Exciting news of the long-awaited dream of rebuilding the historic Fort Prince George in Pickens County may come to fruition, as Pickens County Council the night of March 3, 2025 voted unanimously to sign a lease from Duke Energy for War Path Landing, where Fort Prince George may be built.

 

Pickens County Administrator Ken Roper was in Washington, D.C. at the time of the County Council meeting, and Assistant Administrator Allison Fowler addressed Council about the project. “This is a current Duke Energy-owned property,” she said. “It is land that they are required to have for public recreation on Lake Keowee as part of their FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) licensing. So, this is one of several around the county. Mile Creek Park is also a Duke Energy property, and we are the current lessee and manager of that property, so it would follow a very similar path as Mile Creek Park currently does. So, County staff has spent, I would say, the betterment of two and a half years, at this point, looking into not just War Path Landing but also the rebuilding of Fort Prince George.” She noted that the rebuilding of Fort Prince George has been important to Roper since elementary school, when he was taught about Fort Prince George by his teacher, Anne Sheriff, who was present at the Council meeting. “So, after several conversations with Duke about other locations around the county, War Path came up as a possibility,” she said.

 

“But our interest in War Path is more than just Fort Prince George,” she added. “Our County staff gets multiple calls every summer season about theft, the parking situation, the lack of restroom facilities, fires, all kinds of things out there. I’m sure our Sheriff’s Office is a frequent visitor to War Path, as well. Our Environmental Enforcement guys try to drive through as much as they can, but there is no permanent presence there.” She noted that Duke Energy does not have staff there. “As we know, they are energy people, not recreation people.

 

“And, so, after several conversations, we are at the point that we are with them now with the lease that you see in front of you. That lease reads very similarly to Mile Creek’s. It is not too different. There is a little difference in what is allowed to be built there, which is what will allow us to put Fort Prince George on the property. This lease is a 20-year lease, same as Mile Creek, as well, with the option to renew. Currently, per discussions with Duke Energy, they are required by FERC to put any proposal or plan for any of their properties out to their stakeholders. There is a 60-day period of review. We are still in that period, waiting to hear back from one stakeholder group. Once that is done, they are ready to move forward.

 

“What this lease allows us to do, as well, is partner with private funding. So, we have had meetings with the Pickens County Historical Society, and they have agreed to help us privately fundraise for the potential of building Fort Prince George in the future.

 

“We have looked at a three-phase approach to renovations. Part of what inspired this discussion is that Duke Energy, per their FERC license, is required to do some upgrades already to the parking area as well as add the restroom facilities, and so there is an amount of money, but they have not disclosed to us exactly what that number is, that they are willing to put towards phase one, because that is work that would have already had to do. So, they have seen our phase one cost estimates. It could be that we could use a contractor that they use to bring that down. None of that work, except for maybe some dirt moving, would be anything that we could do in-house. So, we would be looking to bid that out. That is a basic overview.”

 

After her presentation, County Council voted unanimously to approve the lease of War Path Landing with Duke Energy and to move forward with pursuing the rebuilding of Fort Prince George.

 

Wayne Kelley, Senior Vice President for the Pickens County Historical Society, attended the County Council meeting and spoke with The Pickens County Chronicle on March 4. “We’re thrilled that County Council voted unanimously to move forward with the War Path Landing/Fort Prince George project,” he told The Chronicle, and he thanked Pickens County Administrator Ken Roper. “This is a major step forward in this process that I’ve been working on for 22 years, and other people preceded me on it.

 

“The Pickens County Historical Society will be the funding organization for this project, so we are working diligently ‘to get our ducks in a row’ to get the money together to do this, and Pickens County will execute it, and there is some enthusiasm beyond us on getting this thing done.

 

“And, as you know, it will be a huge cultural historical tourism site here. It will benefit everybody on every level. Last year, I believe, the Hagood Mill site had in excess of 44,000 visitors. And, with this new sister historical site in the neighborhood, once the fort is up and running, I would expect that number at the mill site to certainly easily double and might go well beyond that. The Hagood Mill site has unlimited potential, especially with the acquisition of that property across the road. We have international visitors at the Hagood Mill Site. This site will draw European visitors. When they are in the country, they will go to Fort Prince George, especially the Brits. They are well aware of this stuff and very supportive of southern history.

 

“So, it’s only positive. Everything’s ‘coming up roses’, as they say. The Historical Society is thrilled that this is moving forward.”

 

At The Pickens County Museum of Art and History is a model of Fort Prince George. “The model of the fort was made by the last archeologist standing at the dig site back in the day when the fort site was being flooded,” Kelley said. “His name is Marshall Williams. I had the opportunity to talk with him and meet with him years ago when he was elderly, and he asked me would we be able to get this thing done in his lifetime, and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Williams, I’m hoping to get it done in my lifetime.’ But he did that model precisely. He was the one who did all the measurements, all the precise measurements, and every element of that fort, and, from his research out there and his measurements, that’s what the fort will be built on, based on his numbers.”

 

“Fundraising is just underway,” Kelley said of the rebuilding of Fort Prince George. “We’ll put it all together, and it will happen.”

 

Dennis Chastain, local historian and writer and Blue Wall Vice President for the Pickens County Historical Society, who also has been working toward the rebuilding of Fort Prince George for more than 20 years, also spoke with The Pickens County Chronicle on March 4 and also thanked Ken Roper. “I could not be more excited,” Chastain said. “Fort Prince George is a cherished lost landmark in South Carolina. For generations of people, having the remains of that British fort in the Keowee River valley was a treasured resource, and, then, when they flooded Lake Keowee, and we lost that, totally, the story of Fort Prince George and all the events that took place around it just kind of disappeared. They kind of just forgot about it. So, with this reconstruction, we’re really reviving the story that goes along with Fort Prince George.

 

“We’re playing a support role in this phase of the project,” Chastain continued. “We want this to be as historically accurate as physically possible. In other words, when you visit this site, it will be like you were in the actual fort. We’re fortunate that we have a good documentary record of how big it was, how it was constructed, what kinds of interior buildings there were, where it was situated. So, that allows us to provide the visitor with a very real experience of what it would have been like to be stationed in this colonial fort in the remote backwoods of South Carolina.

 

“This was the most interior fort of the British government in the South. It was 250 miles from Charleston, where the British government was. It took three weeks just to get a rider with a message or a letter from Charleston up here to Fort Prince George. It took nearly a month if you had a wagon train or a party or anybody coming along with you. It was an outpost of the British government, and this gets to the importance of Fort Prince George. It became a satellite office for the British government in dealing with the Cherokees. Governor James Glen, the Colonial Governor at the time Fort Prince George was built, had realized early on that establishing a relationship with the Cherokee, the largest, most powerful tribe in the Southeast, was key to Carolina. He realized that the Colony would either survive or perish based on whether we could establish that relationship with the Cherokees, and Fort Prince George is what allowed that relationship to prosper. Because they acted as a satellite office of the British government, the Cherokees could come there and complain about trader abuse they thought was unfair. It was the one thing the Cherokees had been asking for since 1747. They had been asking various Colonial Governors for a fort to help protect them against their enemies, largely the Creeks, because the Creek Indians were making constant raids on the Cherokees, and this would impress them that they had the full faith and credit of the British government behind them, and not to mention they had cannons, which most of the Native Americans greatly feared. It served a tremendous purpose and really sealed the deal for that all-important relationship between the early Colonial government and the Cherokees.”

 

In thanking Roper, Chastain said, “This has been his pet project. It has taken quite awhile, at least a couple of years, to try to put this whole package together. It’s a huge undertaking, and ‘all the stars have to be aligned’, and things just have to come together. And, son of a gun, it looks like it’s going to happen.”

 

Fort Prince George, which was built in 1753, was abandoned in 1768. “William Bartram came through in 1775, and he said that there were no remains whatsoever of any of the fort,” Chastain said. But Chastain noted that the years that the fort existed were critical years.

 

Chastain noted the importance of rebuilding Fort Prince George not only for keeping history alive but also as a draw for tourism to Pickens County. “This is a thing folks ought to really be excited about,” he said. “It’s going to be a huge tourist draw, I think, for people throughout the Southeast who are interested in the Cherokee wars and that period of time and just history in general. We send busloads of schoolchildren down to Charleston every year to go to various historic sites down there. Maybe they’ll be sending school buses up here to go to Fort Prince George. I fully expect that to happen. They could make a day trip of going to Fort Prince George, and then go up to Sassafras, and they would learn a lot of South Carolina history.”

 

Anne Sheriff, local historian and Central Vice President/Chief Genealogist for the Pickens County Historical Society, who also has been working toward seeing the rebuilding of Fort Prince George for a long time and also attended the County Council meeting, also spoke with The Pickens County Chronicle on March 4. “I’m just really excited about it,” she said. “Apparently, it is going to happen that we’re going to get Fort Prince George.”

 

A past longtime teacher in Pickens County schools, Sheriff taught her students about Fort Prince George. She taught Pickens County Administrator Ken Roper about Fort Prince George when he was bused from Liberty to attend the gifted and talented program at Forest Acres Elementary School in Easley. Her students, she said, loved learning about history. She took them to cemeteries, especially to gravesites of Revolutionary War soldiers. “The kids were excited about the Revolutionary War,” she said.

 

Fort Prince George, she agreed, will become a field trip destination for students in the near future. “This will be the field trip of a certain grade level,” she said, “and that will tell the early history, and I think that’s just wonderful.

 

“Everybody will take their kids up there, and people will come in from out of state to see it. They’re going to be coming from everywhere. I have been up to Kentucky, to forts up there. They need to have another building so that you can go in and buy books and candy and all this kind of stuff.”

 

The rebuilding of Fort Prince George, she noted, is “going to add a lot to Pickens County tourism and the history. All these people are going to learn the history of this.

 

“It ‘thrills me to death’ that it’s finally going to happen,” she said. “It has so much history to it — the Indian history, the Cherokees, and then the white people. So, it’s going to tell two stories.

 

“I think anybody that’s interested in history, they’re going to love it. They are going to love it when it happens. I may not be around to see it, but, at least, if they just dig a little bit of dirt while I’m still alive. I hope we can dig some dirt and say, okay it’s really going to happen.”

 

Excitedly, she said, “So, it’s going to happen. I guess that’s my favorite statement – It’s going to happen!”

 

Pickens County Administrator Ken Roper was also excited when he spoke with The Pickens County Chronicle. “County Council passed approval Monday night to lease War Path Landing from Duke Energy. We already lease Mile Creek Park from Duke Energy. But this will be us being able to be there and keep that place cleaner and safer with our staff from Mile Creek Park. That lease has been approved, and we’ll do the final execution on that. And part of the thing that is unique about War Path is that Duke is allowing us to do something that’s not their usual rule for these landings. Mile Creek Park would be perfect for Fort Prince George, because it’s only a mile from the original location. That’s where the name comes from, right? But it’s not allowed under the license that FERC has for that park that they gave to Duke. But the rules for War Path allow us to actually put it there. And we’ve told Duke that’s our intention. We’ve had drawings done that we’ve submitted to them, and it’s been publicly noticed to show that it be our intention to rebuild Fort Prince George there at War Path Landing. And so we’re very excited about that. We finally have an official place that we can say that’s where Fort Prince George can be rebuilt. And it makes some sense historically. We’re very excited about that.

 

“But now we move into a different phase. And, now that we know the location, we have to start fundraising for it. And we’ve got one grant, a planning grant, from the South Carolina National Heritage Corridor. And, so, we’re very excited about that, to allow us to do some specific architectural work, so that we can get a cost estimate. So, we’re excited about that.

 

“But, basically, what it’s going to mean, now that we have a location, is I’m going to be looking for grant funding. I’m going to be looking for funding from the state, and also we’re going to be looking to raise money from private sources. And that’s where the Historical Society comes in handy. The County doesn’t really solicit charitable deductions. The Historical Society has agreed, and I very much appreciate them agreeing, to be the place where people could make donations to support the rebuilding of Fort Prince George. We’re very optimistic and don’t think that this fundraising will go for long. We think we’ll have a good response and that, within a year, we will be able to say we’ve raised the money we need to raise. Now that we know the location, I feel comfortable going ahead and trying to raise money from different sources, and I’m very optimistic about that.

 

“If everything works out, we’re aiming to try to have a groundbreaking for this facility during the year 2026, so the next calendar year. And the reason we’re doing that is because, obviously, as you know, that’s the 250^th anniversary of this country’s independence. And, while Fort Prince George is a French and Indian War era fort, a lot of our Revolutionary War heroes trained there. We can tell from historical records that they were there. Fort Prince George was not in existence for the American Revolution, but it was the training ground for our South Carolina patriots. So, people like Andrew Pickens, people like Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, we can show through historical records that they were there at Fort Prince George early in their military service. So, we’re very excited about that. That means that, right here in Pickens County, we were on the frontlines of a world war, the French and Indian war, and a lot of our military heroes from the Revolution were trained, and learned how to be soldiers, here at Fort Prince George.”

 

Roper said that, if ground is broken in 2026, the fort could be built by 2027. “We would try to get it done within a year. We don’t see any reason it would stretch out longer than that.

 

“I’m very excited,” he said. Speaking of what he called his personal attachment to the project, he said, “I was in a gifted and talented program. I went to Liberty Elementary, and they bused us to Forest Acres when I was in fifth grade. And, when I was in fifth grade, my teacher was Anne Sheriff, and she taught us about Fort Prince George. And I remember, as a fifth grader, thinking, ‘We need to rebuild that fort.’ So, that was over 40 years ago. I’m very excited about that, and I hope I can play a role in seeing that through to completion.

 

“I’m very excited about it. This is a part of our history that can slip away, if we’re not careful, and I think that rebuilding it lets us tell the story of our unique place in American history, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”