Military Installations

Early Efforts At Settlement

Spanish scouts first sailed into Port Royal Sound as early as 1514 and in 1525, Pedro de Quexo is believed to have named the prominent headland on modern Hilton Head Island La Punta de Santa Elena, as that location name appeared on Spanish and European maps beginning in 1526. Before making a settlement attempt later that year at a place named San Miguel de Gualdape, the colonizing expedition of Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon entered Port Royal Sound and considered La Punta de Santa Elena as the location before sailing further south.

Giving the sound the name of Port Royale and Hilton Head the name La Grand Ile, a 1562 French expedition under Jean Ribault established a fort and military outpost on the tip of Parris Island named Charlesfort. Due to food shortages and hostile natives it ended in 1563 with a mutiny caused by the belief it had been abandoned. Three years later, at the same location, the Spanish built a fort and a town named Santa Elena. Santa Elena had a total of five forts (San Salvador, San Felipe I, San Felipe II, San Marcos I and San Marcos II) and up to 550 citizens during its 21-year existence as the Capital of Spanish La Florida, the first European capital city in North America.

During a temporary evacuation of Santa Elena due to an Indian uprising in 1576, a French force attempting to capture Santa Elena shipwrecked at the mouth of the sound and the survivors built a fort on what was cited as a large island to the south of the mouth of Port Royale. Santa Elena was reclaimed and rebuilt by the Spanish in 1577 and was abandoned by royal order in the face of a mounting threat from the English and Sir Francis Drake. Santa Elena was consolidated into the settlement in St Augustine in 1587, then establishing the Spanish capital there and enabling St Augustine to beccome a fully self-sustaining colony.

In 1663, Captain William Hilton surveyed Port Royal Sound, discovering the remains of an old fort (presumably on Parris Island) and giving his name to the headland named La Punta de Santa Elena over 125 years earlier by the Spaniards.

In early Colonial times, the Scots built a palisade fort and town on St Helena Island in 1684 named Stuart Town. A lookout post established by the Scottish settlers of Stuart Town and manned by Yemassee braves was located on the elevation of Braddocks Point on Hilton Head and guarded the approach from the south through the inland water passage beginning at the Savannah River. A seaward route taken by the Spaniards in 1686 avoided detection by the Yemassee at Braddocks Point, and Stuart Town was attacked and burned to the ground by the Spanish that year.

Prior to the Yemassee War of 1715, a fort was built on the north end of what is now Pinckney Island and manned by Yemassee allies to help defend against Spanish or French fleet invasions. In 1717, Colonel John Barnwell, who was in charge of the Southern Defenses of the Colony and had been granted land on Hilton Head, built a compound housing 60 Tuscarora warriors as lookouts and scouts against the Spaniard and Yemassee enemies in St Augustine. Following the settlement of Beaufort in 1711 and growth of the town into an important trading port, forts were built on Port Royal Island in 1726 (Fort Prince Frederick) and at Spanish Point in 1758 (Fort Lyttleton) to protect the colony from Spanish and Indian raids from the south.

With the settlement of Savannah in 1733 and the building of forts in Darien (Fort King George) and St Simons (Fort Frederica), Hilton Head and Daufuskie Islands ceased being the southern frontier of the Colony of South Carolina and settlement by the English moved gradually southward into Georgia.

The Civil War

With the secession of Southern states from the Union, the prospect of eventual armed conflict led the Confederacy to begin building fortifications protecting the entrance to Southern ports, especially along the Southeast coast as they were particularly vital to the sea island cotton trade and the southern economy. Fort Walker on Hilton Head and Fort Beauregard on Bay Point guarded the 2.75-mile-wide entrance to Port Royal Sound and the port of Beaufort.

On November 3, 1861 a Union invasion fleet began to gather off the mouth of the Sound as feverish preparations of the unfinished forts commenced and local landowners evacuated the Port Royal area sea islands with their belongings in what became known as The Great Skedaddle. In a four-hour battle on November 7, 1861, the Union Navy bombarded the forts into submission and over 12,000 Federal troops occupied Fort Walker and Hilton Head Island. In the two days following the other sea islands and Fort Beauregard were occupied as Port Royal became a Union stronghold in the heartland of slavery and secession.

Though Fort Walker was renamed Fort Welles by the Union in honor of Gideon Welles, then Secretary of the Navy, the name Fort Walker has persisted. In the months following, with the last completed by early 1864, four other fortifications were constructed on Hilton Head by the Federal forces. Remnants of all remain today.

Fort Mitchel, originally named Battery Gillmore, was built as a coastal artillery battery along Skull Creek (in modern Hilton Head Plantation) in late 1861 and early 1862 as protection against a naval attack through inland waterways from Savannah. Battery Holbrook was constructed along the shoreline of Calibogue Sound (in modern Spanish Wells Plantation) to guard against a possible landing and attack from that direction. Fort Sherman (in modern Port Royal Plantation) was built in 1863 to protect what became the main supply depot for Southern operations and was the largest earthworks fortification in the South until Fortress Rosecrans was built in Tennessee in 1864. Fort Howell (on Beach City Road across from modern Hilton Head Airport) was built in 1863 to protect the Town of Mitchelville from an anticipated Confederate retaliatory campaign against encampments of Freedmen in the Port Royal area.

The Spanish-American War

Fort Fremont was authorized by Congress in 1898, and construction began the following year. It was said to be the most expensive fort built in Beaufort County, and the most useless, since a shot was never fired there. Fort Fremont is located at Lands End on St. Helena Island, S. C., four miles southeast of Port Royal. It overlooks the Fort Fremont Reach of the stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway that runs from Port Royal to the Beaufort River and protected the port of Beaufort, which at the time was the tenth largest port in the U.S.

Attendant to the construction of Fort Fremont across the Sound, Hilton Head was chosen as the location for one of eleven emplacements along the American coastline of an experimental artillery weapon called the Zalinski Pneumatic Dynamite Gun, more informally known as a steam cannon. The cannon could fire a 100-pound canister of dynamite 3 to 3.5 miles with effect. The gun was powered by steam pressure from nearby boilers which provided the propulsion for the dynamite charge from the barrel. The steam cannon position on Hilton Head was manned by crews from Fort Fremont who would be ferried across the sound by boat and camp at the emplacement during their gun duty. The gun was fired over 100 times in practice but never at an enemy target. It was melted as scrap metal for our WW I war effort. The steam cannon location and remnants is in modern Port Royal Plantation.