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Updated: May 3, 2025
To urge the canoe up this narrow stream three miles and a half to the parent river Peedee, was a most trying ordeal. At times the boat would not move a hundred feet in five minutes, and often, as my strength seemed failing me, I caught the friendly branches of trees, and held on to keep the canoe from being whirled down the current towards the Waccamaw.
How he would have enjoyed the descent of this wild river from the swamp to the sea! He had left us for purer delights; but I could enjoy his "Walden" as though he still lived, and read of his studies of nature with ever-increasing interest. Swamps have their peculiar features. Those of the Waccamaw were indeed desolate, while the swamps of the St. Mary's were full of sunshine for the traveller.
Recrossing the Little Pedee, and avoiding Euhaney, he passed the Waccamaw at Greene's Ferry, and, retreating through the Neck, between that river and the sea, crossed Winyaw Bay, three miles in width, and, in this manner, arrived in Georgetown.
Weston and Colonel Benjamin Allston. The latter gentleman was a son of one of the governors of South Carolina. He kindly gave me a letter of introduction to Commodore Richard Lowndes, who lived near the coast. From the Peedee I passed through a cut in the marshes into the broad Waccamaw, and descended it to Winyah Bay. Georgetown is located between the mouths of the Peedee and Sampit rivers.
Hall, who was in charge of a turpentine distillery on my route. "It is twenty miles by the river to my friend Hall's," he said, "but in a straight line the place is just four miles from here." Such is the character of the Waccamaw, this most crooked of rivers. I had never been on so rapid and continuous a current.
He told me that the boundary-line between North and South Carolina crossed this swamp three and a half miles below Piraway Ferry, and that the first town on the river Waccamaw, in South Carolina, Conwayborough, was a distance of ninety miles by river and only thirty miles by land. There was but one bridge over the river, from its head to Conwayborough, and it was built by Mr.
Here I must give the reader an instance on the spot. We had just got ourselves well braced up again, by rest and high feeding, among the noble whigs of Waccamaw, when a likely young fellow at half speed drove up one morning to the house, and asked for general Marion. Marion went to the door. "Well, my son, what do you want with me?"
He then communicated to Greene the necessity of reinforcing him against his increasing enemies, and, in particular, of addressing himself to the movements of McNeill, as he supposed them to be directed, in part, against the country between the Waccamaw and the sea-coast, which had never been ravaged, and which, at this time, held abundance of provisions.
So totally destitute was he of that amiable sympathy which belongs to his nation, that, in sailing up Winyaw bay, and Waccamaw and Pedee rivers, he landed, and pillaged, and burnt every house he durst approach! Such was the style of his entry upon our afflicted state, and such the spirit of his doings throughout: for wherever he went, an unsparing destruction awaited upon his footsteps.
With a good-night to my host, and a sad farewell to the sea, I prepared myself for the morrow's journey. To reach my next point of embarkation a portage was necessary. Wilmington was twelve miles distant, and I reached the railroad station of that city with my canoe packed in a bed of corn-husks, on a one-horse dray, in time to take the evening train to Flemington, on Lake Waccamaw.
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