Bernheim, German Settlements in Carolina (p. 99), points out how the busy distribution of the rose-colored reports of Purry doubtless also led to the German and Swiss settlement at Orangeburg, S. C., in 1735, the history of which he derives from the journals of the council of the province in the state archives, and from those church record-books, which are preserved. It is to Bernheim we must look for the best accounts of the other German settlements in different parts of the province.
In 1851 the Lutheran synod of South Carolina put the Rev. G. D. Bernheim in charge of its records, and in 1858 he began to collect the minutes of the synod of North Carolina, and to interest himself generally in the history of the German settlements of both States. From 1861 to 1864 he printed much of the material which he had gathered in the Southern Lutheran. He found that the writers in English of the histories of the Carolinas had largely neglected this part of the story, perhaps from unacquaintance with the tongue in which the records of the early German settlers are written. The settlements of these people at Newbern and Salem had not indeed been overlooked; but their plantations in the central and western parts of the State, comprising more than three fourths of the German population, had been neglected. In the histories of South Carolina the settlements of Purrysburg and Hard Labor Creek had alone been traced with attention. In 1872 Mr. Bernheim recast his material into a History of the German settlements and of the Lutheran church in North and South Carolina, from the earliest period [to 1850], and published it at Philadelphia. It may be supplemented by a little volume, The Moravians in North Carolina, by Rev. Levin T. Reichell, Salem, N. C. 1857.[809]
We find some assistance in fixing for this period the extent of the domination of the English Church in a map which accompanies David Humphreys’ Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, London, 1730, which is called “Map of the Province of Carolina, divided into its parishes, according to the latest accounts, 1730, by H. Moll, geographer.” It has a corner “map of the most improved parts of [South] Carolina,” which shows the parish churches and the English and Indian settlements. A fac-simile of this lesser map is annexed. George Howe’s History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, from 1685 to 1800, Columbia, S. C., 1870, is another local monograph of interest in the religious development of the province.[810]
INDIAN MAP, 1730.
In the Kohl collection (no. 220). The original is in the British Museum, describing the situation of the Indian tribes in the northwest parts of South Carolina, and drawn by an Indian chief on a deer-skin, and presented to Gov. Nicholson.
The Huguenot element in Carolina became an important one, and as early as 1737 these French founded in Charleston the “South Carolina Society,” a benevolent organization, which in 1837 celebrated its centennial, the memory of which is preserved in a descriptive pamphlet published at Charleston in that year, containing an oration by J. W. Toomer, and an appendix of historical documents. There is no considerable account yet published of these Carolina Huguenots, and the student must content himself with the scant narrative by Charles Weiss, as given in the translation of his book by H. W. Herbert, History of the French Protestant Refugees (New York, 1854), which has, in addition to the narrative in Book iv. on refugees in America, an appendix on American Huguenots, not, however, very skilfully arranged. There is a similar appendix by G. P. Disosway[811] at the close of Samuel Smiles’ Huguenots (New York, 1868); and briefer accounts in Mrs. H. F. S. Lee’s Huguenots in France and America (Cambridge, 1843, vol. ii. ch. 29), and in Reginald Lane Poole’s History of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (London, 1880).[812]
Professor Rivers contributed to Russell’s Magazine (Charleston, Sept., 1859) a paper on “The Carolina regiment in the expedition against St. Augustine in 1740.”