Fort Moultrie rises around you on Sullivan's Island, a site layered with history from the Revolution through the Second World War. On June 28, 1776, a small American force under Colonel William Moultrie defended an unfinished fort built of palmetto logs against a British naval assault. The spongy palmetto wood absorbed cannon shot rather than splintering, and the British fleet was driven back in a humiliating defeat — one of the first significant American victories of the Revolutionary War.
The palmetto tree became the symbol of South Carolina, and it remains on the state flag today. But Sullivan's Island carries a darker significance as well. For most of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans arriving in Charleston were held in pest houses on this island — quarantined to prevent the spread of disease before they were deemed well enough to be sold.
Historian Edward Ball has called Sullivan's Island the Ellis Island of Black America, though the comparison can only go so far: one was a gateway to freedom, the other to bondage. Among the soldiers stationed here in 1827 and 1828 was a young U.S. Army private named Edgar Allan Poe, who set his story "The Gold Bug" on this island and found in its gothic landscape something that suited his imagination perfectly. History accumulates here in layers, each one revealing something essential.