Kingsport Spirit

We’ve spent quite a bit of time in Beaufort, South Carolina, in recent years because of our connection to the beaches of nearby Fripp Island. We fell in love with Beaufort because it offers much of the history and charm of Charleston or Savannah, but on a far more human scale. With fewer than 15,000 residents in a county not unlike our own Sullivan County in size, Beaufort feels manageable, walkable, and genuinely livable. Although it is the county seat for the broader Hilton Head region, the traffic, outlet malls, and resort-style development lie well to the south—buffered from the historic town by the Broad River, Port Royal Sound, and wide expanses of marsh and open water.

We fell in love with Fripp Island for similar reasons. Physically, it is roughly comparable in width, length, and overall scale to Kingsport’s Bays Mountain Park, and—like Bays Mountain—its identity is inseparable from the natural landscape itself. Large portions of the island function as protected wildlife habitat under a combination of state coastal regulations and local stewardship practices. There are no high-rise buildings. Deer are everywhere, sometimes wandering in small groups along the edge of the surf. Leaving Beaufort, the first sixteen miles of U.S. 21 pass through the Saint Helena Island Cultural Protection Overlay, adopted in the late 1990s and in place for nearly thirty years, restricting development such as golf courses, gated communities, and large resorts. The final four miles wind through the preserved maritime forest of Hunting Island State Park. Then the road ends—or begins—at Fripp. To us, it feels idyllic.

The drive down Interstate 26 gives me plenty of time to think. I find myself wondering how early settlers and explorers found their way from the sea into our mountains. It feels like a living puzzle. Beaufort, in particular, is an anomaly. One of its main streets bears a French name—Ribaut. Saint Helena Island is clearly the Anglicized form of Santa Elena. Why are there French and Spanish names embedded in this part of South Carolina?

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary of independence from Great Britain, we are most familiar with the stories of Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Yet the first English attempt at colonization in what is now the United States was the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke Island in 1585. More than two decades earlier, however, the French had already established Charlesfort at Port Royal Sound in 1562, near present-day Beaufort. Just four years later, the Spanish founded Santa Elena in the same vicinity, making it the northern capital of Spanish La Florida. For a brief but consequential period—from the early 1560s to the late 1580s—Beaufort sat at the collision point of French, Spanish, and English imperial ambitions (National Park Service; South Carolina Encyclopedia).

Over time, French interests shifted inland along the Mississippi River system, while Spanish priorities moved south toward Florida. Eventually, the English prevailed. And history, more often than not, is written by those who remain.

In 1994, I read N. Brent Kennedy’s book on the Melungeons, where I first encountered the idea that Spanish activity centered on Santa Elena extended inland toward the Appalachians. Kennedy drew attention to early Spanish expeditions and suggested that their reach might help explain later Appalachian identity traditions. His work was widely criticized, however, for relying on speculative interpretation rather than the documentary and archaeological standards required by academic scholarship.

Two decades later, archaeology began to catch up. In the mid-2010s, UNC-TV (PBS North Carolina) aired a documentary examining the Berry Site near Morganton, North Carolina. Archaeologists identified the Native town of Joara as the site of Fort San Juan, built by the Spanish in 1567. That finding established Joara as the first documented European settlement in what is now North Carolina, predating Roanoke Island by eighteen years (PBS NC / UNC-TV; Ward and Davis). The implication was striking: the Spanish were well into the Appalachian interior decades before the English ever attempted settlement at Roanoke—and Morganton lies less than a hundred miles from Kingsport.

In 2017, East Tennessee PBS aired Secrets of the Nolichucky, which followed ETSU-affiliated archaeologists investigating the Cane Notch site (40WG143) and the nearby Plum Grove site (40WG17) along the Nolichucky River in Washington County, Tennessee. The program explicitly framed these contact-era finds as potentially connected to the period of Juan Pardo and early Spanish movement through the interior (East Tennessee PBS).

Between 1566 and 1568, Spanish Captain Juan Pardo led two major expeditions inland from Santa Elena, seeking to extend Spain’s coastal base by establishing garrisons at major Indigenous towns, securing provisions and alliances, and exploring the possibility of an overland route toward Mexico. This strategy produced a chain of six forts, anchored by Fort San Juan at Joara, which scholars describe as the principal inland post and the earliest European-founded garrison intended for sustained occupation in the interior (Ward and Davis; Tulane University Latin American Library).

Crucially for Tennessee, documentary and archaeological scholarship places Pardo’s force at the town of Chiaha on the French Broad River, generally identified with Zimmerman Island (now beneath Douglas Lake) near present-day Dandridge, Tennessee. There, the Spanish built and reinforced Fort San Pedro, the best-documented Pardo-era fort in what is now Tennessee, after Pardo returned in 1567 to relieve his subordinate Hernando Moyano de Morales, who led an expedition north from Joara. Spanish accounts describe his attack on a fortified Native town called Maniatique, widely associated by modern scholars with the Saltville, Virginia area—Spain’s northernmost documented military reach in the Appalachian interior (Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture; Hudson; DePratter).

The precise routes between towns—and the placement of some associated sites—remain debated. But scholars agree on the operational intent: Pardo’s forts were positioned to project Spanish authority, stabilize supply lines, and control movement along established Indigenous travel corridors, particularly river systems connecting western North Carolina to upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia (Ward and Davis; Hudson).

It is important to be precise. Spanish artifacts found along the Nolichucky do not, by themselves, prove that a Spanish fort once stood there. Trade goods can travel farther than armies. But the evidence matters. It demonstrates that Spanish contact in the southern Appalachians was not confined to the coast or even to western North Carolina. It reached into Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, fitting a broader scholarly understanding of early European–Native interaction networks operating along long-used river corridors and roads.

The Spanish experiment ultimately failed. In 1568, Indigenous communities destroyed the inland forts in a coordinated uprising. Archaeology at Joara confirms burned structures and abrupt abandonment. Spain withdrew from the interior, and in 1587 Santa Elena itself was abandoned, its population relocated to St. Augustine (National Park Service).

Yet withdrawal did not erase memory. In Appalachia, long-standing traditions—later associated with Melungeon communities—preserved stories of people who were “there before the English.” Some families described themselves as Portuguese. That raises a lingering question: how would isolated Appalachian populations have come to adopt that identity more than 250 years ago, long before modern genealogy, textbooks, or popular history?

Modern scholarship is careful. These identities do not demonstrate direct descent from Spanish forts. But they do reveal something important. Communities remembered a past older than English settlement and reached for explanations rooted in the earliest European presence they could imagine. “Portuguese” may have functioned as shorthand for antiquity, difference, and survival in a society that increasingly demanded a plausible European lineage to avoid discrimination faced by those of Native or African descent.

History, it turns out, is complicated. It is rarely tidy or linear. Populations have migrated since the dawn of time, shaped by geography, opportunity, conflict, and chance. Just as modern Iberia reflects layers of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, North African, Celtic, and Germanic ancestry, the early American story is almost certainly more diverse than we often acknowledge. And that complexity is not something to fear—it is something to understand and celebrate.

For a brief time, the Santa Elena History Center in downtown Beaufort helped explain this lost chapter of American history. Though the center did not survive the pandemic, its collections and mission were absorbed by the nearby Coastal Discovery Museum in Hilton Head, ensuring that the story of Santa Elena—and its long reach toward the mountains—continues to be told.