Sullivan's Island Winter-Spring 2018-19

14 www.SullivansIslandMagazine.com | www.SullivansIslandHomes.com T here’s an “underground” club operating in the Lowcountry, but it’s nothing illegal. It has no membership fee or dues, and it’s open to everyone. In fact, it welcomes new members. Its name is the Battery Gadsden Cultural Center. It’s situated at a National Historic site on Sullivan’s Island. And it will always be underground – literally. Battery Gadsden Cultural Center is the latest iteration of a nonprofit established in 1992 by the island’s legendary Maryme Aiken “Make” Macmurphy to create “a museum of the civilian life of Sullivan’s Island,” as well as a workspace and showcase for artists, lecturers and musicians. But its roots in the history of South Carolina and America extend much deeper. Its greatest ancestor is Fort Moultrie, where colonials fought off a British attack from the sea in one of the most significant battles early in the Revolutionary War. The fort and its battlements remained a mainstay of the coastal defenses for the important Charleston Harbor until that focus shifted to the newly built Fort Sumter, which received the first cannon strikes of the Civil War. Yet Fort Moultrie had not yet yielded its role as a redoubt against foreign invaders. In the late 1800s, William C. Endicott, President Grover Cleveland’s secretary of war, established a new line of coastal defense, a set of bunkers below the surface protected by thick Preserving an Underground History Battery Gadsden Cultural Center By Bill Farley Photos by Thomas Runion.