Robert McAlister Knihy

Captain Abram Jones Slocum was born at sea on his father's whaling ship in 1861. He was taught about boats and the sea in New Bedford Massachusetts. He served on and commanded commercial wooden sailing ships in the Atlantic Ocean. His voyages often took him around Cape Hatteras to Georgetown. South Carolina to load lumber for transport to cities in the North. As Captain of two schooners, the three-masted "Warren B. Potter" and the three-masted "City of Georgetown," he sailed at all times of the year through storms and hurricanes for twenty years. He lost his ship in a collision with an ocean liner in 1913. As Captain of another schooner, he and his ship were lost at sea in 1914.

The virgin forests of longleaf pine, bald cypress and oak that covered much of the South Carolina Lowcountry presented seemingly limitless opportunity for lumbermen. Henry Buck of Maine moved to the South Carolina coast and began shipping lumber back to the Northeast for shipbuilding. He and his family are responsible for building the Henrietta," the largest wooden ship ever built in the Palmetto State. Buck was followed by lumber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who forever changed the landscape, clearing vast tracts to supply lumber to the Northeast. The devastating environmental legacy of this shipbuilding boom wasn't addressed until 1937, when the International Paper Company opened the largest single paper mill in the world in Georgetown and began replanting hundreds of thousands of acres of trees. Local historian Robert McAlister presents this epic story of the ebb and flow of coastal South Carolina's lumber industry."

North Island has always been the beacon from the sea leading toward Georgetown, South Carolina. It was an island of exploration for the Spanish in 1526 and the first landing place of Lafayette, France's hero of the American Revolution, in 1777. It was a summer resort for aristocratic rice planters and their slaves from Georgetown and Waccamaw Neck until 1861. North Island's lighthouse, built in 1812, led thousands of sailing ships from all over the world past massive stone jetties and through Winyah Bay to Georgetown. Today, North Island is a sanctuary and laboratory for the study of nature's effects on this unique barrier island. Join historian Robert McAlister as he recounts the island's storied past.