History of Hilton Head Island

Hilton Head Island History Timeline

• Before 2000 BC: Native American peoples build shell rings and settle the creeks and marshes.

• 1526 to 1663: Spanish and French navigators chart the coast; Captain William Hilton sights the island in 1663.

• 1683 to 1715: the Yamasee settle on the island, move to mainland towns around Port Royal by the 1690s, and leave the coast after the Yamasee War.

• 1700s to 1860: plantations of indigo, rice and Sea Island cotton, worked by enslaved Africans.

• November 1861: Union forces take Hilton Head after the Battle of Port Royal.

• 1862 to 1865: the Port Royal Experiment and the freedmen’s town of Mitchelville.

• Late 1800s: Gullah Geechee communities farm, fish and build on the island.

• 1956: Charles Fraser opens Sea Pines and a bridge links the island to the mainland.

• 1969: Harbour Town Golf Links opens.

• 1983: the Town of Hilton Head Island is incorporated.

Native American Heritage: Shell Rings and the Yamasee

The island’s written history is short, but people have lived here for more than 4,000 years, fishing the creeks, hunting the forest and gathering oysters. They left shell rings, circles of discarded oyster shell that are among the oldest structures in North America. One is preserved in the Sea Pines Forest Preserve.

The Yamasee, allies of the English in colonial Carolina, settled on and around the island in 1683 at the Lord Proprietors’ invitation; the island was known for a time as Altamaha Island, after their chief. By the 1690s their towns had moved to the mainland around Port Royal. Trade debts and the Indian slave trade turned them against the colonists, and the Yamasee War of 1715 broke out; afterward the Yamasee left the Carolina coast for Spanish Florida.

How Hilton Head Island Got Its Name

The island has had many names. Spanish sailors knew the coast as La Punta, after the cape Ayllón charted in 1526. French explorers under Ribault called it Le Grande Ile in the 1560s. In 1663 the English captain William Hilton sighted its headland from the sea, and mapmakers began to write “Hilton’s Headland.” Later maps show Altamaha Island (1685), Bailey’s Barony (1698) and Trench’s Island (from the 1720s). Union occupation briefly renamed it Port Royal, and when the Town incorporated in 1983 the name Hilton Head Island was official.

What Is the Lowcountry?

The Lowcountry is the low, flat, tidal coast of South Carolina and Georgia: salt marsh, rivers that rise and fall with the tide, and a chain of sea islands. Hilton Head is the largest of those islands in the southern Lowcountry, and the word explains a lot of the island’s history, from rice and Sea Island cotton to the isolation that kept Gullah Geechee culture intact and the Lowcountry boil on the menu.

Plantations in Hilton Head: The Enslaved Workers Who Built Them

By the 1700s the island was a plantation economy: indigo and rice at first, then Sea Island cotton, one of the most valuable crops in the world. Every one of those plantations ran on the labor of enslaved Africans, who also brought the farming skill, craft and traditions that later became Gullah Geechee culture. Plantation names survive in today’s map: Honey Horn, now the grounds of the Coastal Discovery Museum, Stoney-Baynard, Braddock’s Point, Leamington, Fish Haul and Spanish Wells among them. Few buildings remain; the best-preserved are the tabby ruins at the Stoney-Baynard Ruins in Sea Pines. Plantations near Hilton Head, on Daufuskie and around Bluffton, have their own pages: see Daufuskie Island history and Bluffton history.

Zion Chapel of Ease and the Baynard Mausoleum

The Zion Chapel of Ease cemetery, at 574 William Hilton Parkway, sits under live oaks at the edge of a marsh. The Episcopal chapel was built about 1786 for the planters of St. Luke’s Parish and was abandoned and destroyed in 1868. What remains is the burying ground and the 1846 Baynard Mausoleum, believed to be the oldest surviving structure on the island, broken into after the Union landing and empty since. The Heritage Library cares for the site, and in the fall its guides, in period costume, lead tours of the cemetery on Tuesday mornings, past the graves of Revolutionary War veterans and into the story of the mausoleum. Tours cost $10 and must be booked ahead.

The Civil War and the Port Royal Experiment

On November 7, 1861, a Union fleet took Port Royal Sound. Fort Walker on Hilton Head fell, and the island became the headquarters of the Union’s South Atlantic blockade. Planters fled, and thousands of freed people arrived. The Union built forts to hold the north end, among them Fort Mitchel and Fort Howell (built in 1864 to protect Mitchelville). The Port Royal Experiment began: one of the first attempts to move people from slavery to freedom, with wages, schools and land. Mitchelville, founded in 1862 for freed families, was among the earliest self-governing freedmen’s towns.

Two more forts survive at the northeast end, on Port Royal Plantation: Fort Sherman, built in 1862, and the site of Fort Walker, beside the Steam Gun, a 1901 dynamite gun placed there to defend the sound. The community is gated, so see them on the Coastal Discovery Museum’s Forts of Port Royal tour.

Reconstruction and the Gullah Geechee Communities

After the war, freed families bought or settled land and built self-sufficient communities of farms, fishing and craft work on the island’s north end. With no bridge and little outside influence until the middle of the 20th century, they kept their language, cooking, stories, music and sweetgrass baskets almost whole. Gullah Geechee culture is a living part of the island today, and it has its own section of this guide.

Modern Hilton Head: Sea Pines and the Bridge

Most of the island was still woods and farms in 1956, when the bridge opened and developer Charles Fraser began Sea Pines. His plan kept buildings low, saved the live oaks and marshes, and set a model for coastal development: the reason Hilton Head still looks the way it does. Harbour Town Golf Links opened in 1969, and the island has hosted the RBC Heritage there ever since.