The Hero’s Return: Lafayette’s Epic Journey Back to a Grateful America
The First Meeting of Lafayette and Washington, Philadelphia, August 3, 1777
Bill Riski is a retired USAF Officer and systems engineer. His hobbies include history, photography, writing, and travel. Maintaining this website is a labor of love for the Dataw Historic Foundation in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, where he and his wife now live.
History 3-2-1 (2024-10-17)
3 Images, 2 Moments, 1 Memory Three Images of History Two Moments in History Moment 1—1607 As the scent of ink and freshly bound parchment filled the air in 1607,…
History 3-2-1 (2024-09-17)
Three Images of History in Plain Sight Two Moments in History Moment 1—September 17, 1787 the United States Constitution was signed by delegates at the final meeting of the Constitutional Convention. The…
History 3-2-1 (2024-09-10)
New Series of Quick Posts Inspiration I love this quote from James Clear: “To experience time travel, read. To achieve immortality, write.” He publishes The 3-2-1 Newsletter, one of the…
Did You Know?
This series of articles was written by Joel Holden and John Colgagn circa 2011.
Oranges – An exotic export business on Dataw?
Acres of orange groves on Dataw? Was this one of the earliest commercially produced oranges in the United States?
Tides of Time: Navigating 40 Years on Dataw Island
Our History Afternoon in March 2024 The history sessions, organized to celebrate our 40th Anniversary, commenced at 1:00 PM and concluded at 6:00 PM, on Wednesday the 13th. All sessions…
Songs from a Sea Island Plantation
The music of the Antebellum Era expressed the feelings of the two classes of people on Sea Island Plantations: the white plantation owners and the enslaved people. Listen to their…
Tabby Times – Fall 2023
This issue featured an article about Victoria A. Smalls, a Gullah native of St. Helena Island. She is our guest speaker at the January 2024 Fireside Chat. This event, an…
From Aztec Farms to Datha Island: TurkeyTales
It’s fascinating to trace the wild turkey’s journey from being domesticated by Native Americans a thousand years ago to its role in the antebellum era at Elizabeth and Berners Barnwell…
Tabby Times – Spring 2023
This Spring issue includes three compelling articles: one about the economic significance of Sea Island Cotton in the Lowcountry during the early 19th century and expansion attempts into the marshes,…
St. Helena Island’s Prehistoric Secrets: Mastodons
The DHF is proud that we have artifacts found on Datha Island in the early ALCOA days that date back thousands of years. For example, in the display on the southwest wall of the History & Learning Center is a Paleo Indian Point that dates to 10,000 B.C. However, many have explored our area over the centuries. I recently learned from a young lady in Massachusetts that Charles Upham Shepard found an older and much larger item on St Helena Island in the 1800s; an American mastodon (Mammoth americanum) from the late Pleistocene era! This intact skeleton, found next door, pushes back our knowledge of this area by several thousand years, to at least 12,000 B.C.