Mitchelville archaeologist unearths a lost history on Hilton Head Island (2024)

HILTON HEAD ISLAND— Centimeter by centimeter, a local archaeologist has spent years unearthing the legacy of a once-vibrant community on Hilton Head Island. Her efforts, combined with a $23 million restoration project, are bringing long overdue recognition to the country's first self-governed town of freedmen and refugees escaping slavery.

Today, the once-bustling footprint of Mitchelville exists as a park on the northern edge of the island. A sign welcomes visitors with a simple but powerful slogan— "Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park: Where Freedom Began."

Katherine Seeber was a graduate student just beginning her dissertation when she was invited to a Juneteenth celebration at Mitchelville several years ago. She had her plans set on studying the Sea Pines Shell Ring, a historic mound created by native people thousands of years ago. With little convincing, Seeber switched her focus to Mitchelville and is now partnered with the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park organization.

"I'm so glad I did," Seeber said.

Mitchelville's story began more than 162 years ago with an ambitious assault launched by Union soldiers on the northeast coast of Hilton Head. Only a few hours in, the island’s Confederate defenders fled, and owners of the island’s plantations followed. Left behind were Union soldiers and enslaved people, who found themselves suddenly emancipated.

Over the next week, the freedmen were joined by hundreds of escaped slaves who poured onto the island. They were swept into the U.S. military and assigned barracks until the arrival of a military leader and abolitionist, Maj. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel.

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 had launched their attack to take the island.

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 freedmen and refugees. It was the epicenter of life on Hilton Head Island.

A new effort aims to preserve the history of Mitchelville and share it with a public largely unfamiliar with what happened there. Not long ago, though, the town was widely known.

"When I'm teaching it to adults, I say, 'Do you remember when there was a period of time where everyone in the world knew about the Benghazi papers?' That's what Mitchelville was," Seeber said.

Seeber has seen hundreds of newspaper clippings from every state in the unionthat referenced Mitchelville for five or six years as the masses grappled with what a post-slavery nation was to look like.

The community endured more than 30 years, though the population declined over time as formerly enslaved residents left for opportunities elsewhere.The Great Sea Island Hurricane of 1893 wiped whatever remained of Mitchelville off the map.

Seeber's efforts are among the first modern archaeological attempts to better understand and map out the town lost to history.

Since 2018, she has led five excavations on the site. She has helped locate the likely site of Mitchelville's first praise house, has mapped the location of dwellings and has found a number of artifacts that contextualize how the people of Mitchelville lived their lives.

"We only have one shot at (excavations)," Seeber said. "There's never a do-over."

Archeologists also have to contend with a unique type of soil near the ocean. Typical soil contains dirt, silt, clay, roots and plant matter, but Mitchelville sat atop what is essentially beach sand. That added challenges to excavation, Seeber said.

The sandy soil is easily compacted. People left impressions of some kind in the earth.

"When we did the ground-penetrating radar, it lit up like a Christmas tree, because for 4,000 years there have been people using that spot to live in," Seeber said. She calls those spots of compression "ancestor hot spots."

Seeber's work will continue as Mitchelville Freedom Park leaders prepare to break ground on more substantiveprojects. In early June, the group unveiled new features called Ghost Structures.

The structures, comprised of steel beams that outline four walls and a roof, stand in the footprint of actual dwellings that once were located there. Seeber used ground-penetrating radar to help determine the placement of the historic dwellings.

"The amazing thing about the natural world, and all living things, is that nothing is invisible," Seeber said. "We leave things behind whether you know it or not. When you start to think about the process of moving through time and trying to map out the ghosts of past human activities, it becomes very fascinating and even a little sacred."