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CHAPTER XII
The Dutch Fork and
Upper Broad River
The valley of Broad River, the largest in the South
Carolina piedmont, opened upon the Congaree gateway, the most
important interior point in the province. Its development, however,
was somewhat slower than that of the basins of either the Saluda or
Wateree, for it had neither township nor Indian trade path from
Charleston to attract settlers and to direct them along its course.
Furthermore, its lower portion for twenty miles or more, like that
of the Saluda, is generally narrow, with small creek valleys opening
from it, and the soil, derived from the prevailing slate, is neither
so fertile nor so easily cultivated as the red clay land
beyond.1
On the Saluda, above Twelve Mile Creek and the
scantily settled corner of Saxe Gotha, a certain John Gibson and
several Germans established themselves between 1747 and 1749.
Michael Taylor, one of the Virginians who petitioned in 1746 for the
purchase of the Ninety Six lands, described himself in 1749 as a
weaver and had his plat surveyed on the south bank of the Saluda. On
the same day two other Virginians, James Scott and William Jenkins,
applied for tracts on the south bank, and Scott apparently kept a
boat for the convenience of travellers who came by the path
approaching the northern side. Samuel Lines, a native of the
province who in 1745 was living on Raifords Creek, moved to
Beaverdam Creek, near Scott's home.2
The first settlement
between the Broad and the Saluda was the result of the partial
exhaustion by the bounty immigrants of the good land in Saxe Gotha,
and in 1749 other Germans appear near the earlier settlers. Farther
up the Saluda, on High Hill Creek and on Bear Creek, two Germans and
several Englishmen had plats surveyed, among them Robert Steill, the
Congaree trader, and two soldiers recently discharged from the
independent companies.5 On the west bank of the Broad, at a ford and
island four miles above its mouth, Thomas Brown had two hundred and
fifty acres surveyed. Samuel Hollenshed, a blacksmith from New
Jersey and Virginia, made his home and carried on his trade on the
west side of the river at the mouth of the creek which came to be
known by his name, and by 1750 a dozen Germans had settled on both
sides of the river below Cedar Creek, one of them having three
slaves in his headrights.4
There was no great attraction for
settlers on the lower Broad, however, and hardly had the handful of
earlier immigrants brought the settlements as far as Little River
than other newcomers overran the red clay lands above quite to the
Tyger.6 Purmont Carey and John Hughes, former companions-in-arms in
one of the independent companies, now chose to be neighbors,
settling themselves at the mouth of Little River, while Daniel Rees,
a blacksmith from Pennsylvania, obtained a warrant for three hundred
acres and settled higher up on the same stream. Likewise to this
river there came during the 'fifties Solomon McGraw, Richard Spencer
and James Leslie, former settlers on Raifords Creek, and James
Andrews who had been some years in the province.6 Near Wilkinsons
Creek, a few miles above, Thomas Conoway of Virginia, who declared
he had been living on the north side of the Broad for four years,
and Conrad Alder, who had two slaves and said he had been long a
resident of the colony, had tracts surveyed on warrants issued in
1749.7 Two Penn-sylvanians, Thomas Owen and Lawrence Free, and
Free's "former acquaintance" Jacob Canomore, in 1752 petitioned for
land on the creek. Three years later Owen had a tract with a mill on
it surveyed adjoining his land.
Here settled Ann Hancock,
after being barbarously treated by her husband in Virginia and
finally deserted by him.8
On the south side of the Broad,
Wateree Creek was the first large stream which settlers found in
their northward movement. Elisha Atkinson and John Taylor, recently
discharged soldiers who had to sign their names by mark, Alexander
Deley, who had lately married a German immigrant, and Mary King,
widow of a corporal in the garrison of the new Con-garee fort, were
given warrants which were surveyed on or near this creek.9
Immediately above two similar streams invited immigrants. On the
nearest John Gregory from New Jersey and his illiterate son Benjamin
settled in 1748, the latter planning to make flour. Peter Crim had a
survey on the Santee in Amelia in 1738. Five years later he engaged
in a Cherokee mine venture, and was reported to be overseer of the
work. In 1750 he applied for two hundred and fifty acres which was
surveyed at the mouth of the creek adjoining Benjamin Gregory, and
the stream thereafter was known as Crims Creek. Andrew Holman, a
foreign Protestant who came by way of Philadelphia the same year, in
like manner gave his name to a tributary a mile above, where he said
he planted three kinds of wheat. In the wide lowland at the mouth of
Cannons Creek Herman Geiger of the Congarees in 1749 had a tract
surveyed, and an adjoining plat run out the next year for Hans Jacob
Morf was crossed by a path to Geiger's cowpen. In February 1750 John
Cannon petitioned for land on the headrights of nine children, a
servant, his wife and himself. The survey two months later showed
two houses on the land.10
The Enoree and the Tyger, for some
miles above the points at which they empty themselves into Broad
River, have narrow and steep valleys, but at six or seven miles
distance one comes to Kings Creek on the Enoree, the first of a
series of tributaries. Early settlers evidently found this network
of small valleys with their clear streams and fertile cane-covered
bottoms unusually inviting. "The canebrake" was the name given to
one of the tracts first settled on the west side of the Enoree just
above the mouth of Indian Creek. Easy access to this region was
offered by the ford over the Broad a mile and a half above the mouth
of the Enoree—at first called John Lee's ford, but later Lyles's.11
In or about 1748 a settler named King made his new home on the north
side of the Enoree near the mouth of Indian Creek. He soon died and
his widow Mary, rendered uneasy by surveys near her, in 1750 applied
for a warrant on the headrights of herself and six children. In
consideration of her poverty this was given her without requiring
her appearance in Charleston. The plat showed her house set on the
edge of the low ground of the river and near a spring. On "Collins
River" as the Enoree was known for several years, Samuel Collins
applied for land in September 1750, stating that he had already made
improvements to provide for his wife and six children whom he
expected shortly by sea from New Jersey.12
A path to John
Linvell's, traced on a plat surveyed for John Heigler on the north
side of the Enoree in 1750, indicates the origin of the name
Linvells River by which the Tyger was first known.13 Jacob
Pennington and Gilbert Gilder came from Pennsylvania and in February
1749 obtained warrants which were surveyed, the one in the
cane-covered Enoree river bottom, the other on the Broad; Gilder
however made his home on or near Indian Creek. Abraham Pennington,
brother of Jacob, settled opposite Samuel Collins perhaps as early
as 1750, and in March of that year Nicholas Boater asked for four
hundred and fifty acres to enable him to plant wheat, the occupation
to which he had been bred; his survey included the mouth of Indian
Creek.14 Duncans Creek, the next of the numerous western tributaries
above Indian Creek, apparently received its name from a certain
Duncan who was living there at least as early as August 1752. The
first of the name to apply for land was John Duncan in 1754. Two
plats on the Tyger surveyed in 1753 showed North Carolina grants
adjoining.15
Thus between 1749 and 1751 settlers from the
Carolina low country and from the north, two or three to each creek,
had staked off the upper Broad region for the white man, but the
Indian troubles during the latter year reduced to a handful the
number who came to the region above Crims Creek and Little River. In
1752 settlement began again, but the chief accessions for the next
few years were not from the British colonies to the north, but from
the German states, the continuation of a movement having its
beginnings in 1749. John Jacob Riemensperger, undaunted by the
disastrous outcome of his first return to Europe in 1740 as
immigration agent, four years later offered to make another trip to
bring back some of his Swiss countrymen. He asked the provincial
administration to pay the passages of the expected immigrants, but
nothing came of his application until he renewed it in 1748 after
the close of the Austrian Succession War. He was then promised
payment of his own passage to England, fifteen guineas for
purchase of clothes for himself, and one shilling sterling a head
for all foreign Protestants whom he should get to settle in South
Carolina. In April he announced that he had forty letters from the
Germans to their friends and relatives, and was ready to
depart.18
In October 1749 Riemensperger arrived with a
hundred and thirty-two German Protestants who came as freemen,
besides others who had to become servants in payment of their
passage. "Palatines" they were called, but they probably were part
of the six hundred Wiirttemberg Lutherans for whom he had vainly
besought aid from the British government. Riemensperger declared to
the governor and assembly that from Germany and Switzerland he had
engaged upwards of three thousand persons, but had, by a series of
misadventures, lost most of them to other places, chiefly
Pennsylvania. In London he had asked for his party the privilege of
settling above Saxe Gotha "where land is better", doubtless having
in mind the Crims Creek section, the first large body of very
desirable land on the Broad, and a region already known to the
promoter.17 The crown discouraged his suggestion, but the South
Carolina governor and council gave his immigrants, along with the
bounty, warrants for land "in or near Saxe Gotha" which carried the
ten-year exemption from quit rents, despite the fact that none of
them was surveyed in the township. John Adam Epting and ten others,
with headrights amounting to forty-seven persons, chose Crims Creek;
another settled on Wateree Creek, three miles below.18
Three
years after the arrival of this group of settlers it was learned
that Foster, Cunliffe and Sons of Liverpool had taken on board ship
about fifteen hundred Germans bound for South Carolina. To the
consternation of their Charleston consignees it developed that the
English firm and its Rotterdam agents "led into a very great Error
by some Officious Person or another", expected to receive the
passage money, presumably from the provincial government, when the
immigrants were landed. It does not appear that Riemensperger or the
other South Carolina German agents were immediately responsible for
this migration or the blunder of the shippers, but the circumstances
indicate that it was their energetic advertising that started the
exodus. The consignees estimated that only one-fourth could be
disposed of as indented servants; with this resource quickly
exhausted they released the remaining Germans after taking bond for
payment. The immigrants were then entitled to
their lands and bounty, but the township fund speedily fell short of
the demands upon it, and though a loan of the four hundred pounds in
the ship-building bounty in part met the emergency, the later
arrivals received, for the time being, only a portion of what was
due them.18
From September 1752 to March of the following
year the governor and council received the land petitions of these
immigrants amounting to twelve hundred and fifty headrights. The
clause of the act of 1751 allowing the bounty only to those settling
within forty miles of the coast had been repealed on the governor's
request and the warrants were given for lands throughout the western
half of the province, some of them in the townships. Despite the
fact that only the township settlers were given the ten-year
exemption from quit rents, the great majority settled outside; these
were allowed, however, the provincial exemption for ten years from
taxes.
Four of the petitioners stated that they came from
Wurttemberg or nearby, one that he was from the upper parts of
Germany, and another that he was from Germany, but the rest were
silent as to their origin. In 1846 a Lutheran minister, after
thirteen years residence in the Saluda valley, stated that the
oldest inhabitants declared "their ancestors chiefly came from the
neighborhood of the Rhine, Baden and Wurten-berg".20 Some of the
petitions gave the purposes of the applicants in coming to South
Carolina: a score declared that they came in order to join friends
and relatives; a dozen roundly asserted that they had come to live
in a country of liberty, or a free Protestant land; a smaller number
admitted that the bounty had drawn them; several stated that they
came to make their fortune, and Rosina Barbara Ralgebin, the only
one of her name and family, said that she was "Desirous to see more
of the World". Some, no doubt, anticipated the lot which fell to
Barbara Powmin and others. When Adam Hover heard of the arrival of
the immigrants on one of the first ships, he came down from his home
on Crims Creek with several of his friends "to purchase some of
them", and meeting Barbara he forthwith engaged her for
marriage.21
Peter Beckeli stated that he was a Catholic, and
was informed that he could not get the bounty "unless he renounced
the Errors of the Roman", but no apparent objection was made to
giving admittance or land to him or to the four other men of his
faith who came after him. In the course of the proceedings, the
Reverend Mr. Zubly announced that after several conversations with
the Catholics four of them had accepted Protestantism, and the
others appear to have done likewise, for their grants were marked as
being on the bounty.22
In 1755 Joseph Crell, back in the
Congarees for a short time, declared that the recent German
immigrants to South Carolina were "poor and of the meaner Sort", and
asked encouragement for himself as an agent for bringing in a better
type of settlers. Crell's charge is supported in 1754 by the
complaint of the wardens and vestry of St. Philip's, Charleston,
that the great number of beggars in the town was "chiefly occasioned
by the Importation of many old and Impotent Palatines . . . , who
not being able to get Masters, the Merchants agents had been obliged
to take their Bonds and let them go at large". It is clear that the
host imported by the Foster-Cunliffe firm lacked the outstanding
leaders who came to the townships, and that it contained a far
larger proportion of poor and shiftless than did the earlier Swiss
migration; nevertheless there is no evidence that the great majority
were inferior to the average of the English and Scotch
settlers.23
Tracing these twelve or thirteen hundred Germans
to their new homes is a difficult task, for the warrants specified
no place, and the uncertain rendering of the German names by the
English clerks often made effective disguise. However, a check of
the plats and grants locates all but forty of the petitioners, who
represented only about ten per cent of the immigrants. At least a
fourth of the total are discovered in the valleys of the large
creeks in the red clay lands west of Broad River. Of these Cannons
Creek was the first choice, with Crims Creek, Second Creek
immediately above Cannons, and Wateree Creek attracting smaller
numbers. With some the desire to be near their friends and relatives
obviously outweighed the attractions of land and water, and their
plats are found on high ground. There is a hint in this that these
were Wiirttembergers, following Hans Adam Epting and his fellows who
had come there three years before. Above Second Creek only a few
ventured, but Andreas Power and John George Wells had their plats
surveyed on Indian Creek, and Christopher Jacob Dues and Jacob Hayle
found land on Padgetts Creek and were apparently the first to make
South Carolina surveys on that stream.24 The slate
land on the west side of the Broad below Wateree Creek was
practically ignored, but the north side of the Saluda a few miles
away, which had the same type of soil and an equally scanty
population of German and English settlers, attracted a tenth or more
of the newcomers. This was doubtless due to the fact that the slopes
here were gentler and streams somewhat larger than those of the
lower Broad. Camping Creek, the largest, was selected by a dozen
families. The opposite side of the Saluda received no more than a
total of fifty settlers, the north side of the Broad only half as
many, and a few others went to other portions of the back
country.
Save for the upper west side of the Broad, however,
Amelia Township offered the chief attraction—the excellent soil,
scanty settlement, and exemption from quit rents apparently
outweighing the opportunity to live among the three hundred or more
of their countrymen on the upper waters. A hundred and sixty or more
settled here, and Orangeburg drew half as many. Nearly a hundred
were established on the waters of the Coosawhat-chie and
Salkehatchie, and a score perhaps below Amelia and
Orangeburg.25
Over a third of the Germans who settled in the
middle and back country between 1748 and 1759 came in this migration
of 1752. Until 1756 they continued to arrive at the rate of two or
three hundred a year, but thereafter the number of petitions fell
off sharply and, save for the group which came in 1764, practically
ceased with the outbreak of the Cherokee War. The
movement of Germans from the north was negligible.
The total
number of petitions of the Germans between 1748 and 1759 was
slightly over thirteen hundred, representing about thirty-seven
hundred headrights. The place of settlement of a fifth of these has
not been located but of the remainder sixteen hundred settled on the
branches of the Broad and Saluda, nearly seven hundred in Amelia and
Orangeburg and immediately below those townships, about three
hundred on the Congaree, and an equal number on the Salkehatchie and
Coosawhatchie. The Wateree, the upper Savannah and Purrysburg each
attracted from twenty-five to fifty. Of the seven hundred or more
whose place of settlement is not established a number may have
failed to take up their warrants and remained in Charleston; the
others, concealed under different renderings of their names, were
doubtless distributed throughout the middle and back country in
somewhat the same proportions as their brothers.
The
compactness of German settlement in the forks of the Broad and
Saluda made possible a church organization, and it was for the
service of these settlers that the Reverend John Gasser left
Switzerland in 1752. Coming by way of Pennsylvania he did not reach
Charleston to petition for land until February 1754, but at that
time he had agreed with the settlers to preach in two churches, one
in the lower part of the fork and the other farther up. He was given
the bounty, as was his servant, John Crebs, whom he had recently
freed. His fifty acre plat was surveyed about three miles from the
mouth of Crims Creek, and about a mile above the junction of Holmans
Creek with that stream, a spot convenient for this and the nearby
German settlements. The church seems to have been organized at once,
but in April Gasser presented a petition, signed by about forty
persons, stating that bad crops and the expenses of settlement made
it impossible for the people to support a minister and schoolmaster,
and asking permission to make a general collection from the
province.26 It was probably on account of these troubles that the
minister soon after returned to Switzerland.
In 1763,
however, Epting and Peter Dickert, as elders of the dissenting
congregation on Crims Creek, applied for a hundred acres for a
meeting house and glebe for the minister. The warrant was executed
on land adjoining Gasser's, the plat showing the church complete
with steeple, evidently on or near the site of the present St.
John's Lutheran Church, with roads running to it from four
directions.27
In 1760 and 1761 a very different group of
worshippers, near the mouth of the Saluda, achieved an unenviable
notoriety. Jacob Weber was a Switzer, brought up in the Reformed
church. After a season of depression, then another of faith and
exaltation, he fell into the delusion that he was the Deity. Among
the few associates he collected around him one became the Son,
another the Holy Spirit, and a third, John George Smith-peter, the
devil, whom the others eventually murdered. Weber, Hannah Weber,
John Geiger, and Jacob Burghart were tried in Charleston and
condemned to death for the crime, but only Jacob Weber was executed.
Lutheran and Anglican vied with each other in driving home the
lessons of this tale, each using it for his own purpose, and the
frenzy of the luckless handful of settlers was dignified into "the
Weber heresy".28
The English settlers were first on the
ground in nearly all parts of the Broad and Saluda region, but after
the German tide set in at any point English settlement nearly or
completely ceased. In the lower Saluda valley there were a score of
English headrights between 1752 and 1759, on the Broad below Wateree
Creek and Cedar Creek, about twice as many.
The scanty
resources of this region make it improbable that any considerable
number of English settlers would have chosen it, even if there had
been no Germans, but between Wateree Creek and Second Creek, in one
of the most desirable spots in the province, only about thirty
English head-rights were represented in petitions and plats. There
is no evidence of any hostility between the two peoples, nor as yet
any migration of the earlier English settlers from the German
district, but later comers of either race chose districts inhabited'
by settlers speaking their own tongue.
Between 1752 and 1759
a hundred and sixty men of British name applied for land on the
waters of the Broad, their headrights amounting to nearly six
hundred and fifty persons. Less than fifty of these headrights were
for land below Wateree Creek and Cedar Creek. Above these streams
Indian Creek was the first choice throughout the period and
attracted a hundred settlers; the Enoree itself received about
eighty. On Wilkinsons Creek and the other branches on the north side
of the Broad, but below Sandy River, were located plats amounting to
a hundred and forty headrights, while on the latter stream about
forty settlers were established, chiefly in 1758 and 1759. Surveys
were made on Tyger River and its tributary Fairforest Creek as early
as 1752. By 1759 the headrights on the former were about sixty,
while on the latter there were a score.
The English
population of the valley of the Broad, as indicated by the land
records, was between nine hundred and a thousand.29 They were thus
outnumbered two to one by the Germans who had settled among them on
the middle waters of this river.
As settlement advanced along
the Broad and its branches mills were set up in the manner
characteristic of other back country communities. The first
mentioned was on Wilkinsons Creek in 1752; the next year Peter Crim
had one on Crims Creek, and Isaac Pennington later owned two on the
Enoree. Indirect rather than direct evidence indicates that corn was
the usual crop, but wheat was commonly grown. Though slaves were
few, Pennington bequeathed two and Crim had three.30
The most
important of the later settlers was the elder John Pearson, formerly
of the Congarees, who was captain of the militia company of the
Congaree forks in 1757 and appears to have been living then
on Broad River. When he became bankrupt in 1766 and his
thirteen hundred acres was advertised for sale, his home was on the
west side of the river above the mouth of Crims Creek, where a high
ridge rises from a narrow bottom and affords a splendid view of the
valley. Two other former settlers of Raifords Creek—Evan Rees and
Philip Raiford, Junior—had plats surveyed on the north side of the
river; the latter was living there, near Wilkinsons Creek, in
1755.31
Pearson's letters were well worded though badly
spelled, and in the beautiful script of the trained penman of the
day; those of his son Philip were nearly as good. Both Philip and
his brother John were born after their father settled at the
Congarees, and of the latter it was said that "Under the instruction
of his father, & with a little school education, he became a
very good English scholar." In 1758 John Fairchild surveyed a plat
of two hundred acres on a branch of Indian Creek for Abel Anderson,
and at one point of the line wrote the word "Schoolhouse". No other
reference to the "school" appears, but as the plat was in the midst
of the Anderson, Pennington and King settlement, the suggestion is
clear that these men sought to provide something more than the
simple home instruction which was the only recourse for most of the
back country. Between this time and the Revolution references appear
to three different streams named Schoolhouse Branch, one flowing
into the Tyger, one into Duncans Creek, and a third into Padgets
Creek, but none could well have touched Abel Anderson's land.32 Six
of the English applicants for land on the Broad and lower Saluda
were unable to sign their names and two others who were recorded as
signing land petitions, on some other occasion made their marks.
Five of the eight signatures to the wills of Mary Pennington and
John Cannon were made by mark, although the number must be
discounted because of the possible infirmity of the
principals.33
On the east side of the Broad a handful of
settlers from Pennsylvania, among them Thomas Owen, Jacob Canomore
and Lawrence Free, joined by Richard Gregory, from the Wateree
valley, with his father and brother, made the nucleus of two small
Seventh-Day Baptist congregations of uncertain history and identity,
organized probably about the same time. John Pearson, in the absence
of an ordained minister, served both churches in the capacity of
exhorter or lay preacher. Two letters of Pearson written in 1764
reveal his intense religious interest and activity. In his household
he held prayers morning and evening, and on the fifth of May he
announced "A Great Meeting" to be held on the next Friday, Saturday
and Sunday to which he invited his Raifords Creek
kin.34
Another Baptist congregation was organized on Broad
River in 1759 or 1760 by the Reverend Philip Mulkey, made up of
members said to have come with him from Deep River in North
Carolina. In 1762, however, the minister moved to Fairforest Creek,
about eight miles above the junction of that stream with Tyger
River. His congregation followed him, and the Fairforest Baptist
Church quickly became the chief back country center for the Baptist
faith.35 |
