The absence of a written history hooked me, and my quick trip to the library became a quest. Burning through days that became years in windowless archives, I fed reels of microfilm through a reader and combed through faded documents. Only after thousands of hours of research did I begin to weave together the story of New Cut canal. The few historical documents that I found revealed that my swimming hole at New Cut had been carved from the earth by enslaved Black men. Thumbing through a compendium of old drawings, my first real clue to the canal’s origins was marked on a rare map from 1711. On the map, a surveyor had written “The Cutt” for “New Cut” in the place where I wade into the creek to swim.
Using the date 1711, I went back in time to the late 1600s and early 1700s to learn that enslaved and indentured men were forced to build New Cut, a mile-long watery traverse through a dense cypress forest. The work required felling primeval trees measuring six feet in diameter and digging a deep trench through the marsh to accommodate boat traffic. During construction, Black men shoveled mud through malarial swamps, while battling snakes and alligators in intense heat. Once created, New Cut allowed colonial travelers to rely on strong sea tides to carry them through the canal.
In the 1700s when the canals of the Inner Passage—New Cut, Haulover Cut, New Town Cut, Wappoo Cut, and Elliot’s Cut— were constructed, Black workers were listed as itemized property. These individuals shaped Charleston’s politics and economy by building canals, roads, bridges, forts— virtually all the colony’s infrastructure—but their contributions were not documented and their names are unknown. Their work, however, has survived in the deep trenches at New Cut which have endured for three hundred years. These six-foot walls of mud engineered to hold tidal water still stand just below the water’s surface.
British plans for a canal system through the Lowcountry were ambitious, and New Cut was only one of dozens of hand-dug waterways. By 1750, enslaved men had constructed a reliable water route extending over three hundred miles from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. Augustine, Florida. This inland route, protected from sea storms and pirates, enabled travelers to journey safely up and down the coast as if on a modern interstate highway. Colonists called the corridor “The Inner Passage” or “The Way Southward.”