Charleston, SC Winter, 2000
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Charleston, SC Winter, 2000 |
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SHUTE'S FOLLY |
hospitality,
the occupants were told that if they'd like, they could go out to Fort
Sumter and be with the rest of their kind, which they did. Castle Pinckney was now a Confederate fort, without a shot being fired. Trouble was, when the shooting began on Fort Sumter, Castle Pinckney was too far away from Sumter to lob any cannonballs on it, even though it was in sight out there at the inlet. During the war, Castle Pinckney became a prison for Union soldiers captured at the First Manassas battle. Since then, not much of historic significance has occurred at Castle Pinckney, though it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. At one point, the Southern Confederate Soldiers group took charge to keep it up, but that effort later fell through. The Lighthouse Service had it from 1890 to 1916 to maintain buoys and lights. The Shriners made it into a summer camp for a while, and pipe dreams to build a residence there, a restaurant, and even a casino have popped up from time to time. One newspaper account years ago called the island "a red-headed stepchild" - nobody wanted it. The State Ports Authority acquired the island in 1958, but it has been mostly alone and untended since then. What's the matter with that? I've heard that a visitor to the fort today can go out there and sweep the sand off of Civil War cannons still in place. To get a closer look, Capt. Jay and Val Hartwell took us on a harbor cruise in their trawler. As we ghosted by the island, we noticed three square platforms all in a row projecting out from shore. What were those? Here's what the harbor chart showed: Degaussing range? What's that. Elizabeth wasn't with us to give her sage opinion, but Kathy Cochrane, a visitor from New York, had the answer. People get lice and have to be deloused. Ships get gice and have to be degaussed. The ships pass through the degaussing range and the little critters just drop off the bottom of the hull. Makes sense. But we had a kill-joy aboard with us, Capt. Jack Smith, who is a big boat captain, and he said it had something to do with demagnetizing steel hulls.
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Looking down
North Atlantic Wharf - a ballast stone street across from us - and out into the harbor, we see Shute's Folly Island. It's a half mile off our shore and is a small island, less than a mile long and one block at its widest. Visitors to Waterfront Park and the Battery see it out there and wonder what it is, many mistaking it for Fort Sumter. I wondered too and needed to find out more. The island's name seemed peculiar, to begin with. I asked Elizabeth, Harbor Specialties's resident intellectual, if she knew the origin of the name. She had a theory: a few hundred years ago an English bark went aground out there in the dark, and her captain, who was fond of reading Chaucer, yelled out an olde english epithet: "O shute!" (This was later Americanized to "Aw shoot!") He yelled it so loud that the crew and nearby Indians heard him, and the name stuck. Elizabeth's theory sounded plausible. But what about "Folly?" Elizabeth surmised that grounding a sailboat is, by definition, a folly, and that stuck too. Plausible again. I was disappointed that the library's historical section had a different version. In 1746, Joseph Shute, a Charleston Quaker, bought the island. So much for the "Shute" part. But again, what about "Folly?" "Folly" can mean many things: a foolish idea, a marshy thicket, a white elephant, something wicked, even French dancing girls. Over the years, the speculation has been fruitless as to why it was named "Folly" rather than simply "Island." The local gossip mill had a theory: since Shute was a Quaker, it was a no-no to get married twice. Shute did it anyway, and his indiscretion was commemorated by naming his island Shute's Folly (after he died, of course). Marshy thicket was probably the source of the name, but that would not have been as much fun for the busy-bodies. On the southeast end of the island a fort was built in 1794 to protect the harbor and was named Castle Pinckney after Gen. Charles Pinckney. A gale blew it away in 1804. In 1809 it was rebuilt of brick, and the ruins seen today are remnants of that structure. Never has a shot been fired from the fort, but some authorities claim that it was at Castle Pinckney, not Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began. That was because in 1860, the fort was occupied by two Federal soldiers, a lieutenant and a sergeant along with the sergeant's family. Pretty nice duty out there in the seabeeze, all by themselves. They also had some local laborers who would come out to do maintenance work - paint the place, keep the cannons shined up, and the like. One afternoon, the steamer NINA pulled up to the dock and off jumped 150 South Carolina militiamen who announced they were taking over, much to the surprise of the lieutenant and his sergeant. South Carolina was the first to secede and this was the first act of beligerency. But in a show of southern |
