Transportation and Travel in the Southern Backcountry: St. David’s Parish, South Carolina in Eighteenth Century British America

1This paper explores the experiences and impressions European and early American travelers had of the early Southern Backcountry with a focus on St. David’s Parish in eighteenth century South Carolina. Beginning with the settlement of the South Carolina Backcountry in the 1730s and continuing to 1800. This paper utilizes information gleaned from public records, diaries, probate records and early colonial newspapers to uncover how travel and trade directly contributed to the development of commerce and trade, as well as early towns in the Southern backcountry of British America.

2It was the roads, bridges, ferries and the rivers that provided the physical linkages that connected backcountry inhabitants with the lowcountry merchants. These physical linkages enabled this one isolated colonial frontier region of the upper Pee Dee to become less isolated from the more densely populated urban centers of Georgetown and Charleston. Not only did improvements in transportation extend the backcountry inhabitants reach to these important market centers, but its consequences were also felt at the local level.

3Transportation developments brought friends and families together and facilitated contact with people outside the community. The social network strengthened by allowing people quicker access to local service centers. These places included the country store, tavern, courthouse, church, polling places and even the muster field. Roads enabled farmers and planters to transport their grain to the local mills and send their agricultural produce, livestock, and indigo to the larger markets in Georgetown and Charleston. Improvements in transportation spurred the development of frontier towns, such as Cheraw and Long Bluff, places settled in the 1740s that began to take on characteristics of towns by the 1770s. Moreover, bawdy houses and taverns were usually near ferry crossings where travelers congregated, and the expanding transportation network gave people opportunities to indulge in these vices.1

4 Before public roads were cut in the Welsh Tract, Indian paths and the Pee Dee River were the transportation links that united this frontier community with the outside world. Preceding the public roads, there was a path, covering a distance of nearly two hundred miles in the early 1740s that connected the Welsh Tract to the thriving seaport town of Charleston.2 The earliest plates surveyed by James Gillespie, the deputy surveyor of the Welsh Tract, showed Indian paths crossing some of the lands settled by the first settlers. In the Welsh Tract, two Indian paths that later became public roads bordered each side of the river. These roads were commonly called the river roads, and fragments of them are still in existence today.3

5The transportation difficulties encountered by the first settlers who came to the Welsh Tract before public roads were cut were perhaps similar to what one settler encountered when he arrived at Kingstree in the Williamsburg Township in the 1730s. He recalled that ‘there was few or no roads, every family had to travel the best way they could, which was double distance to some, for they had to follow swamps and branches for their guides, for some time. And after some time some men got such knowledge of the woods as to blaze paths, so the people soon found out to follow blazes from place to place’.4

6The early settlers in the Welsh Tract traveled on horseback to Charleston when they petitioned the royal assembly for their headrights. It took them five days or even longer to complete this trip to Charleston. On their journey, they usually stopped at the ferry houses at Black Mingo, on Black River and Strawberry Ferry situated in St. Johns Parish.5 Their journey could have been similar to the one the Reverend Evan Pugh made in 1762, traveling from Cashaway to Charleston: it took him five days to travel 200 miles on horseback to Charleston. He left on the morning of November 1, 1762, and arrived at Charleston in time to attend church on Sunday morning, November 6.6

7In June 1747, the assembly in Charleston passed an act nominating and appointing commissioners of the highways in the Waccamaw, Black, and the upper settlements of the Pee Dee River, the region that included the Welsh Tract.7

8No records from these highway commissioners have survived for the Welsh Tract and St. David’s Parish. By 1785, however, the construction and maintenance of roads fell under the jurisdiction of the court. At the first session of the Marlboro County Court held in March 1785, one of the primary duties of the justices included appointing overseers of the roads for the ensuing year. The court appointed fifteen men as overseers who were responsible for getting the slaves on nearby plantations and farms or slaveless white males to work on constructing and maintaining roads. A letter to Claudius Pegues explained that he had been ‘appointed overseer of the high roads, from the state line, to the forks of the said road above Fall’s Creek [responsible for...] all of the male inhabitants between sixteen and fifty years of age who are by law made liable to work’ on the roads.8 The Marlboro County court also listed the names of those who failed to complete their service for maintaining and building the public roads in their section. These court records show that those who did not own slaves worked side by side with wealthier men’s blacks to clear the public roads. Rich or poor, every adult male had the responsibility of maintaining the roads. Yet, there were a few individuals who owned no slaves that worked a day longer than those who owned them. This indicates that there was no social equality when it came to working on the roads. Those with wealth and slaves worked fewer days than their poorer neighbors.9

9The origins of this vital transportation network, begun by the highway commissioners, can be seen in some detail in one of the plats surveyed for Christopher Gadsden in the 1750s. In 1757, Christopher Gadsden, a prominent Charleston merchant, realized the need to tap into the North Carolina backcountry trade that was flowing into South Carolina and decided to build a store at an excellent location on Thompson’s Creek at the head of the fall line. Above the river there were rocks, often exposed when the water level in the river was low. This prohibited boats from going down the Pee Dee River, and travelers had to carry their boats or small river craft on land past these rocks before completing their journey down to Georgetown. This physical inconvenience perhaps made Christopher Gadsden’s store a popular gathering place for travelers as well as the local inhabitants. Gadsden’s store depicted in the plate drawn by Thomas Wade, the deputy surveyor, shows a large wooden structure with a highpitched gable roof situated on 1,300 acres. The store was at the cross roads to Lunches Creek, Nicholas Roger’s Store, and the Georgetown road, and that road continued to Thompson’s Ferry on Pee Dee River.10

10This expanding road network facilitated the need for horses. The household inventories suggest that the horse was the most common means of transportation. From 1750 to 1800 over three fourths of the household inventories contained horses, carts, wagons, and track ware. A few settlers even owned riding chairs. The following table demonstrates that on average between seventy to eighty percent of the households owned horses before 1770. There was a drastic decline in carts, horses and watercraft of all kinds in the 1780-1789 decade. The reason for this decline was perhaps due to the Revolution. These goods were either stolen by the British or used by the patriot forces. The figures for the last decade of the eighteenth century are comparable to the decades prior to the 1780s. In that decade there was a dramatic increase from the previous two decades in watercraft of all types, as well as increase in the numbers of horses, carts and wagons found in the inventories. More than sixty-six percent of the household inventories had carts, which represented an astonishing increase over the last four decades. This illustrates that the roads were being utilized by an increasing number of inhabitants. The following table breaks down the percentages of household inventories having horses, watercraft of all types, and carts and wagons (see table 1, on this page).

11Boats were also important for transporting agricultural products and livestock down the Pee Dee River to Georgetown. The inventories show that twenty-five percent of the inhabitants owned boats, canoes, and flats from 1750 to 1759. Flat boats were roughly made rafts without sides usually navigated with oars and were primarily used for transporting casks of indigo, livestock, and in some cases even lumber down the Pee Dee River.11 This number increased to thirty-seven percent from 1760 to 1769. From 1770 to 1779, watercraft in the inventories declined to thirteen percent, but it is doubtful that watercraft decreased by that percentage in the 1780s. Of the thirteen inventories probated in the 1780s, only one had a boat and a ferry flat. The use of the watercraft was apparently more for that decade, because during the 1790s the percentage of watercraft reached its comparable pre-revolutionary level of thirty-three percent. Carts and wagons remained at twenty to twenty-five percent before the Revolution. Use of carts and wagons increased dramatically to sixty-six percent from 1790 to 1800. This is an indication that more roads were being built and utilized in the district. (see table 2, on the next page)12

12It is known how heavy the water traffic was on the Pee Dee River, but the river was a natural resource for travel and trade. An advertisement appearing in the South Carolina American and General Gazette in 1778 stated that Richland Plantation, on the Pee Dee about ten miles north of Georgetown, was ‘extremely pleasant and convenient as all boats from North Carolina, Upper Peedee and the Cheraws pass very near the house’.13

13The presentments of the grand jury at Long Bluff also reveal the inhabitants’ concern for the construction of roads, ferries, and bridges and clearance of the Pee Dee River. And as Joyce Chaplin has noted, trade and commerce were among the major reasons South Carolinians wanted improvements in transportation.14 It was the primary concern among the first settlers in 1748, and nearly three decades later it continued to be a major issue with the local inhabitants. The first meeting of the grand jury at Long Bluff Courthouse in 1772 asked the assembly ‘to cleanse the rivers of the great numbers of trees and logs which interrupt the navigation’.15

14All in all, the grand jury encountered much difficulty in their attempts at getting roads, bridges and ferries built in their district before the Revolution. The provincial government was simply more concerned with providing these services to the lowcountry rather than the backcountry. It was only after the Revolution that many of their requests began to be heard in Charleston.16

15Between 1789 and 1797, fifteen roads were built for the inhabitants in the Cheraws District.17 Several inhabitants in 1789 petitioned the Assembly to re-route the main road between Beaver Dam and White’s Creek to cross Hick’s Creek since ‘the river Peedee overflows ever fresh so as to render it impossible to the great detriment of the people traveling on the road’.18 In 1791, twenty-nine inhabitants in Marlboro County petitioned the assembly to construct a road from ‘William Dewitt’s boat yard on Great Pee Dee and to Swinney’s Bluff on Little Pee Dee River’ because the present route ‘is a disadvantage in particularly to’ the people residing near Dewitt’s boat yard.19 The petitioners noted that if this road were ‘opened and left in repair’, it ‘would be the most direct way from Camden, South Carolina to Fayetteville, North Carolina’. Not surprisingly, these petitioners represented some of the most substantial planters in the region. Among the twenty-two who signed the petition were Rev. Evan Pugh, and Cornelius and David Mandeville, two brothers who worked as merchants having moved to the region from the state of New York in 1785, Robert Lide, an affluent planter, and John Kimbrough, a prosperous millwright and planter. These people maintained that if the Assembly were to build this road ‘the force of hands [slaves] within the said vicinity of the said road proposed, are sufficient to keep the old roads in repair and to open and keep up the one proposed’.20 Since these were slaveholders with wealth they had little difficulty in persuading the state to build this road in 1792.21 Moreover, when influential people wanted roads, they got them, while those without social standing or influence seldom did.22 Being a slave owner was undoubtedly a factor in determining if the assembly would build a road at the petitioner’s request. When forty-two residents in Marlboro County living near the North Carolina line petitioned the assembly in 1796 for a road, their request went unanswered. These petitioners apparently had little influence because only two of the forty-two petitioners owned slaves.23 Moreover, slaveowners were more likely to keep a road up since they could force their slaves to work on it.

16 Ferries had to be put into service to link the roads that crossed the Pee Dee River.24 Thompson’s Ferry was a private ferry, as were most on the Pee Dee River throughout much of the colonial period. As early as 1745, the assembly gave commissioners of the highways the authority to make contracts with individuals to operate and maintain ferries. These private ferry operators could only do so within the same guidelines as the public ferry operators.

17Ferries were also places for lodging and public entertainment. When The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel minister, the Reverend Charles Woodmason, came from London to the province in the 1750s, he stopped to dine at a ferry house on the Pee Dee River where he over heard ‘a knott of villains in the next Room contriving and cooking up ficticious [sic] accounts against the Estate’ of a Mr. Oldfield. That night he lodged with a gentleman who had an interest in Mr. Oldfield’s affairs and the next day he told what he heard to a local magistrate and ‘sav’d the Estate some hundreds of pounds’.25

18Many of the ferries established in the Cheraws in the eighteenth century were instituted after the Revolution: seven more ferries operated from 1784 to 1800. Thomas Lide became the proprietor of the ferry he operated at Cheraw Hill in 1784, when the assembly stipulated ownership of this ferry to him and his heirs for a period of fourteen years. In return, he was to keep and maintain in good operating order a sufficient ferry boat or boats, and other necessaries for the transporting of passengers, their servants, carriage horses and cattle. The ferry was to run at night as well as during the day.26

19Ferry crossings were also excellent places to locate taverns. In 1787, the Marlboro County Court issued nine tavern licenses; three of the nine were at ferry crossings.27 Cashaway Ferry began as a private ferry but became public in 1792 as a result of disorderliness associated with a brothel house owned by Luke Pryor. The grand jurors of Marlboro County attempted to put a stop to Pryor operating a house of prostitution at his tavern near the ferry because the court found three men in the community, who had frequented Pryor’s establishment, to be guilty siring children out of wedlock.28

20Even though vice could surface due to taverns and bawdy houses being near ferry crossings, the positive benefits associated with transportation improvements, far outweighed these occasional adversities.

21In conclusion, it was the roads, bridges, ferries, and the rivers that provided the physical linkages that connected the backcountry inhabitants of British America to the Charleston merchants, and the broader Atlantic World. Transportation improvements strengthened the social network at the local level by allowing people quicker access to local service centers, such as country stores, taverns, the church, polling places, and the muster field. With more roads being constructed in St. David’s Parish, it enabled farmers and planters to transport grain to the local mills, and ship indigo from Charleston to England. Transportation improvements also led to the development of frontier towns, Cheraw and Long Bluff, places settled in the 1740s by European-Americans that began to take on characteristics of towns by the 1770s.