By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, and I’m walking Port Royal’s waterfront looking for bones. This morning I’m with Col. Ben Leitzel (USAF, ret.) and we’re walking along the edge of the marsh — it’s low tide — near the site where a human skull was found about a year ago.
Col. Leitzel was a Bomber/Weapons Systems Officer on a B1 Bomber and taught military planning at the Army’s War College in Carlisle, Pa. Now he is on the Board at the Historic Port Royal Foundation. Several days ago he told me a skull, perhaps two skulls, had been found embedded in a Port Royal bluff in January of 2025.
Thereafter Leitzel found two more bones, both identified as human, near that same location.
The skull was then given to the Port Royal Police Department and they gave it to the Beaufort County Coroner’s Office who commented that the fragmented, two-piece skull might actually be “two skulls.”
I am intrigued because Port Royal lore says that somewhere in Town there was a make-do cemetery where the dead — victims of a Yellow Fever epidemic — were hastily buried.
“Kids have been finding bones along this bluff for 60 years,” Leitzel says. “Some say they are connected to the epidemic in 1877; others say the bodies were sailors who died from yellow fever on a passing boat. It could have been slaves buried in a plantation cemetery. Or, possibly, Native American bones.”
What we know for sure was that there was an outbreak of yellow fever in Port Royal in 1877. We know a lot about that epidemic because a doctor, Manning Simons, came down to Port Royal and tended to the sick and dying.
Dr. Simons’ made notes of that visit.
“Port Royal is not a city; it is a scattering, and, under the circumstances in which we saw it, (an) unhappy looking country village, located on the southeasterly extremity of Beaufort Island …”
“The town and its surroundings were but sparingly shaded with trees, and such as were there, were small and scattered oaks. Whether this absence of trees was the work of the axe or to original failure of growth, we did not discover, but are inclined to attribute it to the latter cause.”
“On the water front are located the extensive warehouses and wharves of the Port Royal Railroad, and it is within a stone’s throw of these structures that the main portion of the Town is clustered.”
Dr. Simons then gets round to the disease.
Simons cites the Town’s census (231); the total number of afflicted patients (183); and the total who died (25). It is interesting to note that of those 25 deaths, 24 were white people, 1 was “colored.”
Simons also made notes about the progress of the disease — from the first, forbidding chills to 105 degree fever to death (for some).
He describes the color of their vomit, black; the color of their skin, mahogany; and he spends a lot of time trying to determine which particular ship may have brought the pathogen to the Town.
But Simons doesn’t mention mosquitoes because then, in 1877, we had not figured-out that the mosquito carried this virus from one person to the next. That discovery would come in 1900, in Cuba.
Simons also names each of his patients and the progress of their illness,
“On the 26th, Mrs. Lunt was taken sick, and she died on the 29th, having vomited a ‘dark stuff’ as described by her husband … She lived in a house called ‘Wilkins Store,’ and we have heard since that she had been requested to wash the clothes from the Steamer Mexican. This she refused to do, but it was done by a colored woman who lived on the same premises.”
Simons doesn’t mention when or where Mrs. Lunt was buried.
But he does mention a “Mr. Stickney who nursed two of the most malignant cases breathing daily the nightly atmosphere of the sick room.” Stickney himself contracted the disease but survived.
On a personal note, I’ve got to wonder whether this courageous man, “Stickney” was, indeed, actually named “Stickley,” who lived at 917 9th Street — the house that my wife and I occupy today.
The Port Royal epidemic in 1877 appears to have been the last reported outbreak of this disease in South Carolina. In 1900, Cuban doctors discovered that the mosquito was the “vector” for this disease and today there is an effective vaccine.
Whether or not these newly found bones are connected to 1877 remains a mystery.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.