Pineville, a historic refuge
Part 20: The Fever of 1833
By Warner M.Montgomery Warner@TheColumbiaStar.com

Springfield Plantation house near Pineville was built in 1818 for Joseph Palmer. It survived the Civil War but was demolished in 1939 for the Santee- Cooper Project. The land is now beneath Lake Moultrie.

During the War of American Independence, most of the plantation homes along the Santee River were sacked and burned by the British or the Tories. After the war, these homes were rebuilt and new plantations were established. In 1793, Pineville was founded by Capt. James Sinkler as a summer refuge for the planters of the Santee region and merchants from Charleston.

Most of the first settlers were Huguenots who had moved up the river from their original settlement at Jamestown or immigrated from Charleston: Palmers (changed from Pamor), Gaillards, Cordes, Porchers, Marions, Cahusacs, Couturiers, Peyres, DuBoses, St. Juliens, Richbourgs, Mazycks, Ravenels, and Gourdins. They were industrious, educated, wealthy, and highly social. They established a church, a race track, an academy, and a library. During the leisure time between planting and harvesting, they dined, danced, gambled, raced, and held lancing tournaments.

Times were not always good, though. The annual freshets and occasional droughts ruined crops. Children died young. Mothers died in childbirth. Homes burned. And three times since 1793, there have been disasters in Pineville, so terrible that the town temporarily disappeared each time: The Fever of 1833, The Burning of Pineville (1865), and Santee- Cooper Project (1939).

In 1832, Pineville had a population of 789 - 235 white, 554 black. Times were good, crops were abundant, then in 1834 an epidemic hit Pineville. The residents believed it to be swamp fever, caused by unpleasant vapors that rose like ghosts in the night.

The first victim had been Thomas Fiske, the principal of Pineville Academy, in 1831. Since he was from Massachusetts, the citizens were not alarmed; after all, Yankees weren't used to Southern ailments. Fiske died at Mexico Plantation in the home of Maj. Samuel Porcher.

Within two years, almost everyone except slaves and the hardiest white men came down with the fever. Trust in the health of the pinelands began to waver. By 1836, the Pineville Academy closed, and the village was practically deserted.

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church was the parish church for Pineville. Many of the planter families are buried in its cemetery. Services are still held in the church.

Dr. Morton P. Waring and Frederick A. Porcher, a graduate of the Pineville Academy and Yale University, moved their residences from Pineville to another pine barren four miles northwest of Monck's Corner. There they built hand- hewn pine houses and, in jest, called their new refuge Pinopolis, Greek for Pineville. The name stuck and Pinopolis exists today as a peninsula in Lake Moultrie. (Dr. Norman "Pard" Walsh has writ-

Ptelann taa tiwoonns,dPeirnfeulal nbdo Voikl-,

lages, Pinopolis and Its People

, in which he identifies the fever as malaria.)

The Santee Canal continued to operate during the fever epidemic. Twenty- four white workers had died of the fever between 1793 and 1800, and the fever continued to take its toal. The 1830s, however, were considered the most prosperous years of the canal. The demise of the canal in the late 1840s was the result of the new railroads not the fever.

Theodore Gourdin II, a resident of Pineville and a member of the US Congress (1813- 1815), died in 1826 at age 62. A few years earlier, seven of his slaves were killed by falling trees while working on the Santee Canal. He was reimbursed for his loss.

His wife, Elizabeth, died in 1834, and his daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1836. It may be only coincidental that they died around the years of the fever.

By 1842, the fear had passed, the planter families returned to Pineville, and the Pineville Academy was reopened. The health of the village returned and Pineville was popular once again.

A new fear, however, soon filled the air. News of Northern abolitionists and slave revolts provoked the formation of Southern Rights Associations in Berkeley County. It wasn't long before the young men of Pineville marched off to war. (Next week: The Pineville

Academy)