Where to celebrate Juneteenth? Hilton Head’s Mitchelville has a special claim. | Military Digest

HILTON HEAD ISLAND — Mitchelville may be one of the best stories you’ve never heard.

It begins with an amphibious assault in the early days of the Civil War.

On Nov. 7, 1861, Union vessels attacked a Confederate fort on the northeast coast of Hilton Head Island, a stretch of marshy beach along Port Royal Sound. Only a few hours after the squadron began to “vomit forth its iron hail,” in the words of Confederate Gen. Thomas Drayton, the island’s defenders fled. 

Overseers of Hilton Head’s 20-odd plantations took off behind the Confederate soldiers, leaving the 70-square-mile barrier island to Union troops and the enslaved population, who found themselves suddenly emancipated. 

Eighty or so went in search of the army. 

“There’s no tutorial about what you do after you’ve been freed,” said Ahmad Ward, the executive director of Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park. “There’s no Pampers being passed out.”

Over the next week, the freedmen were joined by hundreds of escaped slaves who poured onto the island.  

“The word has gone out, ‘You make it to Hilton Head, you’re free,’ ” said Ward. 

At first, the Union commander declared them part of the U.S. military and assigned them barracks. But when officials in Washington, D.C., found out, the commander was reassigned and replaced with Maj. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel.   

Among other things, including a world-renowned astronomer, Mitchel was an abolitionist. 

He saw the cleared acres of farmland on Hilton Head, the banks bristling with oyster shells and the water thick with fish, the poorly run barracks and the Africans who knew how to cultivate crops and communities, and he saw a chance to show a public wary of ending slavery what truly liberated people could do.

“Once these folks were given opportunity, they could be self-sufficient,” Ward said. 

In September 1862, Mitchel arranged for Hilton Head’s formerly enslaved inhabitants to live on about 300 acres on the island’s northeast coast, along the same marshy beach Union vessels attacked.

Within a few months they established houses and businesses, churches and schools, police and government. People from other Sea Islands and around the state came, too, creating a town with about 500 houses and a fluctuating population of between 1,500 and 3,000 freedman and refugees.  

Located on the former Drayton plantation, the site became known as Mitchelville. 

“This was the first place where Africans in America had a chance to be citizens of something that they helped build, create and foster,” Ward said.

Although Mitchel died of malaria six weeks after launching the town, Mitchelville flourished.

Workers traveled between the town and the Union base on a long dock through the marsh; families tended gardens and babies; elected officials settled disputes and organized trash pickups; missionaries taught reading and writing to children, who were required to get an education.

In Washington, many federal officials came to consider Mitchelville a great success. It served as proof of concept for the Port Royal Experiment, which sought to create schools and hospitals for the formerly enslaved, as well as to enable them to buy land seized from slaveholders.

“This is the rehearsal of Reconstruction,” said Ward.

Red Cross founder Clara Barton visited Mitchelville, as did abolitionist Harriet Tubman, perhaps seeing some people she freed who found refuge there.

Anti-slavery activist William Lloyd Garrison visited as well, stopping by Mitchelville just after the Civil War ended. Had Abraham Lincoln accepted Garrison’s invitation to join him, the president would have been at Mitchelville, too, instead of at Ford’s Theater.

The day after Lincoln was shot, Garrison gave a rousing speech at Mitchelville’s First African Baptist Church. But his joy at seeing the thriving community may have been tempered by uncertainty as to where the country would go next.

The town vanishes

Lincoln’s assassination did not bring an abrupt end to Mitchelville, as many feared. Instead, Mitchelville unraveled slowly, and for a number of reasons.

When the Union soldiers left, the economic system collapsed. 

Then Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, decided to return land to slaveholders. 

The Drayton heirs did not want their former plantation back — the site was hot, mosquitoes carried malaria, and the family no longer had an unpaid workforce, explained Ward. So the Draytons divvied up the land and sold it, sometimes more than once, to anyone who came up with the money.

One Black man ended up with most of Mitchelville, and he rented out parcels to other residents. But his son swindled him out of the property, setting in motion a series of legal disputes among a dozen or so families whose surnames are still featured on Hilton Head: White, Singleton, Miller.  

Then, in 1893, a major hurricane wiped out what remained of Mitchelville — the streets and squares, the cotton gin and grist mill, the store and farming plots sown with white peas and sweet potatoes, okra and tomatoes, cotton and watermelon. 

“Half of Hilton Head is submerged, everything from basically Folly Field to Coligny,” said Ward, describing two modern-day tourist spots. 

Then the story itself of Mitchelville disappeared.

“You got these American luminaries who visited or were familiar with Mitchelville, you had newspaper articles in major American cities about Mitchelville,” Ward said, pointing out that Mitchelville was a commonly known place through the 19th century.

And then, by the dawn of the 20th century, he said, “Nobody knows about it.”

No longer even a name on a map, Mitchelville reverted to forest. 

Juneteenth

Standing in the dappled shade of an oak that had seen the town in its heyday, Ward gazed around Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park in its current incarnation. Mostly it was still trees — palmettos and pines filtering the sun into slivers on the pine straw. 

A few people wandered through on their own, and a van idled on the park’s oyster shell driveway, waiting for a docent to finish a tour. She didn’t have much to show at the moment: a replica of a tool shed, a home, and a praise house that, by uncanny coincidence, had been placed on a 4,000-year-old Native American mound.

The Native American relics were what clued folks in to the site’s historical significance. Ancient pottery shards spared the land from being turned into residential development in the early 1980s; instead, it was preserved and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since then, the site has attracted increasing interest as an important place for 19th-century history, too. Today it is part of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network.

“Our tagline is ‘where freedom began,'” said Ward, who is leading a major fundraising campaign to make Mitchelville a national attraction.

He batted his hand around the groves, describing structures that do not yet exist: reconstructions of freedmen’s houses and gardens; an 18,000-foot interpretive center with a window overlooking the Port Royal Sound; an archaeology lab; a plaza anchored by a boulder from Sierra Leone. 

“Sierra Leone would have been one of the major places people were taken from because they already knew how to cultivate rice,” Ward explained.

One goal of the upgrades is to create a destination for cultural heritage tourists — travelers tracing their lineages, or just learning more about who they are, said Ward. 

“There are certain visitors that don’t think Hilton Head has anything for them,” he said. 

Although the park’s master plan has not yet come to fruition, Juneteenth festivals have been held at Mitchelville since 2015. The first happened days after the mass shooting of nine African Americans at Emanual AME Church in Charleston, only 100 miles away from Hilton Head.

“It was such a highlight for us to start the celebration events down at Mitchelville, but it was such a sad occasion,” said Joyce Wright, the park’s director of programs and interpretation.  

Since then, the park’s Juneteenth festivals have grown in scope and size; in 2022, around 1,200 people came from across the region. 

This year’s events will include a campout on June 15; drum circle on June 16; and a celebration on June 17. 

Among other things, the celebration will include readings of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, storytelling, music, arts and crafts, archaeology, bird-watching and food.

While guests definitely have a good time, Wright said, they also learn a little-known piece of American history. 

“We spread the word about Mitchelville, about the resilience of the people and what they did,” she said. 

It’s a story that can inspire anyone, a tale of overcoming and inclusivity that gives the park a slightly hallowed glow. That’s also the feeling that Juneteenth aims to capture, said Ward: the feeling of freedom for everyone.