Goose Creek’s Hidden History

Mayor seeks to uncover city’s hidden history
By Robert Behre (Contact)
The Post and Courier
Monday, September 29, 2008

This new historical marker is just one part of Goose Creek Mayor Michael Heitzler’s plan to raise public awareness about his community’s rich history.
 
The site of the ruins of St. James Goose Creek Chapel of Ease, and of a Yemassee War battle, is about four miles outside Goose Creek and symbolic of the area’s hidden history.
GOOSE CREEK – Michael Heitzler turns off Old Highway 52 onto Avanti Lane to show his passenger a historic site that most people — even those who grew up in southern Berkeley County — have never even heard of.

As he slowly winds his vehicle down the lane, which resembles more of a driveway than a road, some gravestones can be seen through the woods.

This is the site of the ruins of St. James Goose Creek Chapel of Ease — a small Anglican church built a few years after a critical battle.

After the Yemassee War began in 1715, bands of Indians chalked up successes terrorizing the English colonists scattered across the Carolina colony. Many who survived retreated to Charles Town, where they were starving because their plantations and farms were abandoned.

These woods are where a group of blacks and whites, led by Capt. George Chicken of Goose Creek, turned back Indians bent on reaching Charles Town and wiping the fledgling colony off the map.

“That is the beginning of the collapse of the Yemassee War,” Heitzler says.

In many ways, the site also is symbolic of Goose Creek’s history. It’s rich, stretching back three centuries. It’s highly textured, as the site is at once a battleground, a site of a former Anglican chapel of ease and also the site of a later Baptist church that also is gone.

And it’s also invisible.

“The essential challenge in Goose Creek is to find any evidence of our past,” Heitzler says. “Goose Creek’s history has been obscured, and there are reasons why it has been obscured.”

Those reasons begin a century before the hardships of the Civil War. Heitzler figures Goose Creek’s influence probably peaked around 1750. After that, some of its most influential families began moving away because of depleted soils, malaria concerns, lingering fears over hostile Indians and the rise of tidal rice production over that inland impoundments built here.

Unlike many Lowcountry residents passionate about the area’s history, Heitzler was born in St. Louis and moved here in 1968 to teach history to high school students. He later became principal of Westwood Elementary School and has served as mayor here since 1978. In his retirement, he gets to feed his interest in history and currently has two books in the works.

One of Heitzler’s chief goals as mayor is to foster more appreciation for his city’s history. He’s doing it with more than two dozen new historical markers either erected or on the drawing board, with the resurrection of historic names for new streets and places and with a lecture series that begins Wednesday.

He’s also trying to advocate for better protection and interpretation of the ruins and sites that survive to this day. One of the challenges is that some of the history is located on the Naval Weapons Station and, while presumably protected, is off limits to the public.

Heitzler is working on the chapel site. Not only is there a new historical marker there but he is trying to interest Berkeley County in buying the site and making it accessible to the public.

“I want the county to do the right thing,” he says, then jokingly adds, “but the county is busy doing less important things like drainage.”

He faces a big challenge. Most people passing through Goose Creek today wouldn’t think its history extends much beyond the mid 20th century, when Charleston’s suburban development began moving up this way. The city didn’t even incorporate until 1961.

But long before there were six-lane highways and fast-food restaurants and new subdivisions here, Heitzler knows there was only a well-traveled Indian path between two rivers, a path where deer could cross a shallow, winding creek.
Robert Behre may be reached at 937-5771 or by fax at 937-5579. His e-mail address is rbehre@postandcourier.com, and his mailing address is 134 Columbus St., Charleston, SC 29403.

Information From:

http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/sep/29/mayor_seeks_uncover_citys_hidden_history56187/