Berkeley County snore

I did not, in all honesty, set out to write a geneology any more than I would ask for the dwindling interest of a friend to endure a long-winded family tree review.  Yawn?  Some are interested, and you have them for an audience immediately, and others hear enough.  What I am driven to do, ardently, is speak to the fabric of the United States, the grit of bearing a united republic into the world from nothing, but from the very heart of those who desired to be free and beholden to none.  The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, words we memorize to pass in some history class way back when, were and are rare in the world.  The New World, and then the United States represented hope to a lot of people.  Still does.

The picture at left is satellite topography, and for me it's a way to see the forest for the trees, the coast as it may have appeared hundreds of years ago, without the industry and distractions of modern times.  Cloud's eye view.  I want to show you Georgetown, South Carolina's port, still an important one today, as a series of outlines, which the stories of the peoples who settled there fleshed out.  Somewhere in the middle of this history lesson, I found myself.  This is my lineage, this is my blood.

     Strawberry Chapel (1725) in Cordesville, Berkeley County. 

Rice Hope Plantation, house rebuilt 1840 on original foundation of the 1696 Daniel Huger "Luckins" plantation house in Moncks Corner.  Huger was a French Huguenot rice planter.

Berkeley County doesn't look like much.  It's flat, sandy, and just a big forest.  I have ridden on I-26 a bizillion times and always found driving through Dorchester and Berkeley counties a big snore.  We might not realize what's sleeping under the forest floor, what stories the places can tell.  Charleston was recently one of the fastest growing cities in the country, until the economy went south, and in the throws of clearing land for roads or housing communities, treasures were uncovered.  An example from 2005: a Civil War battle's remnants outside of Beaufort were awoken from the grave by a steamroller, putting all progress to a hault.  How quickly do we forget where we came from, in the romantic spin [or apathetic nod] we've given the past.  The people who settled and founded this country stood on the same soil that we do, only we are standing on their backs, on who they were and what they did.  Basic lesson of history: we're here because of them.  I see this education as an expression of gratitude.