Tree Servicein Johns Island, SC

South Carolina has 35 barrier islands (also called sea islands,) more than any other state except Florida. Barrier islands run parallel to the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and shield the mainland from the brunt of sea storms. The islands are home to wide sandy beaches, sea grass beds, vegetated uplands, and Lowcountry marshes.

What Is the Largest Island in South Carolina?

At 84 square miles in area, St. Johns is the largest Island in South Carolina. Located in Charleston County, it’s the fourth largest island on the East Coast. Situated between the city of Charleston and the barrier island beaches that border the Atlantic Coast, a portion of the island is located within the city limits of Charleston.

Technically an island, yet not bordered by the open sea, the Stono and Kiawah Rivers are what separates Johns Island from its border islands and the mainland.

What Is the History of Johns Island?

Colonialists arrived on Johns Island from English settlements in the Caribbean and named it after Saint John Parish in Barbados. However, Native American tribes, including the Stono, Bohicket, and Kiawah Indians, were already living on the island.

The settlers brought the crop, indigo, from Barbados and cultivated it in the Lowcountry of Johns Island. By the mid-1700s, indigo became the main export for the island. A popular bright blue dye, indigo grown on Johns Island was commonly sold to England. During the height of indigo production, the Stono Rebellion occurred. The settlers relied on slaves to grow and produce their crops. In 1739, a group of slaves on Johns Island rebelled and attempted to escape to Florida, which was under the rule of the Spanish at the time.

However, the uprising was unsuccessful and plantation owners captured the slaves before they could reach freedom. During the Revolutionary War, the British market for indigo was disrupted, and England began to turn to India for its indigo supply. By the 1800s, indigo was no longer listed as a crop for Johns Island.

Johns Island has been the site of several important historical events. Occupied by British troops during the Revolutionary War, Johns Island also endured the Battle of Bloody Bridge during the Civil War. Today, visitors can view the historical site marking the Civil War battle at the Burdens Causeway.

Currently, Johns Island has a population of 21,500 and growing. The nearness of downtown Charleston, the beautiful scenery of the Lowcountry, and the nearby sandy beaches of the barrier islands make Johns Island a popular spot for new development.

What Do People Do at Johns Island?

Today, Johns Island is known for local farmers’ markets, historical parks, and towering oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Although new developments are cropping up on the island, about 75% of the island remains rural with agricultural and horse farms, large acreage estates, and waterfront communities. Just a few miles south is the resort community of Kiawah Island.

One of the main attractions on Johns Island is the Angel Oak, a live oak tree that is thought to be the largest living oak tree east of the Mississippi River. Estimated to be around 400 years old, it’s the oldest tree in South Carolina. The massive tree is 65 feet tall and 25.5 feet around. Further, it provides shade to a staggering 17,000 square foot area. Surrounding the tree is a small park with a visitor’s center and a gift shop.

Another popular activity on the island is shopping at the Freshfields Village, an open-air shopping center with over 30 shops, numerous restaurants, and a boutique hotel.

The Goatery at Kiawah River is a small artisan goat dairy farm specializing in goat cheese and soaps. The farm offers private tours, classes for children, and goat yoga. The farm also doubles as a goat sanctuary, offering many goats a forever home.

Where Is Johns Island on a Map?

Johns Island is in between Charleston and the barrier islands. It’s surrounded by Kiawah, Seabrook, Wadmalaw, Edisto, James, and Folly Islands. The Stono and Kiawah Rivers separate Johns Island from the mainland and the barrier islands.

What Animals Live on Johns Island?

Johns Island is teeming with wildlife. Although there are many homes, shops, and restaurants on the island, much of the land remains undeveloped, providing habitat for numerous species. On the island, it’s common to see deer, raccoons, coyotes, bobcats, otters, wild hogs, and even alligators.

The rivers and marshes on the island are abundant with oysters, trout, black sea bass, bluefish, and bottlenose dolphins. Birds found in the area include many species such as osprey, bald eagles, wild turkeys, and egrets.

There’s a new red light on Maybank Highway, and new Charleston County Councilman Joe Boykin hears about it. Every. Single. Day.

Because, make no mistake, traffic is the undisputed heavyweight chokepoint of contention on Johns Island.

“A lot of folks are upset; they can’t get on and off the island,” Boykin says. “You think it’s bad now — there are 1,300 homes planned or under construction around there. Wait ’til all that drops.”

Yep, that’s the thing — the island can’t wait any longer for traffic relief. Residents have been waiting, largely in idling cars, for years now.

Johns Island’s chronic congestion — and dysfunction — has spread over time, and overwhelms James Island and West Ashley with tens of thousands of commuters daily. Sometimes the drive-by traffic shuts down the grid west of the Ashley River.

See: Savannah Highway and Main Road, Interstate 526 and Sam Rittenberg, Maybank and Folly Road, et al.

There are various solutions to this problem planned, but land disputes, jurisdictional spats, environmental concerns, the threat of lawsuits and rising construction costs have slowed many of those projects. It’s a mess.

Of course, politics is behind some of the paralysis. Nobody can agree on anything these days, especially what needs to be done about Johns Island growth … and its infrastructure.

It’s really about an island with an exploding population that has exactly two routes on and off it. You could call that poor planning, but plans for a third route have been in the works for years. But that’s another story.

So here we are.

There is some reason for hope, however. On Thursday, county and city traffic engineers — along with Boykin, County Council Vice Chairwoman Jenny Honeycutt and City Councilman Karl Brady — sat down in Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg’s office to talk about more collaboration between the two local governments to get various road projects moving.

Which is a good sign, because in the past the two haven’t always seen eye to eye.

At Boykin’s request, County Council recently pledged to work more closely with the city on Johns Island traffic.

And a unanimous vote from a City Council committee last week affirmed its commitment to the same.

Most significantly, City Council gave initial consent to a fourth lane to Maybank Highway between River Road and the bridge to James Island. Right now, much of that stretch is restricted to a single outbound lane that at times is ridiculously overwhelmed.

The City Council resolution is notable because, years ago, Charleston held up county plans to widen Maybank — largely because officials didn’t want to sacrifice trees for additional lanes.

But in the past two years, the traffic count on Maybank has gone up by 6,000 cars per day, to a new high of more than 35,000. For comparison, about 45,000 cross the Wappoo bridge.

The agreement to widen Maybank Highway is a good start, because it’ll ease the bottleneck that builds up ahead of the bridge to James Island. Boykin says if that can be done without sacrificing any trees, it will be.

That’s a big deal but, frankly, just having the city and county in accord is bigger.

“I believe we have a newfound, unprecedented level of cooperation and commitment to improving the traffic at River and Maybank,” Tecklenburg says. “We’re looking at temporary and long-term ways to get two lanes from River Road to the bridge. We’re going to update the traffic plan, which should take about a month. We’re going to do whatever the Department of Transportation will allow.”

Because, remember, the state technically owns all these roads.

Commute times don’t yet reflect it, but there’s already some movement.

The county’s northern pitchfork is under construction — that new traffic signal at Maybank and Fenwick Hall Allee (the one Boykin is getting calls about) is in place because that’s where the pitchfork will meet the highway.

The problem has been the light’s timing. As any traffic engineer will tell you, when a road is that hopelessly over capacity, it’s difficult to sync it.

The next challenge will be building the southern pitchfork, which Boykin says is key to alleviating congestion on that side of the island. And it’s needed whether or not 526 gets finished.

That’s one thing the county and city, which secured land for the southern leg a few years back, will study in the coming months.

As Boykin and Tecklenburg note, the tines of the pitchfork need to align because yet another traffic light on that stretch of Maybank is simply not an option.

Neither is allowing Johns Island’s congestion to fester any longer.

There are several powerful reasons why Seabrook Island Town Council should reject a proposed annexation that would pave the way for a new boat dock, private clubhouse, boathouse, pool house and 10 rental cottages near the town’s northern limits.

The additional boat and car traffic would create more congestion on Betsy Kerrison Parkway in particular and Johns Island in general, as well as more pollution to the otherwise pristine Bohicket Creek. But the biggest reason Town Council should reject the 18-acre annexation is the dangerous precedent it would set, a precedent that would erode the rural character of southern Johns Island.

Decades ago, local governments, led by the city of Charleston and Charleston County, agreed on an urban growth boundary across Johns Island and other areas. The big idea was to ensure their zoning and other policies were synchronized to allow suburban development to continue to spread, but only up to a point, beyond which the existing rural nature would be preserved. The boundary has generally worked well, but as with so much other conservation work, it needs to be embraced and reaffirmed by each new generation.

Seabrook Island’s potential move would mark one of the first and most dramatic annexations by a municipality into the rural portion of the island; if it succeeds, it almost assuredly wouldn’t be the last, and it could hasten the unraveling of the boundary line — and increase development pressures on the shrinking amount of land on the rural side of the boundary.

Robby Maynor of the Coastal Conservation League agrees that annexing and rezoning this property on the rural side of the urban growth boundary would set a disastrous precedent on the county’s Sea Islands and could lead to annexation battles such as those that are playing out along the most rural stretches of the upper Ashley River, whose rural historic district remains in jeopardy from encroaching homes, stores and the traffic they bring. Approving the marina project would be “like kicking an anthill and hoping you don’t get bit,” he says.

The case that the property’s owner and other supporters have made for the annexation is that it would give Seabrook Island future control of the site and limit future development there, according to reporter Warren Wise. But the proposal appears to us as designed to facilitate development, not to curb it. Annexing the site, which is next to Bohicket Marina, would allow it to tie into the town’s sewer system.

Unfortunately, Seabrook Island’s Planning Commission has recommended annexing the site and rezoning it for a mixed-used development. We urge Town Council members to reject that move when they consider the matter Aug. 22.

As Mr. Wise noted, the project is a scaled-down version of a 30-year-old Andell Harbor project that state environmental regulators rightly and mercifully rejected. While this is smaller, with only about 4 acres of development near the creek and the rest set aside for open space, it still would represent an unwelcome and disturbing encroachment into the rural area between the barrier islands of Kiawah and Seabrook and the suburban growth from the city of Charleston.

Last year, we urged elected officials, neighborhood leaders and planners with Charleston County and the two beach towns to come up with a mutually agreed-upon overlay for their shared area at the southern tip of Johns Island. That overlay should guide future development toward the kinds of uses — and the sizes and scale — residents of all three jurisdictions would most like to see, and help address growing real estate pressures in a way residents prefer. We repeat the call for regional cooperation, and Seabrook Island’s rejection of this annexation would be an important first step.

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Clemson University’s Historic Preservation program is launching the Johns Island Preservation Field School. The summer field school program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Vernacular Architecture Forum focuses on researching and documenting late 19th and early 20th century public buildings and their role within the African American community on Johns Island, SC.

Alongside Clemson’s Historic Preservation program, the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, the Progressive Club and the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission (GGCHCC) are hosting this three-week program—the field school runs from May 22 to June 9.

“The field school brings together African American studies, public history, history, historic preservation and other thinking and skills, all surrounding important and story-laden historic places and the people associated with these built environments,” explained Amalia Leifeste, associate professor of historic preservation at Clemson University.

The program includes workshops by historic preservation faculty, history faculty, archivist, scholars and local community educators, teaching participants about life in the Johns Island community during the Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Civil Rights periods. Through hands-on training in historic preservation documentation and research methods, including archival research, measured drawing, photography, laser scanning, photogrammetry and GIS, participants will learn how to document the physical fabric and cultural narratives associated with the historic buildings and landscapes on Johns Island.

“This is the kind of work that can bring new people into the field of historic preservation and assists in continuing to evolve the field to include buildings and people not always centered in historic conversations,” Leifeste said.

Johns Island residents will also be encouraged to apply to the second year of the field school (Summer of 2024), and they will be given priority along with applicants demonstrating historic or cultural ties to Johns Island or the broader Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Residents will also be invited to participate in one-day workshops with topics including reading buildings with Jobie Hill. Community members will be compensated for their time in attending these workshops.

Public Preservation Events

Johns Island Preservation Field School also offers three public events during its three-week tenure on the island. The public is invited to panel discussions, student presentations and a preservation advocacy discussion. Following are the events that are open to the public:

Step inside the big top tent during Cirque Ma’Ceo to witness an emotionally charged artistic experience featuring circus performers and horses from around the world. With misty red lighting, the tent offers an intimate setting where every seat allows for breathtaking access to the one-of-a-kind performance which promises to transport you back in time to the “roots of Gypsy heritage,” according to the show’s website. This 90-minute show offers fire dancers, mesmerizing acrobatic acts, dance and equestrian displays.

Cirque Ma’Ceo is suitable for all ages and offers five performances March 24-26 at Johns Island County Park.

The show has been described as an equine version of the famous Cirque du Soleil. The theatrical, equestrian-themed circus show tells a story through acrobatics, dance and aerial performance — all to the acoustic beats of Spanish guitar. Cirque Ma’Ceo is based out of Sarasota, Fla., and has performed in Las Vegas, Nev., Honolulu, Hawaii, and all over Canada.

Rachel Gauthier, media relations for Cirque Ma’Ceo, said the show blends many cultures. It was created in 2005 by director Olissio Zoppe, a ninth-generation descendent of the historical Italian family that created equine-based theatrical-style circus performance, the Zoppe and Zamperla family. Zoppe himself has performed in the circus since childhood.

“He was born in the circus — he’s been doing this all his life, and now he’s created his own show,” Gauthier said. “We’re performing and traveling all across the United States doing this amazing show, but this will be our first time in Charleston.

“The show features aerialists, fire dancers and amazing tightrope acts. We have this really dreamy act of featuring this black Friesian stallion horse. The performer rides the horse as an aerialist takes flight over him with red ribbon silks. It’s a really beautiful act.”

Those who are interested in horses will enjoy seeing many different and exotic breeds, including Friesian Percherons, Mustang quarter horses, miniature horses and more. The show combines elements of contemporary circus, as seen in Cirque du Soleil, along with more traditional circus elements.

“Zoppe comes from a more traditional style of circus: the big top tent with the ringmaster announcing act after act — the traditional circus acts that you would see. This show is a blend of both worlds because he comes from a traditional circus family, but in his work he has touched on the contemporary more theatrical side of circus too. He was inspired to create his own show that had this traditional feeling to it, but brings a contemporary style of circus as well,” Gauthier said.

General admission tickets are $35 and can be purchased here.

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