Shaded oaks draped in Spanish moss welcome you to White Point Garden at the southernmost tip of the Charleston peninsula. The park takes its name from the bleached oyster shells that once lined these shores, visible to sailors entering the harbor as a navigational landmark. In the early eighteenth century, this point was notorious for a grimmer kind of landmark: gibbets — iron cages — from which the bodies of executed pirates were hung as warnings to others.
Stede Bonnet, the "Gentleman Pirate" who was a plantation owner before taking to piracy, was hanged here in November 1718 along with dozens of his crew. The feared pirate Blackbeard blockaded Charleston harbor that same year. For decades, White Point was the site of public executions.
Later, the Confederacy erected monuments throughout this park — statues of generals and secessionists that stood for over a century as part of the "Lost Cause" memorial movement. In 2020, following national reckoning over racial justice, the city removed the statue of John C. Calhoun from Marion Square, and debates over monuments here intensified. The oak trees remain, draped in Spanish moss, indifferent to the arguments beneath them.
History in Charleston is never quite past.