Color Hair Salon near Sullivan's Island, SC

SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. (WCBD) – This week, the Town of Sullivan’s Island introduced a new position centered around resilience and natural resources on the island.

“I grew up here in Charleston and happened to be born the year Hugo hit. And my family would take me out to the beach every summer, exactly here on Sullivan’s Island at Station 27. And I watched the land grow longer and longer every year and the trees get taller and taller and felt myself a contemporary here in these woods,” said Rebecca Fanning.

Fanning is the town’s very first Director of Resilience and Natural Resource Management. Her job is to oversee the preservation and protection of the natural resource she grew up enjoying, and the rest that make up the island.

The role comes as the Lowcountry continues to see an increase in frequency and severity of storms and floods, according to Fanning.

“My primary responsibilities will be to preserve and protect the amazing nature-based solutions that we already have and to increase the nature-based solutions that we’re able to work with in our town, in our back yards,” Fanning told News 2.

Town leaders said the position was formed as part of the town’s 10-year comprehensive plan.

“Part of that is also a response to the consent agreement of the maritime forest which involves removal of invasive species and so having a person whose job that is, whose sole purpose that is, to be responsible for the natural resources of the island, is very important,” said Town Councilman Gary Visser.

Fanning’s other duties include making decisions on tree cuttings, amending ordinances to improve resilience, applying for grants, and engaging the community with the maritime forest.

“Certainly, it’s important to preserve this maritime forest and other trees on the island because of all of the benefits that they provide us from shading our roadways to cleaning air of pollution. However, it also is just one of the things that makes this place so special and unique and why people love it so much,” Fanning shared.

The Lowcountry native said she received her master’s degree from the College of Charleston. She has experience working with local environmental organizations and has studied flooding and other ecological issues in the Piedmont region of the state.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - From West Ashley to Sullivan’s Island, businesses spent the day recuperating after heavy rains and strong winds caused them to temporarily lock their doors.

Many of the exterior windows at Hay Tire Pros, off Savannah Highway, shattered, and a large part of their ceiling collapsed on the inside.

Vice President Bill Sekula said that they have always expected severe storms to come through with being in Charleston, but that they have never had this much damage before.

“I guess it was like a microburst or something to that effect, but apparently it was raining harder than usual and then the windows started to buckle and snapped over. These windows on the side just kind of came apart and came out of the building,” Sekula said.

Sekula said glass from the windows was even in the back part of their building which is almost 30 yards away. They had to close the business for the day and return all of their customers’ vehicles. He said the incident happened during hours of operation as employees notified him at around 8 a.m.

The next-door business, Etto Leisure Cars, a golf cart dealer, also saw significant damage. Will Harton, chief executive officer, said that part of their awning was ripped off and hit their power box causing them to lose power.

“I said ‘Oh my goodness.’ You know, you live in Charleston long enough, you know a storm is going to happen. Usually, it’s a hurricane. It’s not a microburst like this, but we will be fine and we will move on from here,” Harton said.

He added that he’s glad that all of his employees are safe and that the building and golf carts can be fixed.

First Alert Chief Meteorologist Bill Walsh said the damage could have been from a potential microburst or straight-line wind, but the National Weather Service has not yet confirmed that.

The Co-Op Frosé and Eatery on Sullivan’s Island had around two feet of water inside their restaurant. Their staff members spent the day using buckets to help get rid of the water. They said they have had flooding in the past, but never anything over a foot, so this is the worst they’ve seen.

“This morning, we lifted everything off the floor because we were expecting rain and heavy floods, but we didn’t know it was going to get this bad. So, as we were lifting things off the floor, it started coming in through the back door. Next thing you know there is water all over the place and we started getting buckets and mops and throwing water out. We’ve been throwing water out for the past three and a half hours,” employee Havannah Malan said.

She said that they have had to get their floors redone three times, and she expects the business will have to get them redone a fourth time after Saturday’s flood.

The businesses said they hope to repair the damages quickly, so they can return to normal operation as soon as possible.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

While Irish culture might be celebrated this weekend in the form of green beer, Celtic music and a raucous good time, there are certainly many other ways the Emerald Isle has made its mark on Charleston.

In fact, it goes all the way back to one of the first settlers of South Carolina, for whom a nearby beloved island and popular beach town is named.

Florence O'Sullivan, who was an Irishman of the 1600s working for the British crown, is a notable fellow for quite a few reasons, at least from what we know of him via few surviving documents and an 1897 text called The Shaftesbury Papers that looks back on the founding of South Carolina as a proprietary colony.

Sullivan's Island is named after him, assumingly because he manned a cannon in the area where Fort Moultrie now sits that was directed at any approaching enemy ships during the earliest days of the colony. He was one of the first nonindigenous people to survey and settle in the Lowcountry, docking at Charles Towne Landing in 1670. But he actually never owned land on Sullivan's Island.

Local Charleston County Public Library historian and the voice behind the Charleston Time Machine podcast, Dr. Nic Butler, has done some extensive research on O'Sullivan, prompted by his own Irish heritage and a fascination for learning about South Carolina's past.

Sullivan's Islanders, also hungry for knowledge of their home's origins, have turned to Butler to shine a light on this enigmatic figure of local (and beyond) historical significance.

An Irishman under the British crown?

The colonization of a land already inhabited by Native Americans, who were then decimated by Europeans through war and disease, is part of Charleston's (and the United States') complicated history. But by looking at this past, Butler and other historians can better paint a true picture of how our state, and nation, came to be and how it has informed our modern-day society and culture.

When O'Sullivan comes into play, there are some interesting politics involved that speak to one particular point of tension: the Irish and British. The fact he was an Irishman working for the British crown is a fascinating and rare occasion of the times, Butler told The Post and Courier.

It is perhaps because of his status as an Irishman that he is portrayed so negatively by his peers in the documentation we do have.

"He was depicted as this weird guy… a very one-dimensional bad character," said Butler. "He was appointed surveyor general, deemed completely incompetent, and historians write him off, that he was an idiot, and an Irish idiot on top of that."

"Some of that may be true, but many South Carolina historians are looking at South Carolina from a very English perspective, and that makes sense because this was an English colony. But most Americans are not aware of the really intricate, subtle and meaningful distinctions between Ireland and England at that moment."

Ireland was a part of the British Isles and treated repressively by England. Not only were there religious differences (English Protestants very openly despised and subdued Irish Catholics — and that goes way back to the English Reformation in the 1500s), but there was a general mistrust due to English slave traders capturing Irish people and shipping them away to work in the British Empire being established at the time alongside enslaved Africans.

Indentured servants also worked for the British, receiving passage to these new lands and some payment in return; O'Sullivan helped the British recruit some such servants when he contracted with the Lord's Proprietors of Carolina to establish where we now live.

Getting into and out of a mess

Butler suggested that O'Sullivan was possibly born between 1630 and 1640 in Barbados or born in County Cork in Ireland and quickly moved to Barbados, perhaps ousted during the Irish Confederate Wars of 1640 and British Reconquest of Ireland, 1649-53.

He likely had poor Irish parents and spoke the native Gaeilge language, Butler said, and plausibly had no choice other than to use the British crown to advance his own life with the possibility of property and prosperity, despite its maltreatment of the Irish people.

"He was probably too poor to cling to the luxuries of principles," said Butler. "O’Sullivan likely held his tongue, took the king’s shilling to fight under the English flag and pushed against adversity to escape a bad situation."

The first records of him are in 1666 in Barbados, when he was a captain of an infantry unit seeking to recapture the English portion of St. Kitts from the French. He was shipwrecked during a hurricane and had to battle with French soldiers in the jungle for survival; he was then captured and spent nearly an entire year as a prisoner of war.

Somehow he paid a ransom for his release and was transported to England; in 1668, he was unemployed, penniless and in danger of being imprisoned for debt in London.

He submitted a petition to King Charles II asking for financial assistance, citing his imprisonment as a sacrifice for the crown; it was granted, along with a small catch that he must return to Barbados.

Then the Lord's Proprietors of Carolina appeared as a beacon of hope, recruiting for a new settlement in the wilderness of what would be known as Carolina. In the position of surveyor general, O'Sullivan would receive free passage and promise of land ownership in the new territory.

Charleston Scene

Settling Carolina

This is where the bad talk about O'Sullivan enters from his peers, as he begins surveying in the new settlement.

“O’Sullivan doth act very strangely and was a very dissentious troublesome young man in all particulars," one source shared.

Another complained that O’Sullivan “doth by his absurd language abuse the governor, counsel and country and by his rash and based dealings he hath caused everyone in the country almost to be his enemy.”

This "absurd language" might have been him speaking in the native Irish tongue, countered Butler. And perhaps he didn't get along with anyone because he wanted to scout out his land and then be left alone, finally escaping the British dominion that had almost entirely consumed his life and career.

Columbia

A few years later, O'Sullivan was replaced as survey general and commissioned as a captain in the nascent militia, where he likely made raids against neighboring Native tribes.

It was 1680 before he officially was granted parcels of land totaling 2,460 acres. The largest tract stretched from the northwest of Shem Creek to the southeast of McCants Drive and Rifle Range Road to Haddrell's Point northward to the vicinity of Venning Road. Another spanned Charleston Harbor to Home Farm Road in Mount Pleasant. And the smallest covered some of the Old Village.

Surprisingly, unlike his peers of the time, O'Sullivan sold most of this land to neighbors while others were expanding their territories.

“Florence O’Sullivan’s downsizing in the 1680s provides yet another example of his divergence from the contemporary norms," said Butler. "Perhaps he scorned the use of enslaved labor and cultivated far less acreage than his more affluent neighbors.”

While there is no record of a wife, O'Sullivan did have a daughter, Catherine, and withdrew to a more private life East of the Cooper, while likely manning a cannon as lookout on Sullivan's Island.

Irish resiliency

"While he might’ve just been a cantankerous, belligerent man, we can at least entertain the possibility that he was something far more interesting and sympathetic: a refugee from a broken country, a poor migrant searching for a home," said Butler. "Rather than seeking riches and possessions in the Carolina colony, perhaps he simply wanted to be left alone, free to express his own beliefs and opinions in the language of his ancestors."

This idea of Irish resiliency is one that Butler paints through O'Sullivan in an episode of his podcast on the subject.

Perhaps by considering O’Sullivan as a stoic Irishman struggling within an Anglo-centric framework, we might lift the veil shrouding his enigmatic story, he offered.

Joseph P. Kelly, director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston, notes that while O'Sullivan's story is a lesser-known one, there have been many Irish people since in the Lowcountry who have made a significant impact on society.

Take Simon Felix Gallagher, the first Irish Catholic professor at the College of Charleston, and one of the first we might associate with our modern definition of who the Irish are, said Kelly, like those behind the St. Patrick's Day parade.

The list goes on, but two organizations in particular stand out.

Today, we can look to the Hibernian Society as a melding of the Catholic and Protestant Irish. At its beginnings in 1801, it was truly a symbol for freedom of religion, a promise that had been made in the New World but not truly upheld.

Opinion

That, of course, changed with the separation of church and state in 1776, and the Hibernian Society sought to bring together Irish culture in its diverse forms that had since developed from the early days of the Carolinas.

The Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an entirely Catholic organization that had a presence in Charleston in the 1860s, sought to rebel against years of prejudice against Irish Catholics, fighting stereotyping and discrimination.

Both are still going strong today in Charleston, as local Irish culture lives on in its many forms. Perhaps we have O'Sullivan to thank for a small piece of that, a figure who defied norms, ruffled some feathers along the way and had a whole island named after him that he didn't even own.

There's something to think about next time you're walking the beach at Sullivan's Island. You might end up at Dunleavy's Pub for a Guinness and Reuben after.

Get a weekly list of tips on pop-ups, last minute tickets and little-known experiences hand-selected by our newsroom in your inbox each Thursday.

SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - Several Sullivan’s Island dog walkers and regulars are speaking up about their personal experiences with coyotes.

This comes a day after town officials reported five coyote-led attacks involving dogs within the month of August.

They say the wild animals has been approaching people, dogs and roaming open areas of the beach more often than usual.

The Jourdan family says they experienced a too-close encounter with a coyote over the weekend.

“They were out halfway to the water, from the dune, so middle of the beach. And they were attacked by coyotes,” Jourdan said.

Five-year-old Willie Nelson, the Jourdan family dog, was taken by two coyotes early Saturday morning while on a walk with a babysitter.

Jourdan says it happened in broad daylight and in the middle of the beach.

He adds the family was devastated by the loss of their “wonder dog.”

“I was trying to get closure for my family’s sake, for Willie, because we weren’t even there. Which was frustrating. I crawled on my belly for over four miles between stations 26 and 28,” Jourdan said.

The attack occurred at Station 27, a part of the beach several residents have called a “breeding ground” for coyote packs.

Officials with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources say the breed has been approaching people, dogs and roaming open areas of the beach more often.

They add that mid-summer and fall are peak active times for these animals, meaning it is when coyotes migrate to new spaces, feed and have young.

SCDNR officials say another reason for the increased interactions could be from them being opportunistic feeders, meaning they will be quick and take anything they need.

Others say they have been chased by coyotes in the past but escaped.

“We were walking in June when a coyote came out of the dunes and started chasing,” Sullivan’s regular Shelly Carson said. “I was able to chase it away, and it ran down the beach to chase a golden retriever.”

Now, they avoid the area altogether or take proactive measures to be able to walk safely.

“I’ve always known there are coyotes here,” Carson said. “Never seen one until this year. Really, March was the first time I had my first sighting and started carrying pepper spray on the beach. In June I started carrying a birdie alarm. And now I carry a stick with me too.”

Visitors are asking for help from officials to curb the problem.

“It’s close to our hearts, but the coyote system is unfortunately not something that is new, declining or lessened. Rather the opposite,” Jourdan said.

They ask for coyote population control, area management and listening to residential concerns.

Town officials say they do have systems in place to manage the problem, which include education, tracking, hazing and lethal control.

They ask anyone who experiences an encounter or sighting to report the problem immediately.

If you run into a coyote, you’re advised to react loudly, throw small sticks or cans or spray the animal with water.

For more information on coyotes along Sullivan’s Island, click here.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Jimmy Dye, founding partner and broker-in-charge of The Cassina Group, successfully represented the owners on the sale of 1702 Ion Avenue, a significant transaction for Sullivan's Island. The property, a stunning 5-bedroom, 3.5-bath, 7,344 square foot home, was sold for $9,000,000, marking a notable milestone for the island's real estate market.

, successfully represented the owners on the sale of 1702 Ion Avenue, a significant transaction for Sullivan's Island. The property, a stunning 5-bedroom, 3.5-bath, 7,344 square foot home, was sold for $9,000,000, marking a notable milestone for the island's real estate market.

Originally constructed as the Base Commandant's Quarters, this exquisitely preserved historic home holds a unique place in history as the largest and most elaborate surviving structure of offices at Fort Moultrie. Its significance was further accentuated during World War II when it became the residence of the chief of staff, George C. Marshall.

"I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to represent the sellers on this extraordinary property," said Jimmy Dye. "Its rich history and timeless elegance make it a truly one-of-a-kind home, and I am proud to have been involved in the sale."

The property's distinctive features include expansive wraparound porches, tin printed ceilings, multiple fireplaces, gracious rooms, 9-foot ceilings throughout, a renovated kitchen, and a private pool, among others. Its charm and historical significance were a draw for buyers, leading to the property going under contract a mere 7 days after being listed with Dye.

This sale not only underscores the enduring appeal of Sullivan's Island but also highlights Jimmy Dye's exceptional ability to navigate high-value transactions in the luxury real estate market. The Cassina Group has a dominant presence on Sullivan's Island, closing 2023 as the #1 firm for sales on the island.

For more information on The Cassina Group, please visit TheCassinaGroup.com.

About The Cassina Group

The Cassina Group is a boutique real estate brokerage with offices in Mount Pleasant, SC and Charleston, SC. The firm is managed by founding partners and brokers-in-charge, Jimmy Dye and Robertson Allen, and Owen Tyler, partner and managing broker. Recent awards include top honors from Charleston Magazine, Inc. 5000, T3 Sixty and SC Biz News. For more information, visit TheCassinaGroup.com or call 843-628-0008.

Media Contact

Simon Ashton, SIMS Agency, 1 8433219292, [email protected]

SOURCE The Cassina Group