Miko and Me: It's Bew Fort Not Bow Fort

Beaufort South Carolina is located on Port Royal Island, one of the largest Sea Islands along the southeast Atlantic coast of the United States. It is one of only a handful of U.S. towns that has had its entire downtown designated a historic district by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Beaufort was one of the only Southern towns chosen to be occupied by Union troops, rather than destroyed. The story of how this came about is fascinating and even more impressive than the beautiful mansions that were built by the wealthy plantation owners before the Civil War.

Seven months after the Civil War started the battle of Port Royal occurred. The Port Royal Sound was guarded by two Confederate forts on opposite sides to the entrance to the sound. The Union sent down a fleet of gunships to secure the sound since it was a crucial supply point to the Confederacy. When the attack began, the ships sailed past one of the forts, shelling the fort as they passed by. They then turned around, sailed back past that fort, shelling it again. Around and around they went until five hours later, the fort was abandoned. When the Confederates in the other fort saw the Union flag flying on the first fort they abandoned their station and the Battle of Port Royal was finished.

When the plantation owners saw that the forts had fallen, they skedaddled as fast as they could leaving their mansions and plantations behind. The Union took over the town and declared that all 10,000 enslaved people were free in Beaufort County. This was two years before the Emancipation Proclamation where Lincoln unilaterally freed all enslaved peoples.

What to do with all of these people who were not self sufficient and could not read or write? The Union needed the plantations to be worked as they were rich in sea cotton. This was a ready made work force so the Union hired these newly free people to harvest the cotton and rice. Since they now had a paycheck, they started buying up the houses that all the plantation owners had left and were now in tax arrears. Northern teachers came down and set up schools, the most notable was Penn Center (the teachers mostly came from Pennsylvania).

This was called the Port Royal Experiment. Could formally enslaved people be helped to be upwardly mobile and self-sufficient? The Experiment was meant to be an example about how Reconstruction should work. It was successful and since Port Royal and Beaufort County were rather isolated (sea islands with no bridges), they were rather immune to the Jim Crow laws that flourished in the rest of the south.

Martin Luther King visited Penn Community Center five times between 1964 and 1967.
Here he worked on and drafted his “I Have a Dream” speech,
as well as plan and strategize the March on Washington.

I'm a sucker for factory tours and it was with a great deal of glee that I found the perfect factory tour of the Kazoodle Kazoo factory and museum. How could I pass this by? Kazoodle orders the plastic parts for the kazoos and with a very small work force manages to put together about 5,000 kazoos a day or about million kazoos a year. Rather mind boggling I would say. It is very much a manual process with not much automation involved. The kazoo's origins are rather murky but it's current form seems to have originated in the 1840's and became immensely popular. If they could hum then regular folk could make music. At the end of the tour, we each made our own kazoo. Such excitement!

The three pieces of a kazoo are put together and then slid in those little white boxes
on the table to be pressed together. The kazoo is now ready for printing and bagging