Johns Island is the Lowcountry’s largest and fastest growing sea island, encompassing 84 square miles of high ground and breathtaking marsh and home to roughly 15,000 residents who are drawn to the island’s convenience, relative affordability, beauty, and history. Johns Island (sometimes spelled John’s in the past) is bounded by rivers and other sea islands including Wadmalaw, Edisto, and James Island. From Charleston, the island is accessed via Highway 700 (Maybank Highway) from James Island and from Main Road via US 17 if you’re approaching from West Ashley or coming southeast from growing Ravenel, South Carolina.
Early History of Johns Island: From Native American to Plantation Landscape
Native tribes including the Kiawah, Stono, and Bohicket (for whom nearby rivers and creeks are named) lived on Johns Island in the late seventeenth century, when English colonists arrived and began to settle. Prominent early landowners included the Legare, Gibbes, Fenwick, Stanyarne, and Godfrey families (surnames that are still present on locally), but the island is named for Saint Johns Parish in Barbados, rather than a person. Many of these early planters had arrived in South Carolina by way of the smaller Atlantic island. Most early island residents sent their goods and traveled to Charleston by water, sailing or rowing the Stono River and navigating to tributary creeks or “cuts” (manually excavated canals or deepened creeks) to reach the peninsula’s Cooper and Ashley Rivers.
Johns Island was a plantation landscape of large holdings cultivating rice, Sea Island Cotton, and foodstuffs. Elite planters constructed grand plantation homes, though the majority of the island’s population were enslaved people who toiled as farmers, excavated the canals and cuts, and worked as carpenters, coopers, and cooks. Brick House and Mullet Hall plantations (now a Charleston County Park for hikers and horseback riders) are still intact today.
Fenwick Hall, “an early eighteenth-century rice plantation with Georgian style brick house that is similar in age and grandeur to famous Drayton Hall, with two formal facades (one facing the road and one looking onto the river)” is intact and privately owned. In 1780, British commander Sir Henry Clinton used Fenwick Hall as his island base during the British occupation of Charleston in the American Revolution. Fenwick was later known as “Headquarters” for this reason.
Late Nineteenth Century
Johns Island was partially devastated during the American Civil War as Union troops raided the plantations. Reconstruction brought freedom for the enslaved and vast societal change to the island, though it remained (and partially remains) rural. Reconstruction brought important changes for Johns Island’s black population. The Freedman’s Bureau redistributed plantation land seized from Confederate owners and granted it to the freed populations who had worked the land as slaves, leading to several important freedman communities which have remained in the same families since the 1860s. Black Johns Islanders founded their own church congregations, including Mt. Hebron Presbyterian on Bohicket Road (built in 1865) and Promised Land Episcopal (1875.).
After the war, larger plantations were subdivided into smaller tracts for “truck farming”, or crop farms. Alongside black landownership, exploitive farming practices like tenant farming and sharecropping became common for African American families on the sea islands. Civil Rights leaders who would become nationally known worked on the island in the 1940s and 1950s to help Black islanders receive an education and learn to vote. Septima Clark, Bill Saunders, and Esau Jenkins established the Progressive Club with classrooms and a grocery co-op. The shell of the building still stands on River Road and awaits restoration.
Johns Island Today
The island was connected to land in 1921 by a wood bridge that was replaced with the John F. Limehouse Bridge in 1958, which was named for a beloved ferryman who ran a general store near his ferry landing. Development has burgeoned in the last fifteen years. The island offers diverse housing types, including large rural properties, custom new builds along the waterways, townhouses, and apartments, and a host of recent subdivisions with neotraditional style frame houses in a host of sizes and configurations. Stonoview has a community dock, pool, and tennis courts, as does Kiawah River community. Kiawah River Estates is a new planned community with a clubhouse, golf, and a crabbing dock. These- and most neighborhoods on the island- are safe, quiet, and popular with young families and retirees, while the young professional set is drawn to the lower maintenance townhouse developments like Indigo Grove or the Islands.
One of the highlights of living on the island is the outdoor activities and amenities. The Angel Oak is an estimated 500 years old and its breathtaking limbs cover nearly half an acre. It stands protected and welcomes visitors at a city-owned park site. Johns Island County Park and Mullet Hall Equestrian Center feature 738 acres of trails through marshlands and pine forests on what was one Oaks and Mullet Hall plantations. Stono County Park at the foot of the Limehouse Bridge costs only a dollar and “offers beautiful Lowcountry river views from 1.5 miles of wooded trails and marsh boardwalks for walkers, runners, and cyclists. The 85.5-acre site is comprised of 25.3 acres of highland, 12.2 acres of marsh island, and 48 acres of marsh adjoining the Stono River.”
Lowtide Brewing and Charleston Distilling Company has indoor and outdoor tasting areas, and the Goatery at Kiawah River brings you up close and personal with a plethora of friendly goats at a working farm. Rosebank Farms offers the best local produce and seafood in the Lowcountry at its expansive roadside stand on Kiawah River Drive. It is operated by island treasure Sidi Limehouse and stocks goods from his family farm and other producers. Shopping and restaurants are mostly groups along Maybank Highway including beloved Wild Olive, Sunrise Bistro, and Island Provisions. The drive up Main Road to the Stono Market and Tomato Shed Café, operated by the Ambrose family, is a must for traditional Lowcountry food and hospitality. The Ambrose Family Farm is also open seasonally for U-pick tomatoes, strawberries, and blueberries.
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