Chimney Sweep in Lincolnville, SC

As the world focuses on Black History Month during February, every day in Lincolnville is a celebration of black excellence and history. The parcels of land that sit on the border of Charleston and Dorchester counties as the nucleus of surrounding Summerville and Ladson subdivisions are an extraordinary gem of American history.

Like the pristine waters of the ebbing and flowing creeks from the Ashley River through Lincolnville, the town’s journey travels through many eras of American history. The Charleston-Hamburg Railway was the world’s longest track of rail (136 miles) when it was completed in 1833. The railway ran through Pump Pond, which would be renamed “Lincolnville” by Bishop Richard Harvey Cain 34 years later. On Oct. 3, 1832, these rail tracks carried the first steam engine locomotive as well as the first passenger train in America. The train ran from Line Street in Charleston to Summerville. The history of the innovative pre-Civil War railway system can be heard thundering through Lincolnville four times daily 191 years later.

The Charleston-Hamburg Railway was central to the growth of South Carolina’s economy in the 1800s, and vital transportation for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. No doubt the builders of these tracks and locomotive operators were enslaved men who perhaps lay at rest in Lincolnville’s historic cemeteries, Bible Sojourn and Hamburg cemeteries.

Lincolnville was founded in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended and the beginning of the Reconstruction era, and was incorporated in 1887, making it one of the oldest African American towns in South Carolina. The town’s founder, Bishop Cain, was among the first African Americans from South Carolina elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1872.

It would be 98 years later, during the civil rights era in 1970, when Herbert U. Fielding became the first African American elected to the S.C. House of Representative since the Reconstruction era. Fielding, a son of Julius and Sadie Fielding, spent many of his childhood days at his family home in Lincolnville where his father, founder of Fielding Home for Funerals in Charleston, had purchased land and built a home. Located on the corner of Dunmeyer Hill Road and Lincoln Avenue (across from the Community Garden), the Fielding residence was the gathering place for many strategic meetings hosted by Herbert Fielding for S.C. Democratic Party members. Among them was a young James E. Clyburn, who is now assistant Democratic leader in the U.S. House.

One of the many crown jewels of history in Lincolnville is the Rosenwald School, now operating as the Charles Ross Municipal Building at 141 W. Broad Street. Julius Rosenwald, son of a German immigrant who rose to become president of Sears & Roebuck in 1908, partnered with his friend Booker T. Washington, founding president of Tuskegee University, to build schools throughout the South for African American children.

During the Jim Crow era, education was not provided for African American children in the rural South. Rosenwald provided funds for more than 5,357 school buildings, including Lincolnville Elementary School, which was built in 1923.

Black history is Lincolnville. For more information, visit lincolnvillesc.org.

Pernessa C. Seele founded the Lincolnville Preservation & Historical Society and works to raise awareness about the town’s unique history.

LINCOLNVILLE — This small town may be South Carolina’s least understood, most unique historical place. Its relative anonymity stems partly from its tucked-away site along railroad lines where Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties meet up, partly from its small size, and partly from its origins during one of the most tumultuous chapters of the state’s history, Reconstruction.

The town, which I’m guessing is the state’s only public place named in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, didn’t merit an entry in the South Carolina Encyclopedia — not even in the index. Many people who live in the Charleston region don’t even know where it is.

But Pernessa Seele, whose ancestors helped found this incorporated African American town and who grew up and went to school and church here before moving away for work, hopes to change that. She seems uniquely positioned to do so. Her professional experience includes having founded and run The Balm in Gilead Inc., a 33-year-old Virginia-based nonprofit that works with faith communities in the United States and in the United Republic of Tanzania in East Africa to reduce health disparities.

“Lincolnville and its history live in me. It’s in my blood,” she says. “Lincolnville has just been sitting here waiting for me to come back and get busy.”

And she has. She still hasn’t moved back full time, but she has founded the Lincolnville Preservation & Historical Society and printed brochures and newsletters to share the town’s story. She has reached out to the Clemson’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation for help documenting and assessing the town’s Bible Sojourn Cemetery and one of its most curious surviving buildings. And she has plans for a historical park as well as walking and biking trails that would make the town’s past more accessible to present eyes.

While many people driving along U.S. Highway 78 south of Summerville might notice a Lincolnville town limits sign, it’s hard for passing motorists to appreciate what’s here, particularly beyond the town hall at 141 W. Broad St. (originally the 19th-century Williams Graded School, a Rosenwald School) that was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 but suffered a severe fire two years later. It was rebuilt as the Town Hall in honor of former longtime Mayor Charles Ross.

The town’s story began just two years after the end of the Civil War when U.S. Rep. and Emanuel AME pastor Richard Cain led a group of seven black Charleston men, all of whom were likely frustrated with their treatment in the city, to find a place for a new community they could call their own. They found a site along the train line about 20 miles north of Charleston and spent $1,000 to buy 620 acres from the railroad. The tract was known as “Pump Pond” and formed a perfect circle around the stop where the train’s engineer could get fresh water.

Unlike many other 19th century settlement communities, Lincolnville incorporated in 1889 and survives to this day as a local government still led largely by African Americans, many descended from the town’s early generations.

In that sense, it’s unique. The historic African American town of Atlantic Beach began in the 1930s but didn’t incorporate until a year after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts had passed. Maryville, just two miles west of the Charleston peninsula, was incorporated in 1886 but was dissolved in 1936. Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island began during the Civil War as a military mission and evolved into a self-governed community of formerly enslaved people, but it never incorporated, and it slowly faded after the war.

Lincolnville’s past can still be read on the landscape, if you know where to look — not unlike the historic cornerstone on Wesley Methodist Church, which notes its 1887 beginnings but which also is obscured by lattice placed around the base.

Not many historic-looking buildings survive in Lincolnville, but one that does is the town’s 1933 jail, a tiny stucco structure off Smith Street with two cryptlike cells. Clemson students plan to study its condition and recommend preservation steps.

Seele’s efforts scored a recent success, with the National Park Service adding the town to the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, a series of national places that related to the 1861-1900 Reconstruction Era, “one of the most fascinating and misunderstood periods in American History,” in the agency’s words.

Ultimately, Seele hopes Lincolnville will become a tourism destination for all those coming to Charleston interested in African American history. Until it does, expect her to remain busy trying to make it so.

“I tell folks when I was 17, I was running away from my mom’s house,” she says, “and now I’m running back.”

It’s not every day that a whole town gets added to a national historic network, but that’s what happened Tuesday for Lincolnville, a town of about 2,500 people on the edge of Charleston County near Summerville.

The National Park Service announced Tuesday that Lincolnville and four other sites were new additions to the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, a group of sites largely centered on South Carolina that help to tell the story of American Reconstruction after the Civil War. It’s part of an effort established in 2019 to create the Reconstruction Era National Historic Park in Beaufort.

Lincolnville’s part of the Reconstruction story is key to understanding the transformation that the United States underwent as newly freed African Americans became integrated into the country’s social, political, economic and labor systems.

Lincolnville, the Park Service said in a news release, is a “freedmen’s town founded in 1867 by seven African American men who purchased 620 acres to create a community of homes, churches and schools for African American people, primarily of Gullah Geechee heritage, who had migrated from the Sea Islands.”

Some of the descendents of original settlers still live today in the small town “among original structures, cemeteries and live oak trees, actively preserving their rich Gullah Geechee heritage and celebrating their ancestors’ ability to overcome adversity during Reconstruction to found Lincolnville.”

“These sites tell critical stories related to the Reconstruction Era,” said Reconstruction Era National Historical Park Superintendent Scott Teodorski in the release. “They join sites from across the country that focus on this important period in our history. We are pleased to welcome these new sites to the network and work with them to share their stories.”

The Rev. Richard Cain (1825-1887), a major Reconstruction leader who pastored Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church after the war, is credited with leading the effort to found Lincolnville. He later was elected to the state Senate in 1868 and served two terms in the U.S. Congress.

“He also purchased more than 500 acres of land about 25 miles north of Charleston and sold lots to African Americans,” according to “We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel” by Herb Frazier, Bernard Powers and Marjory Wentworth. “These initial sales were the basis for the settlement of Lincolnville, which Cain planned to become an all-black town in which the residents could show their capacity for discipline, order and prosperity.”

About half of Lincolnville’s residents today are Black, according to Census Reporter.

Three other South Carolina sites added to the Reconstruction network Tuesday were Redcliffe Plantation State Historic Site in Aiken County; Randolph Cemetery in Columbia; and the Schofield Normal and Industrial School in Aiken. Also added was the D.C. Legacy Project: Barry Farm-Hillsdale in southeast Washington, D.C.

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