the others. People report the sound of a congregation, hymn-singing from an empty nave, and figures in the doorway at dusk. The church holds an outdoor service once a year, the second Sunday after Easter, which is the right day to go if you want to hear singing you can account for.
Visiting: Old Sheldon Church Road, off U.S. 17 near Yemassee and Gardens Corner. Free, dawn to dusk. About an hour from St. George.
4. Fort Dorchester, Summerville
Now we’re home. The tabby powder magazine and its walls at Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site are the best-preserved tabby fortification in the Southeast, built in 1757 to store gunpowder for the colonial town of Dorchester on the Ashley River. The British held it during the Revolution, the Americans retook it, the town was abandoned by the 1790s, and the fort stood empty in the woods for two hundred years. We tell the full story at Fort Dorchester: The Tabby Fort That Was Never Called a Fort.
The legend. The fort shares its ground with the ruined bell tower of St. George’s Church, and that tower is the one with the stories: a bell that rings with no bell in it. We built a whole dispatch on it, The Tower With No Bell, and the real history is at The Bell Tower of St. George’s, Old Dorchester.
Visiting: 300 State Park Road, Summerville. Small admission fee; open daily. The best-kept ruin on this list and the easiest to reach: forty minutes from St. George.
5. The Old White Meeting House, Summerville
The Congregationalists who founded Dorchester in 1696 built their meeting house on Dorchester Road, and it stood, rebuilt and enlarged, for nearly two centuries, until the earthquake of August 31, 1886 shook it down. What’s left is low tabby walls, a few feet high, and a cemetery with stones older than the United States. It is the smallest ruin on this list and the one we’d send you to first. The history is at The Old White Meeting House: What Is Left of 1696 on Dorchester Road.
The legend. Ours. At 9:51 p.m. on the last night of August, the minute the earthquake struck, the clocks stop and the people who were mid-sentence when the walls came down get fifteen seconds to finish. We wrote it as The Fifteen Seconds. The earthquake itself is covered at The 1886 Charleston Earthquake, From the Epicenter Out, and the epicenter, you should know, was not in Charleston. It was here.
Visiting: Dorchester Road (SC 642), Summerville, beside the Summerville Presbyterian Church’s property. Free. Respect the graves.
How to see all five
Two days. The Dorchester pair, Fort Dorchester and the Old White Meeting House, are twenty minutes apart and fit in an afternoon with the rest of our Upriver Haunted Route. The Beaufort three take a full day: Old Sheldon first, off U.S. 17 on the way south, then Beaufort and St. Helena for the Chapel of Ease, then Hilton Head for the Baynard mausoleum and, if you pay the Sea Pines gate, the Stoney-Baynard ruins. Stay in Beaufort. It’s also the right base for the 1893 hurricane sites.
Why ruins
Southern Gothic started with a ruin, as we lay out at Southern Gothic vs. Traditional Gothic: the European castle became the Southern plantation house with the roof going. The Lowcountry’s version is smaller and older than Faulkner’s. Four tabby walls, a tomb that won’t stay shut, a church with no roof and a congregation that sings anyway. Every dispatch on this site is built on a place like that, and two of the five above already have one. Start with The Tower With No Bell.
Sources
- South Carolina Department of Archives and History, National Register nominations for the Chapel of Ease, Stoney-Baynard Plantation, Old Sheldon Church, Fort Dorchester and the Old White Meeting House.
- Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, South Carolina State Parks.
- Coastal Discovery Museum, Hilton Head Island, on the Baynard mausoleum and Stoney-Baynard ruins.