Relic Room exhibit focuses on SC’s Fort Motte

Late in the Revolutionary War, British forces headquartered in Charleston constructed a string of forts to to try to protect their lines of movement and supply to the Upstate. Fort Motte, in present Calhoun County, was one of those outposts, built in early 1781 above the banks of the Congaree River.

The fort consisted of the plantation house of widow Rebecca Motte, a fierce patriot and planter believed to be the richest woman in South Carolina. British troops seized the house and surrounded it with a heavy palisade of timbers, an earthwork parapet and a ditch.

But in May of that year, an American force under Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox) and Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee (father of Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee) lay siege to the fort. The British garrison of 184 men, after resisting for seven days, surrendered when the besieging force set the roof afire with flaming arrows.

“Rebecca Motte was a very staunch revolutionary and gave permission to have her house burned,” said Jim Legg, of the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. “Of course she was rich and had other houses.”

Legg is co-curator of “‘...make no Doubt we shall carry this post...’: The History and Archaeology of Fort Motte,” a new exhibit at the South Carolina Relic Room and Military Museum. It examines the siege of Fort Motte, as well as the excavation of the site and the artifacts uncovered.

The exhibit will be on display through October 2016 and is free with regular museum admission. It features a variety of American and British artifacts, most of which have never been on display, including weapon fragments, ammunition, pottery, buttons, coins, arrowheads and more.

The arrowheads in particular are fascinating, Legg said, because they are made of forged iron, unlike the stone arrowheads used by native Americans. They suggest that the besieging troops, which consisted of Lee’s regular Army Continentals and Marion’s South Carolina militia, forged the arrowheads specifically to set the fort ablaze.

“There’s no other explanation for their presence,” Legg said.

The fort’s capture was a significant episode in the 1781 American campaign, said co-curator Steven D. Smith, director of the institute.

“Combined with the British loss of Camden, the fall of Fort Motte ... signaled the beginning of the end of the British occupation of South Carolina during the American Revolution,” he said.

The exhibit boasts an extensive collection from the archaeological investigations at Fort Motte, as well as samples from two other sites related to the “War of the Posts” in the spring of 1781, including the Camden garrison and Fort Watson near Santee.

All of the material was gathered in the course of archaeological research between the 1960s and 2016, mostly work conducted by the institute. Legg and Smith have been conducting archaeological investigations at Fort Motte since 2004.

Nothing remains of the fort today except a monument erected on its site; however, the site is on private property and is not open to the public.

The S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, founded in 1896, is the oldest museum in Columbia and the second oldest in South Carolina. The museum focuses on South Carolina’s military history from the Revolutionary War to the present.

This story was originally published April 29, 2016 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Relic Room exhibit focuses on SC’s Fort Motte."