The State: New SC-NC Border Will Impact Some Residents

While not directly related to archaeology, The State newspaper had an interesting piece on the affects of the new border between North and South Carolina as a result of a soon to be finished survey. The survey is the first full survey since the original was completed 240 years ago. I thought the article might be of interest to those of us who have spent hours in the archives pieces together land documents in order to draw a fuller picture of what we were excavating.

New SC-NC Border Will Impact Some Residents

By ADAM BEAM
On May 24, 1772, William Moultrie took a break from surveying the South Carolina-North Carolina border to visit little Charlotte Town, which he described as having five or six houses, “very ordinary built of logs.”

Nearly 240 years later, Charlotte has a few more houses. But the passage of time and the developers who built those houses have cut down the trees that Moultrie and his crew blazed with axes to mark the border between the two Carolinas. So when homeowners along that border – and some tax collectors – asked state officials to point out where the boundary is, they couldn’t do it.

[...]

...South Carolina and North Carolina have been working quietly since 1994 on resurveying their border. To avoid having to get congressional approval of the border, which would cost more, the states had to retrace their original boundary from the 1700s. That sent researchers into South Carolina courthouses, looking for clues as to the original border – clues that led them to a 17-foot scroll stuffed in a drawer and an engraved stone in Greenville County that had not been seen in 150 years.

[...]

South Carolina’s entire border with North Carolina has been surveyed just once during its 349-year history. A series of surveys was conducted in pieces between 1735 and 1815, mapping disrupted by wars and a lack of money. Portions of the border have been surveyed two other times, including the 1905 survey, between North Carolina’s Scotland County and South Carolina’s Marlboro County, and a 1928 survey, between North Carolina’s Brunswick and Columbus counties and South Carolina’s Horry County.

In some surveys, particularly the later ones, surveyors left a trail of stone monuments, some of which have been rediscovered. But the majority of the work in the previous surveys was done by marking trees that since have disappeared.

“They probably weren’t thinking about 240 years from then,” Miller said.

[...]

You can read the entire article here.