Interesting Facts about South Carolina

• When the chief of an early Indian group died, his horse was buried alive with him. There were so many such burials that Indian Hill is known as a mountain.
• A group of Seewee Indians decided to take their grievances directly to the king of England. A pirate crew spotted their canoes at sea, and they were never heard from again.
• Corporal Jesse Gillespie was wounded, then recovered in a French hospital during World War I. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army had issued a death certificate. When he returned home he was made to sign an affidavit that he was not dead.
• On the way to a Lancaster cemetery, the body of Andrew Jackson's father was taken from bar to bar on a sled, until some mourner found it had disappeared. The body turned up in a snowbank and finally reached the intended burial place.
• Theodosia Burr Alston, Aaron Burr's daughter, was the wife of South Carolina Governor Joseph Alston. In 1812 she sailed from Charleston to New York and was never heard from again. Later, a pirate confessed that she had been made to walk the plank, but his story was never verified.
• The state's first steam locomotive produced such a hiss of steam that the fireman sat on the safety valve to reduce the noise; there was an explosion, and he was killed.
• Onlookers at Beaufort Bay thought that a man named Jones had finally reached his long-sought goal of perpetual motion, as his boat dashed about the bay. However, he had hooked a stingray, was being pulled by it, and could not cut the line.