Ware County Georgia Civil War Remembrances File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Bob Hurst Table of Contents page: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/ware.htm Georgia Table of Contents: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm OLD SHELDON CHURCH REMAINS HIDDEN IN SOUTH CAROLINA LOW COUNTRY NEAR POCOTALIGO History Records That This Church Was Burned During Both The Revolutionary And The Civil Wars WILLIAM BULL'S FAMILY TOMBS CENTER ON THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD IN THE COLONIES English Emigrates Settled Here, Established Sheldon Church, Remained Here For Eternity By Robert Latimer Hurst For Chaplain Joseph Furse, the great-grandfather of Pierce Countian Sam Owens, and other Confederates the local history around Pocotaligo did not seem to be the most important item in their lives in 1861. For the Englishman William Bull, born 1683, who had helped establish the Sheldon Church, the Pocotaligo vicinity was now home. This location had become the core of his family's existence. Here entombed inside "his" church are the remains of a man who had been an honorable member of the Colonial House of Commons from 1706 - 1719, colonel of the Berkley County Regiment during the Tuscadora and Yemassee wars, Lord Proprietors Deputy and holder of many other leadership positions. This place had been sacred to William Bull and his family, who had emigrated from Warwickshire, England. Happenings here, as the colonies became states, meant a great deal to him, but he was dead and buried beneath a slab in his church. He would not know that a renown military man, Robert E. Lee, would visit here or that a General William T. Sherman would burn it a second time in 1865. Neither would Sam Owen's Great-Grandfather Joseph J. Furse, whose letters had ended before either officers' campaigns. Today, the majestic outline of the old Sheldon Church still stands in the deep forest. These ruins, reported not to be on any map, was once Church of Prince William's Parish, built between 1745 and 1755, before the American Revolution. It followed the Greek temple imitation in America, with impressive Tuscan columns, towering walls and massive arches. The British army burned it in 1799 during the Revolutionary War. It was rebuilt in 1826 and renamed Sheldon Church of Prince William's Parish, only to face conflagration again at the hands of Sherman's arsonists in 1865 during the Civil War. Joseph, writing from the same area in 1861, speaks of getting items from home: "... I received the Carpet Bag - with articles sent. You can have no idea how dirty it gets in Camp. Standing (at) our lightwood knot fire, we are smoked almost black...." Then the serious note: "...the Yankees are in sight all of the time and often fire on the guards...." Pocotaligo, missed today if one blinks his eye while traveling the trail, stands tall now. It is pinpointed as a battlefield. It will be remembered in many places in years to come as the place where "21 men were killed and 37 wounded or captured by the Rebs in the Battle of Pocotaligo." Lehigh County's Pennsylvania's Soldiers & Sailors Monument underscores it just as it does those lost at Antietam and Chancellorsville; however, many of the Yanks who were involved in this section of the world saw it as the Battle of Tullifinny, referring to the Tullifinny River that runs through the area. But, now Joseph Furse, along with the others at Camp Martin in Pocotaligo, wondered where this coming conflict, which now seemed to be lengthening, would take them. Had he lived, this farmer-minister-soldier, like all his peers, would have witnessed the tragic ending of one way of life and the beginning of another, vastly different existence. "I often get homesick. ...," the soldier confessed, adding that a friend says that it is evident because "...he says he can see it in my countenance very plainly. ... Our company will all be uniformed in a few days. We are not armed ... At night, some are enjoyed in reading the Bible or prayers - some playing on the violin - some singing all sorts of songs - and a great many other amusements, all going on at the same time." Then an abrupt change in the letter: "The cars are now passing --Good bye. We are just called off to attack the Yankees at Mackey's Point...." On December 6, 1861, again from Camp Martin, Pocotaligo Station, South Carolina: "... I have been quite sick with influenza since I last wrote you, but I am happy to say that I am much better. ... I know not what moment I may be called into battle. Should I be killed, I know that I will die in a glorious cause and find that God will be with me through all trials and finally save me in His kingdom. I often dream and think of you all. Though absent in person, I am present in thought and feeling with you...." Chaplain Furse's last letter, December 10, 1861, reveals that his "cold is much better" and that the weather is most changeable at Pocotaligo Station. "...There is a good deal of sickness in camp, mostly colds, nothing of a serious nature. Some sixty men from this regiment went down on Beaufort Island the other day. This Colonel, with several men, went on ahead scouting the Yankees and ran into an ambush. ... One man was shot several times, and it is reported that we killed him and wounded some others...." Victory was not achieved this day "for the Yankees ran." The Unionists, at this time, were stationed at Port Royal, near Beaufort, South Carolina. As the fighting narrowed for the Rebs and Yanks, Colonel Martin, Furse's commanding officer, heard the Northern officer shout, "Stop! You damned rebels!" Furse writes for the last time: "We are in the midst of exciting times. Our country is in a prickly condition, and it becomes every man to come to its (care). ..." Furse is dead of one of the many diseases that are a curse of camp life. It is the late fall of 1862 when Colonel Robert E. Lee, on assignment to establish defenses along the Southern coast, visits the home of Mrs. George C. Mackey, near Pocotaligo. This locale is again described as one ready for attack: "As fortification, the Coosawhatchie River was blocked with heavy timbers, and guns were mounted along Bees Creek and adjoining streams. Local action began in May, 1862. A Federal force came up Broad River from Port Royal Sound and landed at Mackey's Point. Then they proceeded along the road to Pocotaligo, hoping to destroy the then- new Charleston and Savannah railway track. A small force of 110 Confederates managed to stop them by encirclement at the Tullifinney River bridge...," records Grace Fox Perry. Pocotaligo is no more the village it was during the Civil War years. In fact, very little is found to show where once- upon-a-time Camp Martin's fires lit the darkness, and where, during one of America's saddest eras, a young chaplain, in that firelight, wrote to "My dearest wife." JOSEPH J. FURSE, CONFEDERATE CHAPLAIN, LETTERWRITER, HUSBAND This Soldier, 141 Years Ago, Recorded Life During A Divided America's Most Critical Period PIERCE COUNTIAN SAM OWENS SHARES 1861 LETTERS FROM GREAT- GRANDFATHER JOSEPH J. FURSE Letters Written To Owen's Great- Grandmother Glimpses Battle of Pocotaligo MARY ELIZABETH FURSE CANNON, OWEN'S GRANDMOTHER, WITNESSED AS SHERMAN'S TROOPS BURNED SOUTH CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY Six- Year-Old Mary Elizabeth Watched As Neighbors' Farms Went Up In Blaze By Robert Latimer Hurst Blackshear Native Sam Owens looks lovingingly at the picture of his grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Furse Cannon. He sees an older woman with soft gray hair and remembers her telling him stories about her days as a young girl living in South Carolina during the Civil War. He takes the yellowing letters, all protected by individual plastic folders, and looks at them, rubbing his fingers over the same pages that his grandmother had once caressed. He looks at the practiced penmanship of his great-grandfather, a man who strived to unite with his family even from the battlefields in the lowcountry of South Carolina. And the stories Mrs. Cannon told her grandson were backed by those yellowing letters with the flowing penmanship. They were all dated "1861" and addressed to "My dear Wife." The events she related had been penned to her mother by her father, Chaplain Joseph J. Furse, who died in 1862, while serving in the Confederate Army. But, for a while, Rev. Furse spoke to them through the ages from that marshland around Pocotaligo, South Carolina. This was land that he knew well: the creeks, the plantations, old Sheldon Church, Beaufort, even Charleston further down the road. But the letters only lasted a short time before another message reached the family in Barnwell, South Carolina. Later, a sketch would appear that further explained the death of this young soldier of the Confederacy. "Rev. J.J. Furse, a minister of the Savannah River Association, has also entered the rest which remaineth for the people of God. He had enjoyed more than ordinary opportunities of study, and had pursued a course of Theology in the Seminary of the Presbyterian Church, located in Columbia. He had thus been fitted for more than ordinary usefulness. "With a heart full of devotion to Christ, and a mind thus trained and instructed, he was enabled with great acceptance to break the bread of life to the edification of the Churches he served. He was another of those who, who blessed with education, and in a state of comfortable independence, have felt it their duty to enter the service of the country as soldiers. He became a private in one of the regiments of South Carolina, and died a victim of disease," report the editors of "Maturity of Pipe Creek." As his widow, Mrs. Furse, remembered only as Joseph's "dearest wife," would herself become an eyewitness to William T. Sherman's troops coming through the Palmetto State. It would be in Barnwell County, South Carolina, that the mother and the six-year-old daughter faced the two Union soldiers at the door of the farmhouse early in the morning. "We are hungry, M'am," one said. They were members of Sherman's advanced guard. But it did not matter. This lady had never turned anyone desiring food away from her door. She knew the stories. Sherman and his men would march through this land and burn, steal, destroy everything. Mary Elizabeth overheard; and, though she was young, she understood their predicament because she had heard often about "Papa being away at war." They knew the approximate date that this military movement would take place, and they waited. All too soon, they saw the troops marching on the muddy road in front of their farm. They saw the cannons being pulled by the slow-moving mules, the wagons --everything they needed to ravage the already ravaged South; and, in the distance, the billowing smoke as neighbors' homes, barns and outbuildings were being burned. They heard the screeching of farm animals --either being slaughtered or taken away from their nesting places. Had they been able to listen more closely, they probably could have heard the sobs of a way- of-life being erased. But when all had passed, their farm home stood. Not one soldier had entered their gates, and the Union storm had passed as it moved out to set its fire in other places. General Sherman began his devastating march in early January, 1865. By March 9, his troops had passed out of the state into North Carolina, leaving behind a path of total destruction 100 miles wide and extending the entire length of the state, as recorded in THE CIVIL WAR IN SOUTH CAROLINA. "Federal troop strength was 60,000 plus a cavalry corps of 4,000; the total Confederate troops involved were 33,400, although not all of them were available to defend the state in the early part of the campaign." Some South Carolinians term this period as "66 Days in Hell." (Part II of this series will follow as Pocotaligo, the Furse letters and the Civil War become featured in a drama that changed the South forever.) DATED DECEMBER 10, 1861, THIS LETTER TELLS OF EVENTUAL CONFLICT AROUND THE POCOTALIGO AREA Pierce Countian Sam Owens Shares Civil War Letters Of Great-Grandfather With Readers MANY STREAMS RUN THROUGH THE POCOTALIGO SOUTH CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY The Pocotaligo River Meanders Through Marshlands, Past Forgotten Plantations On Its Way To The Sea By Robert Latimer Hurst Sam Owen's great-grandmother, then, must have been comforted by remembering the letters. One can guess that her fingers rubbed the almost fresh ink on the notepaper pages. "My dear Wife" they would begin. He would apologize for his tardiness in writing, but explain that the mails are somewhat slow at this time also. "I hope this letter may find you in the enjoyment of health," he would write, urging her to be cautious in all undertakings, "And may God help you is my sincere prayer. You must be thankful that you are in such good hands -that of your mother, whose kindness to me in my last year's sickness never shall be effaced from my memory...." On October 28, 1861, Joseph writes from Boiling Springs, South Carolina, again: "...I am sorry to inform you that it will be entirely out of my power to come down this week. ... I am very highly pushed at this time. And my work gets along very badly when I am absent. ... My cotton patch looks perfectly beautiful. A great deal is opened. I am trying to get it out before it rains. If I do not, it will be very much injured. I got up to Church last Saturday about half after twelve. I found the congregation anxiously waiting for me ... They gave me a call to that Church for another year - which was unanimous -without a dissenting voice. I preached a sermon on Sunday on the Judgement Day...." Many Southerners thought at this time that the war, which had begun on April 12, 1861, with the firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, would not last long. And many of the volunteers saw themselves returning to their home duties shortly --in time for spring plowing. The United States Navy was completely unprepared for its role in this battle with the rebellion states, indicating one example of numerous strategies that placed odds with the South. But it only took about seven months for the Navy, united with the U.S. Coastal Survey and the Army, to gain that necessary foothold in South Carolina at a place call Port Royal, near Beaufort. By October, 1861, the Yanks, with Bull Run and Wilson Creek behind them, faced a November expedition in South Carolina, planning the "greatest and most significant blow to restore the Union in 1861," reports Historian Max Shaw. Then from Pocotaligo, South Carolina, and Camp Martin, November 29, 1861, not knowing these plans of the adversary, the young minister-soldier, in the path of this conflict, writes home: "Although I feel quite tired and fatigued having been on guard last night, yet I take pleasure not being compelled to go on drill this morning. ... I wrote to you by the lantern of the wagons." He speaks of his family, urging his wife to get some help to take care of the cotton business while he is absent: "... I would suggest to you the possibility of sending four or five fine bales of good cotton to Augusta so that you may get anything you wish...." The realization of the coming conflict begins to dawn, but no devout Southerner could accept the possibility of defeat even if the enemy was on the doorstep. Pocotaligo had an interesting history, though, at this time, no one really was studying its background. Traders from Charleston had often come through this wilderness to barter English wares for the animal hides and furs the Indians furnished. In the 1700s, this settlement was the chief council town of the aboriginal Yemassee Indians. William Gilmore Simms, South Carolina's famous novelist, used this locale to sketch "a vivid picture of the tribes as they were living along the rivers; and of the intrigues and injustices which led to the Indian uprising of 1715. The Yemassee War began with a savage massacre of negotiating agents at Pocotaligo and soon involved the whole lower state...," writes Grace Fox Perry in her MOVING FINGER OF JASPER. Pocotaligo, surviving the Yemassee ordeal as the Indians moved toward Florida, became a village devoted to transportation. A stagecoach stop, it developed into a commercial center for rice-growing along the rivers with names like Bellinger, Matthewes, Mazyck, Bryan, Bull, Fishburne and Williman designated as prominent land grant holders. Fort Balfour, a British garrison, was located in the village not too many years before the American Revolution. (Part III of this series will follow as Pocotaligo, the Furse letters and the Civil War become featured in a drama that changed the South forever.) ======================== USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be freely used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other presentation. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for FREE access. ==============