SC is home to nation’s first town run by freed slaves. State aid is helping tell the story.

A sign outside Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park on Hilton Head Island. (Provided/Town of Hilton Head Island)

Months before the Emancipation Proclamation declared an end to slavery, freed slaves were already building their own South Carolina town.

Mitchelville, established on Hilton Head Island in 1862, was the first self-governed town of freed slaves in the country. Over the years, though, the homes, churches and schoolhouses that once stood on the land were destroyed by hurricanes or fell apart with time. Much of the land was sold off, leaving only a fraction of the original town protected.

A $22.8 million project funded in part by state taxes will tell the story of the town in an effort to make it a larger part of the conversation around the Civil War, said Ahmad Ward, executive director of the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park nonprofit.

“There’s no one-stop-shop to learn about this community,” Ward said. “So, we’re building it.”

So far, the nonprofit has raised about $10 million, Ward said.

At least $4 million of that has come from state budget earmarks sponsored by Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, over the last decade. That includes $1 million in the budget that took effect July 1.

Davis plans to ask for up to $10 million additional during the next budget cycle to help finish the planned museum and event space, he said.

‘An extraordinary historical happening’

In November 1861, Union soldiers defeated Confederates in the naval Battle of Port Royal Sound.

As the U.S. Army occupied the Sea Islands and set up its Department of the South headquarters on Hilton Head Island, wealthy white residents and plantation owners fled. They left behind their property, possessions and, by some accounts, more than 10,000 slaves, according to the nonprofit’s research .

Hundreds of the newly liberated residents, officially called “contraband” since they weren’t yet legally free, sought refuge at the new base and were assigned to barracks.

The freed slaves worked with the Union Army unloading supply ships, washing clothes, gardening and harvesting cotton, now for pay. But as word spread, the barracks quickly became overcrowded.

When Union Maj. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel arrived in September 1862 and saw the living conditions, he directed the building of a village outside the base by and for the freed slaves. According to research, Mitchel held a contest between Union Army engineers and freedmen for the best cabin design. The freedmen won and construction started, with up to six homes built daily on quarter-acre lots.

The town came to be known as Mitchelville in honor of the commander who died of yellow fever before it was finished.

Mitchelville was part of the larger Port Royal Experiment on the Sea Islands, which gave freed slaves small parcels of abandoned plantations on which they could live in their own houses, run their own government, farm the land and work for pay, according to the nonprofit.

During its early years, Mitchelville spanned more than 200 acres of what was then Fish Haul Plantation.

Residents elected a mayor and council to oversee local government issues. Children between the ages of 6 and 15 were required to go to school — marking the first compulsory attendance law in South Carolina, according to the Department of Archives and History .

“And all this is happening during the Civil War, during one of the most chaotic parts of American history,” Ward said. “You’ve got this community where people were getting the foundations to be citizens for the first time.”

After the Civil War ended in 1865, Union troops withdrew from the island, leaving the town on its own. Many residents left, whether to follow the Army, find work on other plantations or go further inland. However, the town remained, with one account describing around 1,500 residents in 1867, none of them white, according to the nonprofit.

“All of a sudden, after Reconstruction ends, you don’t hear about it anymore,” Ward said.

A hurricane decimated the barrier island in 1893, bringing an end to the physical town. Land disputes in coming decades divided the property, including among heirs to the former slave who bought most of the land after the federal government returned ownership to the Drayton family, according to the nonprofit.

The Mitchelville neighborhood of Hilton Head Island remained. In 1988, the plantation on which the town stood was added to the National Register of Historic Places , protecting at least a portion of the property.

The remaining park is about 36 acres, Ward said. None of the historic houses or churches survived. All remaining records of the town come from historical documents and archaeological digs that have unearthed portions of what once stood there.

Davis said Mitchelville’s story needs to be preserved and told, and the state should help with those costs as the right thing to do. Helping to revitalize an area of such national historical significance is also a good use of state tax dollars, he said.

“It’s an extraordinary historical happening in South Carolina,” Davis said.

What’s planned

When Ward first came to Hilton Head Island in 2017, Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park was primarily open space, he said.

Visitors could go to the gazebo, see a replica house, visit a prayer house or sit on a bench overlooking the Port Royal Sound.

“That was all that was in the park for a while,” he said.

Information panels with some history went up in 2022. In June, the park added a series of “ghosted structures,” or outlines of houses made with steel beams to show where buildings likely stood.

“It’s a beautiful feeling, coming out to the park now and seeing those permanent structures as soon as you get on the property,” Ward said.

By the end of the year, the open-air depiction of the church will include benches adorned with the words of hymns the people who attended might have sung, Ward said.

Archaeologists are working to create a display of history of the land that spans millennia, using samples of dirt and artifacts pulled from the ground. The dirt will give a scope as to when Mitchelville was at its height, but it will date back as far as 4,000 years ago, when Native Americans lived in the same place, Ward said.

A nearby garden will grow the same fruits and vegetables people might have grown as a food source when they lived in the town. A 4,000-square-foot lab building will allow archaeologists to study what they find without sending the items off-site, while also giving tourists and school children a glimpse into how the process works, Ward said.

“That’s going to just help us tremendously,” Ward said.

Using $922,000 from last year’s budget, officials are working on resurfacing a trail that runs through the park and adding informational panels to tell people more about the history of the town. Four sculptures, chosen as part of a competition, will depict artistic interpretations of the area’s history and culture.

Officials are also working to get a boulder from Sierra Leone, one of the places in Africa the town’s founders would have originally come from.

A planned interpretive center will be the biggest addition to the park. Expected to cost between $12 million and $15 million, the 18,000-square-foot building would include a museum detailing the history of the area and Gullah Geechee culture as a whole, along with an event space, Ward said.

Outside, the land would be cut into quarter-acre lots, to represent how much land each freed slave was given.

“We want young people to see what a quarter acre actually looks like when they visit the park,” Ward said.

Depending on how quickly the nonprofit is able to get the funding, Ward said he hopes the museum will be open in the next five years.

What else the park might include depends on what archaeologists find during continuing digs. Even people like Ward, whose jobs are to tell the history of the site, often learn things they didn’t know about Mitchelville.

For instance, in 2021, an archaeologist found a hearth for a fire that was not attached to a home. That raised other questions: What were people making that needed a detached hearth? Could it have been tabby, a building material embedded with oyster shells?

“They’re meticulous about being historically accurate about the restoration,” Davis said. “It’s going to organically grow out of what the Mitchelville community looked like.”