04/27/2019
Old Sheldon Church Ruins - The Old Sheldon Church Ruins is a historic site located in northern Beaufort County, South Carolina, approximately 17 miles north of Beaufort in the Sheldon area. the building was originally known as Prince William's Parish Church. The church was built as a chapel of ease in the English Georgian style, using the Roman Tuscan or Doric order, between 1745 and 1753.
The traditional understanding is that Prince William's was burned by the British in 1779 during the Revolutionary War, rebuilt in 1826, and then burned again in 1865 during the Civil War:
The official South Carolina report on the "Destruction of Churches and Church Property," after the War Between the States, described Sheldon's second burning: "All that was combustible was consumed ..., its massive walls survive the last as they did the former conflagration," Bishop Thomas wrote, "Exactly as it happened a hundred years before in 1779, when General Prevost, marching from Savannah into South Carolina burned the Church, so now in February 1865, General Sherman marching from Georgia into South Carolina, burned it a second time."
However, an alternative view has more recently come to light. In a letter dated February 3, 1866, Miton Leverett wrote that "Sheldon Church not burn't. Just torn up in the inside, but can be repaired." In this view, the inside of the church was apparently gutted to reuse materials to rebuild homes burnt by Sherman's army.
