Standing beneath the spreading branches of a massive live oak, historian Garrison Marcoux tries to imagine what this scarred, struggling tree saw 245 years ago.
Did one of the British soldiers encamped at this South Carolina crossroad near the end of the Revolutionary War sit in the oak’s shade to recuperate from the series of attacks in American Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene’s “war of posts?” Did he or his comrades take cover behind its then slender trunk and fire at the onrushing Continental Army?
Perhaps a soldier took his last breath beneath its canopy, watering its roots with his blood.
“I’m a spiritual person,” Marcoux, with the South Carolina Battlefield Preservation Trust, said as workers clamber among the limbs above. “To say that a place that experienced a lot of violence and intense emotion and things like that doesn’t hold some kind of energy is probably not likely. I think that energy exists where something like this happened.”
This is a “witness tree.” And it now faces its own fight for survival.
