As you will discover, April 2024 is a very busy month for the BDC staff. We're hosting three Behind-the-Scenes tours and two local history programs, plus doing some outreach. If local history lectures are your "thing", we have two coming up in mid-April. One deals with the colonial period; while the other addresses the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. We'll go in chronological order this time.
Join us at St. Helena Branch Library the day after taxes are due for a reprise of "Snakebit" - an examination of surviving sources of information about one of the state's most fascinating Englishmen of the colonial period by The Red Bird and the Devil author, Robert E. Lanham.
"Snakebit: Henry Woodward, South Carolina's First English Settler" with author Robert Lanham | Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | 2 PM | Beaufort History Museum/Beaufort County Library Local History series 7.4 | St. Helena Branch Library, 6355 Jonathan Francis Sr. Rd | Doors open for seating at 1:30 PM
The main focus of Lanham's presentation is how he discovered and made use of historical documents to flesh out the personality and activities of the Palmetto State's first permanent English settler, trying to separate what was "fact" from what is commonly held "fiction" for his novel.
Robert Lanham is a retired family law attorney and former geologist residing in the South Carolina Lowcountry where Henry Woodward, the protagonist of his book, The Red Bird and the Devil lived 350 years earlier. Lanham moved here from Colorado and fell in love with the Lowcountry and its history. His distant grandfather came to the southern colonies as an indentured servant in the late 1600s, the same time as Henry Woodward, sparking his interest in early colonial history. Using skills developed during 40 years of research, writing, and teaching in science and law, Robert published The Red Bird and the Devil, a fresh look at the origin and first decades of Carolina Colony from the perspective of Henry Woodward.
On Thursday, April 18th, we will gather for the next "Historically Speaking" series lecture co-sponsored by the Beaufort County Historical Society. This lecture is part of our contribution to the Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era 2nd Annual Symposium, April 19 - 20, 2024.
"Freedom's Eddy: To Beaufort and Battle by Boat" with Wyatt Erchak | Thursday, April 18, 2024 | 11 AM | "Historically Speaking" series 5.5 | First Presbyterian Church Education Building, 1201 North Street, Beaufort | Doors open for seating at 10:30 AM
Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate Wyatt Erchak will share a little known story about a daring escape by enslaved people into the Union lines at Port Royal.
On October 26, 1862, nine enslaved people used the Union Navy's presence to escape from Georgetown and join the black regiment being formed in Beaufort. Their goal was to take a direct action against slavery. Wyatt's presentation explores the life of Bristow Eddy. Born enslaved as a forced plantation laborer, when he and eight others made their break for freedom, he became Corporal Eddy. A skilled carpenter and soldier, Bristow was best summed up in the words of a comrade: "he was a little fellow but he was a good deal of a man." Before attaining that reputation, his group made their way to an island where others like them had been gathering for months as the floodgates of slavery broke down and waves of freedom seekers rushed out, often boarding arriving gunboats. "I was taken with others by boat," Bristow remembered, and came to Beaufort, where "I enlisted voluntarily" in November. From there, he entered the maelstrom of war and got to work; after peace returned, he built a new life for his family in the Beaufort area, at Lady's Island and Dixonville. Eddy's odyssey of freedom, represents the most singularly understudied figure of the Civil War era: the formerly enslaved Black soldiers of the Deep South, whose untold stories, once told, significantly transform how we understand that conflict.
Wyatt Erchak was Dr. Edda Fields-Black's research assistant at Carnegie Mellon University as she was preparing her latest book, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024). During the Combahee research process, Wyatt became irrevocably entangled with the obscure story of the Union's first-formed black regiment. The story of the First South Carolina Volunteers of African Descent has become the core of his doctoral candidacy. The University of South Carolina's Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era has asked Wyatt to be a keynote speaker at their pending symposium 19-20 April 2024 at USC-B. Wyatt lives in upstate New York, is currently a Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate, and will present a version of our talk at the World Congress of Environmental History conference being held in Oulu, Finland in August.
first seated opportunity to learn more about the depth and scope of Beaufort District's history, its people, environment, and events.
No comments:
Post a Comment