Six hundred people took shelter at Lincoln High School the night Hurricane Hugo came ashore because the maps said the building sat twenty feet above sea level. High enough for a hurricane shelter. Safe ground.
The maps were wrong. The school sat at ten feet. Around midnight on September 22, 1989, six feet of seawater came through the walls. Thomasena Singleton held her seven-year-old son above her head as the water reached her chin. People climbed into the rafters, crawled above the false ceilings, stacked furniture and prayed. The tide was going out instead of coming in. That's what saved them—not planning, not the maps, not the shelter designation. Luck.
Nobody drowned that night. But the town of McClellanville learned what their grandparents should have taught them: you can move to higher ground all you want, but if you never measure how high, you're just guessing.
For 167 years, McClellanville thought their ancestors had solved the hurricane problem by moving to "higher ground" in 1822. Nobody had ever measured how high.
Moving Without Measuring
McClellanville existed because plantation owners thought they'd already solved this problem. After the 1822 hurricane killed 300 people and washed away the summer village at Cedar Island, they moved inland to "higher ground" along Jeremy Creek.
Nobody measured how high Cedar Island had been. Nobody measured how high the new ground was. Nobody calculated storm surge heights or documented elevations. They just moved, called it adaptation, built a town.
For 167 years, that seemed to work. Hurricanes came through—one in 1886 destroyed much of the town, a Category 3 in 1893 caused major damage. Each time, people rebuilt. The shrimping fleet kept going out. Whatever their ancestors had done back in the 1820s seemed good enough.
Then Hugo's twenty-foot storm surge hit Bulls Bay, and the higher ground turned out to be ten feet of wishful thinking.
Rebuilding on Faith
The morning after Hugo, McClellanville was cut off from the outside world. Trees blocked every road to Charleston and Georgetown. When help finally arrived, they found boats in front yards, century-old oaks snapped, homes destroyed. The picturesque fishing village was wrecked.
Some people left. Others stayed and rebuilt. Thomas Williams, whose house was destroyed by the surge, built his new home sixteen feet above mean sea level. He hoped it would stay dry next time. Hoped sixteen feet was high enough. Nobody could tell him for certain because nobody really knew how high the next surge might be.
South Carolina changed its policy —hurricane shelters would no longer be designated in storm surge zones. Better elevation data. Improved maps. No more Lincoln High Schools. The bureaucracy learned its lesson about the maps.
But most people in McClellanville didn't rebuild sixteen feet up. They rebuilt where their houses had been, maybe a little higher, maybe not. The town still exists—about a thousand people live there now, plus another thousand in the surrounding area. The shrimping boats still go out.
They're still guessing how high is high enough.
The Problem Nobody Solved
Here's what the plantation owners created in the 1820s when they moved to "higher ground" without measuring it: a town built on hope instead of numbers. Hugo proved that McClellanville wasn't high enough. But how high would be high enough?
Ten feet wasn't enough. Sixteen feet might be enough. Twenty feet? Thirty?
The improved elevation data after Hugo told people exactly how high their land was. What it couldn't tell them was how high they needed to be. Because that would mean looking at the storm surge projections. Looking at what the models actually show. Looking at the fact that most coastal towns aren't high enough and never will be. Looking at the possibility that "adaptation" might mean leaving, not rebuilding.
So McClellanville did what their ancestors did: rebuilt a little higher, called it adaptation, hoped it works. Some people like Thomas Williams went to sixteen feet. Others stayed lower. The town stayed put.
Thirty-five years later, they're still there. Still shrimping. Still rebuilding after storms. Still hoping the next surge won't be worse than Hugo's twenty feet. Still trusting that the ground they're on—the ground their ancestors moved to in the 1820s without measuring—is high enough.
The storms keep coming. The projections keep rising. And the people of McClellanville keep making the same choice their ancestors made: stay on the ground you're on, hope it's high enough, find out during the next storm.
Thomasena Singleton's son is in his forties now. He survived that night because his mother held him above the water and the tide was going out. Next time, the tide might be coming in. Next time, the surge might be higher than twenty feet. Next time, sixteen feet might not be enough.
They'll find out when it happens. That's adaptation when you never bother to measure the ground you're standing on.
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Storm towers for enslaved workers: After the 1822 hurricane, Santee Delta planters built circular brick towers with elevated floors specifically to provide emergency shelter for enslaved people working in the rice fields—a rare infrastructure investment in worker safety driven by economic necessity.
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The Sea Island Storm: The 1893 Category 3 hurricane that struck McClellanville was part of a devastating season that killed an estimated 1,000-2,000 people across South Carolina's coastal communities, yet the town rebuilt in place each time.
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McClellanville's reciprocal disaster aid: After receiving crucial assistance from Toms River, New Jersey following Hugo, McClellanville sent aid workers to help when Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey in 2012 —a reminder that coastal communities share vulnerability across state lines.
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Hugo's statewide impact: While McClellanville's shelter crisis drew attention, Hurricane Hugo left 56,000 people homeless across South Carolina and caused 35 deaths, with damage extending far inland from the coast.