The scent of fresh-mown kudzu somehow cuts through air as dense and hot and humid as a summer greenhouse. This path we’re on, four of us, is being carved out, literally as we’re walking on it.
Somewhere around here is the site of Fort Pickens, a Revolutionary War fort named for Andrew Pickens. Nobody quite knows where it is. But historians know it’s down here, in this under-construction public park a few hundred yards from Pickens Spring, somewhere.
It’s too good a metaphor to ignore, that the mower of this kudzu is exposing the ground beneath it to the sky for the first time in decades, and that the path being carved might actually be leading us to Fort Pickens. At the bottom of this hill, we find a foundation -- bricks and stones, dating back beyond the 20th century.
It’s also too good a metaphor that I never came to Abbeville to find any historic artifacts. I came to talk about a 13-year-old.
Back around 1780, a teenager, a child, named John McCord volunteered to fight with Andrew Pickens against the British. He was small, this John McCord. Not very impressive-looking to be a field soldier. But he served in various capacities for the patriot cause, eventually becoming a bodyguard for Pickens himself.
What I didn’t know when I started asking questions was that there really isn’t much more known about John McCord. His family has descendant still in Abbeville, although it’s fairly likely that none of them are actually descendants of John himself -- just as nearby McCord’s Creek is connected to his family name, but not the man himself. John isn’t even buried here. It’s believed he’s buried in Mississippi, where he moved following the war.
Past that, little is known of John McCord -- even whether he got his pension for serving.
But here’s the thing: Asking about this historically obscure young man opened up paths to history in Abbeville that haven’t seen the light of day in decades. Dozens of them.
“Abbeville got typecast as a Civil War town for such a long time,” says Anna Lagrone. She’s one of the three people walking down the hill with me. She’s also the CEO of the Abbeville Chamber of Commerce, which is a major keeper of history here.
“The reality is, we didn't have any fighting here during the Civil War,” Lagrone says. “If you're talking about actual battles, actual skirmishes, actual forts, we had so much more of that during the Revolution. Multiple different battles took place here. The Battle at McCord's Creek, that's one we're looking to recognize. Battle of Cherokee Ford. Battle at Pratt's Mill. Battle of Dunlop's Defeat.”
The building for the Chamber of Commerce is a museum in its own right, currently bedecked with costumes and flags and pieces of history showcasing Abbeville’s connections to the Colonial period and the battles Lagrone has mentioned. It’s fast becoming a repository for local information about just how pivotal Abbeville was to the American cause.
“Abbeville was of strategic importance more so than has really been focused on in the past,” she says. “You've got Star Fort in Ninety-Six, you've got Fort Charlotte in what is now McCormick. Abbeville was truly the frontier."
It might be hard to visualize today, but at the time of the Revolutionary War, Abbeville actually was on the western edge of what would become the United States. It was an important food hub because crops could grow here; and an important throughway to the West, through Cherokee country.
And, as Lagrone says, it was a violent place, no stranger to skirmishes and death and battles with the British and the Cherokee.
“South Carolina has a much more diverse history, I think, than has really been explored,” she says. “It's not just the patriot story, it's the loyalist story, it's the Cherokee story, women's story, children's story, African Americans’ story. Abbeville represents all of that. We had African American veterans here. We had a strong Cherokee presence here. Yes, we had some incredible local patriots, but that's just one piece of a larger conversation that, fortunately, is taking place across the state, across the nation now.”
Local historians are keen to present the complexity, the nuance, the diversity of the American Revolution as Abbeville played into it. History, as it has mostly been taught in schools, tends to simplify the American Revolution as a battle of freedom versus oppression.
In reality, the Revolutionary War was a civil war. It was also a war for the frontier; a war of attrition. The fighting was brutal; punishments often barbaric and cruel. The whole thing was diverse and complicated, and all those nuances played out here, in Abbeville.
But even local historians like Tom Howie, chairman of the Abbeville 250 Committee and one of my other pathfinders on the hill near Fort Pickens, know that much of the city’s and county’s history has been left buried by years of indifference to telling the story.
“ We've let our history sit on the sideline for way too long,” Howie says.
He’s especially interested in telling people that Andrew Pickens -- whose spring downtown is the fount from which this city actually grew -- has deep ties to Abbeville. That’s despite the fact that there’s a city and county named for Pickens on the other side of Anderson County.
For Howie, the attention being paid to Abbeville’s Revolution-era history now is a welcome perspective on both the county and the South.
“ Most of the attention [during the war] went to the northern states because most of the bigger battles were there,” Howie says. “They were more organized and they were better reported on.”
My third companion on the hill is Wayne Sears, a retired historian who’s also working on Abbeville’s 250 project. Sears is a descendant of Andrew Pickens -- and, for the record, of John C. Calhoun. Pickens met a Calhoun girl and married her, which appears by all accounts to be the reason that Pickens came to Abbeville in the first place, Sears says.
“One of the stories was that while they were in Waxhaw, that's where Andrew Pickens first saw Rebecca Calhoun,” he says. “He was just taken in by her.”
All of this makes Sears a kind of living metaphor of hidden Revolutionary War history in Abbeville. His ancestry is proof that history is everywhere; that the family names that show up in the history books are the same families that still show up in the phonebook.
“As our representative likes to say, our history is not distant,” Howie says. He’s quoting State House Rep. Craig Gagnon (R, Abbeville), who’s said that a lot. “It is under our feet, and we have discovered what was right here all the time. It's been like finding something of value in the attic that you didn't know was there.”
Turns out, the stuff under our feet is directly under our feet — although we didn’t actually end up discovering Fort Pickens, I’m sorry to say. The slab and rocks are likely the remains of a train station that ran through here a century after the Revolutionary War.
But no one really knows what else might unexpectedly turn up. Now that people are looking, it could be anything. Even a fort on what used to be the American Frontier.
