Discover Goose Creek: Cabin Churches Near the Bridge

The following is a passage from The Goose Creek Bridge, Gateway to Sacred Places by Michael Heitzler. 

The avenues to the nearby plantation settlements intersected the main road near the bridge. Although Schenckingh’s noxious cow path also originated near the bridge, the proximate convergence of the byways, paths and avenues consigned that busy place as the preferred center of the community. There, the dynamic and durable institutions of the emerging British Empire in North America appeared when energetic families erected a log church, cemetery, parsonage and school.

The same year Edward Hyrne embarked upon his tragic epic at Medway, the first minister to Goose Creek, Reverend William Corben arrived at the cabin church. By the time Reverend Samuel Thomas replaced Corben two years hence (1702), Goose Creek was a dynamic Anglican center and the largest and most populated Carolina community after Charleston. Reverend Thomas met his rugged and “ignorant but well inclined,” souls in his small log prayer house across the road from Middleton’s avenue of stripling oaks. From that perspective, the learned minister watched herds of cattle, packhorse-
peddlers, burden men and native slaves stream daily within his vista. Already a human bouillabaisse; multiple European, African and Native ethnicities characterized the people, and a palette of accents from every European and Caribbean city with a seaport, painted the countryside, creating a unique demography that surprised the minister from London, who was stunned by the “…heathen slaves in this parish… [who] come constantly to Church."

Want to learn more about Goose Creek? The book is available for sale on the St. James, Goose Creek Chapel of Ease website.