Freshets and Floods

Weather: The snow lingers. In places, ice is forming underneath where the snow is melting during the day, then freezes before it is absorbed. Icicles hang from my steel roof and others that face east or northeast.

Last useful snow: 1/1. Week’s low: -2 degrees F. Week’s high: 38 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas; everything else is under snow.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat

What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: One bird came out for seeds on a chrysanthemum, and the rabbit has left a daily trail.

Weekly update: Humans take credit or blame for some of their actions, but overlook others. Thus, some suspect global warming is causing more severe storms, and concede people building on barrier islands contributes to the problem. What they don’t recognize is they, like many of us, really do want to live near nature, either on a waterfront or near a forest. Unfortunately, while the population increases, the amount of land does not.

The causes of increased population pressure go back to the 1950s when people had more children than their parents had had during the Depression. At the same time, penicillin and other improvements in medical care meant more who were born survived, and those who did live lived longer. No one blames health care for overbuilding the sea islands, because no ones wants to return to earlier conditions.

Humans cannot help themselves from impacting the environment. In South Carolina, Samuel Dubose, Jr. noted the effects of agricultural successes on his life. His great-great-grandfather, Isaac DuBose, left Normandy after Louis XIV rescinded the act of tolerance for Huguenot Protestants. [1]

The French-speakers weren’t particularly welcomed by English colonists, and settled on land upriver from Charleston. [2] Once indigo was accepted as a commercial crop and subsidized by the British navy, DuBose remembered "one after another" of the Huguenot "planters moved" to Saint Stephen’s Parish "as opportunity offered for the purchase of land" and slaves. [3]

The bounty ended with the American Revolution, and eventually cotton replaced indigo as a cash crop. Soon, lands downriver were being ravaged by freshets, as floods were called. He wrote:

"The upper country being then but partially cleared and cultivated, the greater part of its surface was covered with leaves, the limbs and trunks of decaying trees, and various other impediments to the quick discharge of the rains which fall upon it, into the creeks and ravines leading into the river; consequently much of the water was absorbed by the earth or evaporated before it could be received into its channels, and even when there so many obstacles yet awaited its progress, that heavy contributions were still levied upon it. The river, too, had time to extend along its course the first influx of water before that from more remote tributary sources would reach it. Owing to these and other causes, the Santee was comparatively exempt from those freshets which have since blighted the prosperity of what was once a second Egypt." [4]

His own house was burned during the Civil War, [5] and his descendants moved to Charleston. [6] Cotton and rice plantations reverted to second growth forest that was purchased by wealthy northerners for hunting retreats in the early twentieth century. Thus, was formed the upper class taste for living in what had been wetlands.

Forested land away from the coast was deemed wasteland. Dubose’s acreage was flooded in the early 1940s by Lake Moultrie, [7] a reservoir created by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to produce power for the area north of Charleston. [8]

Each step in the degradation of DuBose’s patrimony was independent and seen as progress at the time: the expansion of arable land, rural electrification. The result, more land was rendered useless, and the remaining land became more crowded. The damage from storms simply increased at each stage with increased density.

Notes on photographs: Taken 3 January 2019.

End notes:
1. "Isaac DuBose, I." Gini website. 23 May 2018.
2. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 51-52.

3. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 40.

4. Samuel Dubose. 37-38.
5. "Harbin Plantation – Lake Moultrie – Berkeley County." South Carolina Plantations website.

6. Harlan Greene. "Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 83:154-167:1982.

7. SC Plantations.
8. Wikipedia. "Santee Cooper."