The 1893 Sea Islands Hurricane: The Storm That Silenced the Island

In the late summer of eighteen ninety three, two hurricanes struck the South Carolina coast within a single season. The first came in late August. The second, which made landfall in late October and is sometimes called the Sea Islands Hurricane or the Great Storm of eighteen ninety three, was catastrophic.

At its peak the October storm carried a surge estimated at twelve feet or more above normal tide levels. On Hilton Head, which sits barely above sea level across most of its surface, there was almost nowhere to go. The surge rolled across the island and swept away most of what stood on it.

Historians estimate that between one thousand and two thousand people died in this storm across the South Carolina and Georgia sea islands, with Beaufort County among the hardest hit. The dead were overwhelmingly the Gullah Geechee families who had established communities on the island after emancipation and the Civil War, people who had built their lives here over three decades and had nowhere else to go. The community of Mitchelville was destroyed.

First African Baptist Church was destroyed. The agricultural fields and the wooden structures of ordinary life were swept away. One account holds that only two buildings on Hilton Head survived the storm, the stone Baynard Mausoleum and the Graham House, both built of masonry.

After the storm, the island entered a long period of isolation. With most of its infrastructure gone and its market connections severed, Hilton Head became quiet and largely forgotten by the outside world. The Gullah families who survived rebuilt their lives on the island, but the larger Sea Islands economy had been broken.

That quiet lasted more than half a century.