From Salem to Sewee: The Forgotten Story of Awendaw’s Earliest Settlers

How a group of New England families journeyed through shipwreck, uncertainty, and wilderness to shape the Lowcountry we explore today.

December 11, 2025

If you’ve ever paddled through the quiet creeks near Awendaw or stood beneath the live oaks behind Sewee Restaurant, you’ve been closer than you realize to one of the Lowcountry’s most surprising pieces of history—a story that reaches all the way back to Salem, Massachusetts, in the uneasy years after the infamous witch trials.

It’s a tale of resilience, migration, and the meeting of cultures. And like so many stories in this part of the world, it begins with water.

A Journey Born from Upheaval

In the late 1600s, Salem was a place marked by fear and division. The witch trials of 1692–1693 had shaken the community to its core, and in the months that followed, some families chose to leave and begin again elsewhere. Historical accounts tell us that about 52 New England Congregationalists—many from the Salem area—set out to make a new life in the southern colonies.

Their journey didn’t go as planned.

As the story goes, the ship carrying these families was wrecked off Cape Fear, North Carolina. They survived, were taken in by rescuers, and eventually made their way south until they reached the protected waters of Seewee Bay. Here, among the tidal creeks, saltmarsh, and the villages of the Seewee people, they found a landscape rich enough to sustain a new beginning

In 1696, these Salem-area families established a settlement they called Wappetaw—the earliest European community in what is now Awendaw. Their meeting house, built around 1700, became the Wappetaw Independent Congregational Church, one of the most significant early churches in the Carolina colony.

Under the canopy of live oaks behind the Seewee Restaurant lies the Wappetaw cemetery, the resting place of many of those original settlers. The church itself was burned by British forces during the Revolutionary War, but the graveyard is still there.

Some of the names that appear in surviving genealogies—like the Whilden family—trace their origins to the Salem area before making the journey south. Their story is part of the connective tissue that links New England’s turbulent history with the quiet marshes of Cape Romain.

Long before the Salem families arrived, this region was home to the Seewee people, who lived along the estuaries, harvested shellfish, and navigated these waters in dugout canoes. The settlers depended on Seewee knowledge to survive the unfamiliar climate and marshland. Though the details are sparse in written records, the archaeological and ecological story suggests a period of exchange—foodways, place names, pathways through forest and marsh.

Awendaw, in many ways, has always been a place between worlds: between forest and sea, between old ways and new beginnings.

Today, Coastal Expeditions explores the same waterways that carried those early families to safety. When you paddle out from Garris Landing, drift past oyster beds in Bulls Bay, or hike through the maritime forest on Bulls Island, you’re experiencing a landscape shaped by centuries of human and ecological history.

And tucked quietly behind the Sewee Restaurant is a reminder that the Lowcountry has always been a refuge—for wildlife, for people seeking a new start, and for anyone who finds peace in places where the land meets the water.

At Coastal Expeditions, we believe that a sense of place deepens every adventure. Knowing that Awendaw’s roots stretch from Salem’s troubled past to the saltmarshes of Seewee changes the way you see the landscape. It connects present-day conservation work with the long continuum of people who have lived, worked, and dreamed along these creeks.

Awendaw has been called a trailhead to the forest and sea, and perhaps that’s been true since the very beginning—when a shipwrecked community stepped ashore and found a home surrounded by water, wildlife, and wild possibility.