Chapel of Ease – St. Helena Island, South Carolina

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South Carolina  |  SC Picture Project  |  Beaufort County Photos  |  Chapel of Ease

These tabby walls are all that remain of an old chapel-of-ease on St. Helena Island. The chapel was built in the mid-1700s. During South Carolina’s colonial era, plantations on St. Helena Island grew indigo and later, sea-island cotton.

The primary parish church in Beaufort was too far away for planters and their families to attend church regularly, so the Anglican Church established this “chapel of ease” to make it easy for them to go to church.

The US Army gained control of South Carolina’s sea islands early in the Civil War. Plantation owners were forced to abandon their land, leaving their slaves behind. The slaves found themselves in legal limbo – no longer enslaved, but not yet officially free.

Northern missionaries and teachers came south and with support from the federal government, established what came to be known as the Port Royal Experiment – the country’s earliest efforts to educate and train former slaves to work outside of the institution of slavery.

After the Civil War, the church continued to be used as an outpost by a variety of freedmen’s groups. A forest fire destroyed the building in 1886 and it was never repaired. The ruins were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

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