South Carolina

The Audubon Swamp: these are tupelo trees, one of the few that can grow permanently in water. The other is the swamp or bald cypress and both are common in these vast subtropical swamps that run for 1,000 miles, all the way from Virginia to Florida. I’ve used generous amounts of mosquito repellent that according to the label also sees off “chiggers”. A Google search reveals these to be biting mites that live in grass and cause severe itching. The expression, “bitten by the travel bug” is open to many interpretations!

Now we come to the shallow lake where the alligators live, in their natural habitat. We only saw them from a distance, as they are quite shy and much less aggressive than crocodiles. However, it is against the state law to feed them, so we didn’t come armed with a tin of Lassie. They are also a protected species and this is rigorously applied as we were told happened at the campsite where we’re staying. The large campsite lake had an alligator living there that one of the permanent residents baited and killed, following which he was reported and arrested by the police.

We did get a lovely close-up of this Great Blue Heron, who looks as if he’s wading through a pool of treacle.
And now to yet another plantation: Boone Hall. This one’s a bit different, as it’s been used many times as a film location. The house and avenue of trees shown below is how you would imagine a plantation house and entrance drive to be.



Those white candyfloss bits of tree catching the sunlight are Spanish Moss. It is neither Spanish nor moss. It’s a flowering plant that lives on oak and cypress trees and gets all its sustenance from the air, and is named after the early Spanish settlers' wispy beards.
The plantation is also a working farm, currently producing vegetables. From the 1880’s until 1911 it was the world’s largest pecan nut plantation, 14,000 trees. In 1911 a hurricane destroyed almost all the trees after which the plantation moved on to crops.
Boone Hall originates way back from 1681, so naturally it has a slave history, with rice as the main crop in this area. The household slaves were housed in these buildings made from reject bricks turned out by the slave brickworks. This was top housing as the field workers lived in wooden shacks near the fields, which of course haven’t survived. They were still being occupied as dwellings by poor workers up to the 1940’s.

Before coming to Charleston, we expected the town to be capitalising on all aspects of its tourist potential, including the “Charleston”, the 1920’s dance and symbol of the party set of that era. We thought some cafes would be playing the music with maybe a video, perhaps a small museum somewhere in the town. When I phone my Dad and tell him where we are, I can tell it’s a blur of places- until we came to Charleston. “Ah, that’s where that dance comes from”, he said straight away. We couldn’t find any recognition of it in the town, but we did find a poster describing its origins, surprisingly, in Boone Hall.

Would you believe it, the Charleston dance originated from the music of the Jenkins Orphanage band in Charleston. The Jenkins Orphanage was founded in 1891 by the Rev Jenkins for African American orphans. The orphanage had received donations of some musical instruments and the reverend decided to get some musicians in to teach the youngsters to play. The experiment was so successful that the orphanage developed a band culture, and by the 20’s was running as many as 5 bands some of which toured America and Europe. The song “Charleston” was written into a Broadway musical, and the dance steps appeared in another show, which all helped to broaden its popularity.