The original circular boundary of the Town of Lincolnville outlines a new cultural heritage district to recognize the Charleston County community’s post-Civil War beginnings and protect the historic settlement from future growth.
The six-member Lincolnville Town Council recently approved the district to identify and manage new development and redevelopment to ensure it’s consistent with the town’s cultural and natural landscape.
Lincolnville Mayor Enoch Dickerson said the town faces pressures from development just as other tri-county communities. The region, he said, is flooded with “developers coming in and building houses, but the infrastructure is not there to keep up with the houses and traffic.”
The resolution is designed to manage growth and maintain the quality of life and identity in Lincolnville, a town of 1,150 residents, Dickerson said, “We feel it is very important to keep [our] history alive because of the struggle back in 1867 to create [Lincolnville] that mostly catered toward Blacks to give them a better quality of life.”
The history of people of African descent, he added, is under attack across the country. With the town’s cultural heritage district “we want our children to remember which way we came to create the quality of life they now enjoy,” he said.
With the new cultural heritage district, the Lincolnville Preservation & Historical Society will seek to have the town placed on the National Register of Historic Places, said Pernessa Seele, the society’s founding president.
Development has already encroached on the town’s Bible Sojourn Cemetery, she said. About three graves have been lost. The cultural heritage district, she explained, will prevent further destruction of the 2.2-acre burial grounds that was established in 1889.
“We are developing guidelines for the historical district just like Charleston and Summerville,” she said. The guidelines, which are expected to be completed by November, will meet criteria set by the U.S. Department of the Interior. It is too early, she said, to speculate on which guidelines might be included in the town’s preservation plan.
Last summer, Lincolnville was added to the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, managed by the National Parks Service’s effort to link sites and programs that tell the story of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.
The Rev. Richard Harvey Cain, pastor of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and six other AME church trustees, purchased 620 acres near Summerville after the war and sold lots to settlers who sought to escape racism in Charleston. In 1868, Cain was elected to the South Carolina Senate, and later he served two terms in the U.S. Congress.
Some original Lincolnville settlers included newly freed people from the sea islands. Seele’s great-grandmother Martha Seele, who was enslaved on James Island, settled in Lincolnville.
Residents who live in some of the community’s original homes will especially appreciate the preservation efforts, she said. New development outside the town, she explained, will not be affected, “but if you come into the historic district and decide to build, you’ll have to adhere to the guidelines for preservation.”
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