Archeology tech Spencer Barker uses a metal detector to search for
Revolutionary War-era artifacts.
http://www.thestate.com/
Friday, Apr 13, 2007
More than 225 years after Francis Marion hid in the swampy reaches of the South Carolina Low country and bedeviled British troops, the locations of the Swamp Fox’s hideaways remain a mystery.
Legends and myths abound, linking every piece of high ground near a river or swamp to the Revolutionary War icon. But in the past year, experts hired by an organization planning a Marion-focused tourism trail have been looking for definitive proof.
Archaeologist Steven Smith hasn’t turned up the Marion holy grail — the silver crescent Liberty emblems worn by militia members — but he has found enough evidence that he’s closer than the British ever were to cornering the Swamp Fox.
The Francis Marion Trail Commission plans to showcase one of the most promising sites with a public archaeological dig Saturday at Dunham Bluff. Smith thinks Marion slept there for a few weeks in 1780.
“The case gets built up to ‘Gee, this looks pretty darn good,’” Smith said. “It’s as good as it gets for Francis Marion.”
Preliminary searches at the Marion County site on the Pee Dee River uncovered a brass candleholder from the 1780s and a small British cannonball, along with loads of rifle balls and a few pieces of equestrian gear.
The physical evidence strongly points to a Revolutionary War camp on the bluff, Smith said. Written documents mention a Marion camp at Dunham Bluff, though most of the mythology puts his main local hideout on the other side of the river on Snows Island.
Oddly enough, Smith has found nothing that points to Marion on Snows Island, another of the 15 sites he is exploring. At some of the others, he has found evidence as compelling as on Dunham Bluff. The trail commission decided to go public with the Dunham Bluff site first because it’s on public property, the 25,668-acre Woodbury tract purchased by the S.C. Department of Natural Resources last year.
The commission aims to parlay Marion’s renown into a tourism boost for an economically depressed area. The Swamp Fox’s ragtag farmer militia hid out in the lowlands of the Pee Dee and Lowcountry during 1780 and 1781, mysteriously appearing to attack British and Loyalist forces, then retreating into the wetlands.
Historians contend the British might have won the war if they hadn’t been waylaid in South Carolina. Briefly after the fall of Charleston, Marion led the only organized resistance in the state.
The Swamp Fox was a hero immediately after the war, moved into a pantheon below George Washington after flowery biographies in the early 1800s and gained modern fame with a Disney series and the movie “The Patriot,” based loosely on his life.
“We have this incredible historical resource that we weren’t taking advantage of,” said Ben Zeigler, commission chairman.
“We can pull people off the interstate and get them on the back roads, give them something to see, and they can spend money in places that need an economic boost.”
The state Legislature created the commission in 2005, allocating $100,000 to get the effort started. An additional $200,000 was devoted to the project last year.
Some of the money has gone to planning and to hiring an executive director, but the most important $75,000 went to archaeological work. The commissioners didn’t want to put up kiosks that said, “Legend has it, Marion camped here.”
“We’re not trying to create a Francis Marion amusement park,” Zeigler said. “We want to be historically accurate.”
The grand plan is to build four small museums in Manning, Georgetown, Florence and Moncks Corner. Visitors will be able to watch short films, view artifacts and plan road trips to the Marion sites spread out over several counties.
Smith used written accounts to come up with the general location of 15 camp or skirmish sites. (Marion also served at known sites such as Fort Moultrie, Fort Dorchester and Fort Watson.) Smith’s crews fanned out at the sites with metal detectors, then did preliminary digs.
The resulting finds of ceramics, belt buckles and musket shot sit in boxes that cover much of the floor in Smith’s office at the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at USC. The candleholder and cannonball from Dunham Bluff are the stars.
Documents show Marion, who usually traveled without artillery, had two small cannons when he could have been at Dunham Bluff. The candleholder looks much like one pictured in a book of Colonial relics from that period.
Locals say Robert Bass, author of a Marion biography, brought school groups to this area as late as the 1970s to show them an earthen ridge supposedly built by Marion’s troops. But if there was such an earthen redoubt then, it disappeared when a timber company planted pine trees in the 1980s. That’s why Smith has to dig down for evidence.
This week, the crew found another belt buckle and three buttons from the Colonial period, but no crescent symbols, no remains of an earthen fort, no definitive evidence.
“He’s elusive,” Smith said. “He’s going to be elusive both archaeologically and historically.”
Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366.