Month: August 2018

Junior Giant

Many years before it emerges from the sea as a hulking 300-pound creature, the loggerhead sea turtle begins its odyssey as a tiny hatchling barely larger than a person’s finger. The Cape Romain Wildlife Refuge near #Charleston, SC, is one of America’s largest nesting and hatching grounds for this amazing creature, which comes ashore on Summer nights in dark, remote beach areas to dig nests and deposit clutches of about 60 ping-pong sized eggs . The loggerhead is an air-breathing reptile that lives its life in the sea, but must drag its massive carapace and land-clumsy flippers on to remote beaches to lay its eggs in the sand, where they hatch about six weeks later and dash into the waves to renew the cycle. Because Cape Romain is the longest stretch of unspoiled coast line in the Atlantic U.S., thousands of loggerheads lay eggs here each Summer and this is crucial to keeping the species alive in the South Atlantic. <img.src=”South Carolina Wildlife” alt=”Loggerhead Sea Turtle”

Legendary Libation

The propensity for alcohol consumption  in historic #Charleston has always been well known. In the colonial period, there was so much drinking at various “tippling houses”, that the city passed an ordinance in the 1730’s prohibiting  such taverns from serving sailors the day prior to embarking from the seaport. And the heavy indulgence of Charlestonians long ago earned the city the nickname “The Madeira City”. Temperance movements became particularly strong in the 19th century, and in 1893, the state of South Carolina passed the Dispensary Act, which prohibited sale of “alcoholic merchandise” from any source other than state-approved dispensary shops. The state got in the business of making the alcohol served as well, and it was sold in bottles with a uniform symbol of the palmetto tree with crossed palmetto logs. The Dispensary Act created such a spate of boot-legging in Charleston that it was finally repealed in 1907. Today, a distiller has used the Dispensary’s original 1898 bourbon recipe to recreated a concoction that is being sold with the old Dispensary logo. Hopefully it will not lead to any prohibition.<img.src=”Charleston Curiosities” alt=”South Carolina Dispensary”