Ninety Six is a town. We had no idea what we would find here but it was a place to get a passport stamp and it was along the route we were taking from Santee to Cherokee.
Got the stamp and read some interesting history but because we still had a long way to go (and there were bugs and bees) we didn’t do the hike back to the fort. Glad we stopped. Interesting to learn more about “the South” on this trip.
Artists rendering of the fort from the internet. It was a British fort, built by slaves, and defended by British loyalists against patriots in the first land battle south of New England.
The hike we could have taken, but didn’t…
That’s it for Ninety Six. Wish our historian friend Steve Elder had been with us! He would have enjoyed this stop. I feel like I should have at least heard of this town somewhere in my history schooling. Maybe I did but forgot. History was not very interesting back then…
Trivia: The nearby town of Greenwood, SC is the home of Park Seed Company. The largest mail-order seed company in the world.
Sad to leave Jekyll Island but now we can look forward to next year. We headed north to Santee but on the way took a trip across the bridge to St. Simon Island and the National Monument at Fort Frederica.
So much history of southern states that was not in our northern textbooks. Lexington, Boston, Paul Revere, we heard about those. I also got the Gullah Geechee stamp because the coastal areas are where the Gullah and the Geechee developed their own subcultures and languages. I need to learn more about them.
The remains of Fort Frederica. Love the British flag and brooding live oak tree. Easy to imagine troops guarding the “debatable lands” between South Carolina and Florida, against those pesky Spanish in Florida. The cannons guard the Frederica River. Frederica, the town and river got it’s name from Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales. This remaining fort seems tiny but at the time (1736) it was the strongest fort built by the British in North America. Not seen in this photo is the entire colonial town behind the fort that supported the troops and townspeople. The entire town was enclosed in a palisade wall and raised earthen embattlements with a dry ‘moat’ to repel attack by land.
I was eager to go to Fort Frederica to; 1. Get the stamp for my National Parks Passport book, 2. Learn about history I missed, 3. Visit a place called Frederica… my great grandmother’s name was Esther Frederica Albertina Zigler Dart. I don’t know why that seems like a connection but it’s something…
Plaque mounted on the fort wall. Horton (who settled on the neighboring Jekyll Island) sailed with Oglethorpe.
What’s left of the mounded “Town Wall” is directly in front on this photo. The Town would be to the right and the “dry moat” is to the left.
One last massive spreading live oak tree with Spanish moss before we leave the warm coast and head back inland toward home.
From Fort Frederica we headed due north to Santee Lakes KOA. We didn’t know it but leaving Jekyll Island let us avoid a big rain they got that night. We had a little rain but nothing like the downpour they got.
View of the beach and dock from our campsite. They described this as “on a bluff overlooking the lake”. I guess when you are close to sea level even a few extra feet of elevation qualifies as a bluff.
That’s our RV, up on “the bluff”. This KOA could be nice, but it’s way overpriced and pretty run down. We won’t return but at the time we were making reservations all the State Parks were full. It turned out to be an ok place to sit and read. Becky got a bunch of quilt blocks sewn and I got the four days at Jekyll Island post done.
DADart Photography 