Combahee River

About

Combahee River Raid — June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman's First Command. Gauge 02176150 keeps watch over the Combahee, a river best understood not by its rapids — it has none rated here — but by its character as a tidal blackwater system. From the Salkehatchie confluence, the current runs slow and dark, staining tea-brown as it moves toward the coast. By the time it reaches St. Helena Sound, the narrow stream has widened into a broad coastal waterway shaped as much by tide as by flow.

Long before the plantations, the Combahee corridor belonged to Indigenous South Carolina. The river flowed through the ancestral territory of the Catawba, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the Muscogee (Creek), the Cusabo, and the Yemassee, who used it as a travel corridor, fishing ground, and gathering place. The 1761–1763 Catawba Treaty, the 1817 Treaty of Old Town, and the 1826–1830 Indian Removal Acts established the framework of cession that followed. The Catawba Indian Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation maintain cultural connections to the region still.

From the 1700s through the 1920s, the Combahee was logged to feed the South Carolina longleaf-pine, cypress, and hardwood industry, the rice-belt and cotton-belt agriculture of 1800–1865, and the Reconstruction-era lumber operations that ran into the 1920s. Sawmills, turpentine stills, logging drives for rice-mill and cotton-gin construction, and the cross-tie and naval-stores industries all worked the watershed. The exhaustion of the longleaf pine in the 1920s, the creation of the Francis Marion National Forest in the 1930s, and the CCC plantings of that decade ended large-scale logging.

It was among the rice plantations lining the river that the Combahee River Raid took place. Harriet Tubman, working as a nurse and scout for the Union Army, planned the operation with Colonel James Montgomery. Three Union gunboats — the John Adams, the Harriet A. Weed, and the Andrew — ascended the Combahee to the pickup point at Combahee Ferry, where Tubman's intelligence had identified three large rice plantations. The raid freed 756 enslaved people. More than a century later, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Combahee River Collective, a pioneering Black feminist organization, took its name directly from that wartime operation, binding the river's memory to a new generation of activism. The raid's 150th anniversary was commemorated in 2013 at the Harriet Tubman Monument at Beaufort, SC.

The river's hydrology was first documented by the USGS South Carolina Survey of the 1900s through the 1930s, followed by mid-century water-quality studies and, later, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control's studies and Total Maximum Daily Load program. Since 2010, SC DNR, working with the Combahee Watershed partnerships and the Catawba Indian Nation, has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Streambank stabilization from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking of redbreast sunfish and shoal bass from 2017 to 2024, and SC DNR Watershed Restoration Program projects from 2020 to 2024 mark the recent recovery. Many South Carolina rivers, including paddling routes like this one, belong to the SC State Paddling Trails system. The Combahee's slow current still carries the weight of what unfolded along its shores.