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FAITH
probably the adjacent town of Port Royal, came when Scottish Presbyterians moved in and established Stuart Towne in 1684. As with the French more than a century earlier, the Spanish had a direct and violent hand in terminating the interests of the Scottish adventurers in 1686. Jesuit missionaries continued to visit Indians on Parris Island for decades after the relocation of the capitol of La Florida to St. Augustine in 1587. Scots were to return to the area a few years after being driven out of Stuart Towne, as Indian traders who slowly reopened the Lowcountry and Sea Islands to European activity. Beaufort became the second chartered city in South Carolina in 1711, following Charleston by 41-years. With settlement came people of faith, many of them seeking relief from persecutions and related wars across the sea. Most of the settler communities were located at key junctures along local watercourses, as were their churches. The Church of the Cross in old Bluffton, for example, built before the Civil War, was situated immediately adjacent to the front door to old Bluffton, the dock at the end of Calhoun Street on the May River. This location made the beautiful old Gothicstyled Church boat-accessible in a matter of minutes to 19th Century congregants from the numerous plantations on Palmetto Bluff, Daufuskie, Bull Island and other islands. Many water-adjacent churches here scheduled their services around the tides, as many of their flock came to church via canoe and low tide departures and arrivals would have been muddy affairs at locations without the luxury of deep water docks. “How firm a foundation is the strength of the Lord,” go the lyrics to a great church hymn that has been validated for centuries among these storied Sea Islands and in the Lowcountry. The foundation that can come only from faith remains alive and well here beneath stately live oaks and Spanish Moss. The history of the faith community in the Lowcountry provides contemporary believers a remarkably rich heritage. This area was significantly Anglican in the early settlement days of the 17th Century and the geographical designations then were by Parishes of the Church, not the counties of today. But a century before the English tide moved into the Carolinas, there were official Spanish, Scottish and French settlers here, all of whom were competing for
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present day Parris Island, primarily to serve as a base from which to control the shipping trade that crossed the Atlantic from the New World back to Europe just off the shores of Beaufort County. The Faiths of Parris Island in the 1500s Three and a half centuries before Parris Island became home to the US Marines, it was Charlesfort to the French Huguenots who settled there in 1562. Then it became Santa Elena to the Spanish and capitol of La Florida from 1566 to 1587. Three hundred men, women and children lived there. Spanish Franciscans and Jesuits may have had a missionary presence there, off and on, as far back as the 1520s. The last European settlement of Parris Island, and
The Jewish Heritage In addition to the Christian flocks in the Lowcountry, there has been a rich Jewish heritage that often goes unrecognized. Some of the grand old names in both early Savannah and Charleston were Jewish, representing some of the first merchants who were attracted to those seaports during the American Colonial era. From those first settlements, sons and daughters spread out to the newer settlements in places like Beaufort and Bluffton and brought their heritage of faith with them. Savannah’s Mickve Israel, 1733, goes back to the founding year of Georgia. Today the congregation prides themselves on “Southern Jewish Hospitality,” their website even leading with ,“Shalom Y’all!” Beaufort’s