Fort Watson and the Maham Tower

In the spring of seventeen eighty-one, Major General Nathanael Greene set out to retake South Carolina from the British by dismantling their chain of inland supply forts one by one. The first target was Fort Watson, a stockaded post the British had constructed on top of an ancient Native American burial mound overlooking Wright's Bluff and Scott's Lake. The mound gave the fort a commanding height advantage. Three rows of sharpened abatis, stakes driven outward at an angle, ringed its base. Inside stood Lieutenant James McKay with about eighty regular soldiers and forty militia.

Colonel Henry Lee, known as Light Horse Harry, and Colonel Francis Marion arrived with their combined force in mid-April and immediately faced a problem: they had no artillery. Without cannon, they could not batter down the walls. They tried cutting off the water supply; the British dug a well inside the fort. The siege dragged on for over a week with no progress.

The solution came from a South Carolina militia officer named Major Hezekiah Maham. He proposed building a log siege tower taller than the fort's walls, so that riflemen on the platform could fire directly down into the British position. Working through the night of April twenty-second, the Patriots felled trees, squared timbers, and stacked a crib-style log tower that rose above the stockade by morning.

At first light on April twenty-third, the McCottry riflemen climbed the tower and opened fire into the exposed defenders below. Lieutenant McKay surrendered within minutes. The Maham Tower, as it became known, was used again at the sieges of Augusta and Ninety Six later that year, becoming a standard tool of the southern campaign. The capture of Fort Watson was the first crack in the British interior supply chain, and it set the stage for the eventual liberation of South Carolina.