Seventeen-year-old Jack Gatlin, who took his first breaths as a less than 4-pound premature baby, is breathing new life into an old Hilton Head Island cemetery.
He has found 41 unmarked graves in the Zion Chapel of Ease Cemetery, and marked each one with a white, metallic cross.
It is part of his Eagle Scout project with the island’s Scouting America Troop 245.
But there’s a broader story here.
In his new search for bones that have rested beneath Lowcountry oaks since the late 1700s, Jack teaches us all a history lesson. It’s a lesson on the value of knowing our past, and how we might best teach it today.
Jack will be a breath of fresh air to many, as he is to me, in this era when legislatures want to handcuff history teachers and librarians in increasing skirmishes over what is fact and what is appropriate and who gets to decide it and what students are allowed to learn.
He’s got a good mind, and he’s using it well, away from this new wave of partisan meddling.
Jack was 8 when his grandmother, Angie Greenfield, took him to one of the docent-led tours at the Zion Chapel of Ease historic site on William Hilton Parkway at Folly Field Road. He was 9 when he became a docent himself.
Ancient grave markers for the planter elites of Hilton Head have for generations captured the imagination of islanders and visitors. The Baynard Mausoleum that dates to 1846 at one time contained iron caskets that had little windows to see within the spooky remains of a long-lost era.
Jack still serves as a docent at other historic sites owned or operated by the Heritage Library, the island’s nonprofit history and ancestry research center. And he does reenactments across the state with the 2nd South Carolina Regiment, 1775-1780.
He traces his fascination with the American Revolution to Erin Richter, his third-grade teacher at the Hilton Head Elementary School for the Creative Arts.
“She just made it real,” he said. “Ever since then, I’ve been pretty much utterly fascinated by that era of our country’s history. It is the defining moment of what made our country. It’s what made us a country. It’s what put us on the world’s stage.”
But he said it gets little attention compared to the Civil War, even though at our nation’s bicentennial, a state commission used the rallying cry “Battleground of Freedom” because of the 168 battles and skirmishes of the American Revolution fought on South Carolina soil.
As a child, Jack played the role of Charles Davant Jr., who was an island child in 1781 when his father was mortally wounded near the cemetery in an ambush while returning from a patrol with the patriot militia.
Davant was killed by Tories from Daufuskie Island.
“Hilton Head has a pretty interesting chapter in the American Revolution in how we were kind of almost having a war with Daufuskie,” Jack said.
As he grew, Jack moved into the role of the senior Davant. That story has the wounded Davant making it back to his Two Oaks Plantation on what is now Leg-O-Mutton Road, and dramatically falling dead into his wife’s arms with his 4-year-old son watching.
Work to recognize the then-overgrown site’s place in history began in the 1950s. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The oldest tombstones in the cemetery now are for Davants, but the wooden chapel is long gone.
The Heritage Library is trying to tell its stories, and Jack’s project to mark where more of the bodies are buried is a help, said executive director Barbara Catenaci.
A private grant funded the professional whose ground-penetrating radar identified the unmarked graves.
“We will never know who they are, but we have paid them respect,” Catenaci said.
The project may pay dividends for Jack, too. The Hilton Head Island High School senior wants to become a history teacher, one who prefers stories of people to endless recitations of dates and wars.
“I’m not interested in the weapon, but who was carrying it,” he said. “I’m interested in the people. We are story-telling animals. History is the greatest story ever told. You have to tell it as a story.”
David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@gmail.com.
