History of Hilton Head Island

of Georgia, and helped chase the Spanish back to St. Augustine after their failed 1742 invasion of St. Simons Island, GA. After relocating to Savannah, GA in 1746, he served two terms in the Georgia Commons House of Assembly while earning a living as a highly active privateer. He drew a well-known chart of the Florida Keys while on a privatizing venture in 1756. The chart is in the Library of Congress.

In 1788, a small Episcopal church called the Zion Chapel of Ease was constructed for plantation owners. The old cemetery, located near the corner of William Hilton Parkway and Mathews Drive (Folly Field), is all that remains. Charles Davant, a prominent island planter during the Revolutionary War, is buried there.

He was shot by Captain Martinangel of Daufuskie Island in 1781. It is also home to the oldest intact structure on Hilton Head Island, the Baynard Mausoleum, which was built in 1846.

William Elliott II of Myrtle Bank Plantation grew the first crop of Sea Island Cotton in South Carolina on Hilton Head Island in 1790.

Fort Walker was a Confederate fort in what is now Port Royal Plantation. The fort was a station for Confederate troops, and its guns helped protect the 2-mile (3 km) wide entrance to Port Royal Sound, which is fed by two slow-moving and navigable rivers, the Broad River and the Beaufort River. It was vital to the Sea Island Cotton trade and the southern economy. On October 29, 1861, the largest fleet ever assembled in North America moved south to seize it. In the Battle of Port Royal, the fort came under attack by the U.S. Navy, and on November 7, 1861, it fell to over 12,000 Union troops. The fort would be renamed Fort Welles, in honor of Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy.

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