Tag Archives: sullivan’s island south carolina

Sullivan's Island, Charleston, South Carolina

To view more photos from Sullivan’s Island or purchase prints, click here

Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina was named for a lighthouse keeper, Captain Florence O’Sulivan, an Irish immigrant from Kinsale in the mid 17th century. It served a more nefarious purpose as the largest slave point in North America. It’s estimated that almost half of the African-American’s in the United States have ancestors who passed through Sullivan’s Island, making it a sort of Ellis Island of the slave trade. Today, the only monument to this unholy past is a small bench, dedicated in 2008.

In the American revolution, Colonial forces held the island against an attack by Cornwallis, who would later go down to a humiliating defeat at Yorktown, due in no small part to the spongy nature of the palmetto trees of which the force was built, which had an uncanny knack for repelling cannonballs. Also in military history, the Hunley – the first submarine to ever sink an enemy ship was lost off the island.