Ninety Six, South Carolina

Ninety Six National Historic Site, Island Ford Road

The South Carolina settlement of Ninety Six was established in the early 1700s. It was named by traders, who (mistakenly) believed that it was 96 miles from Keowee, the nearest Cherokee settlement. The town figured prominently in the Anglo-Cherokee War and also in the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution. In 1775, the first land battle of the Revolution south of New England was fought there. Ninety Six became a Loyalist stronghold early in the war and was fortified by the British in 1780. From May 22 to June 18, 1781 Major General Nathanael Greene, with 1,000 patriot troops, staged the longest (yet unsuccessful) siege of the Revolutionary War against the 550 American Loyalists who were defending Ninety Six.

18th Century Swimming Skills

From Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 2004, pg. 219:

The great majority of the army, like other populations in eighteenth-century America and Europe, were unable to swim a stroke. Soldiers joked that they did not fear to drown, for they were born to hang. Even seamen did not learn to swim, much to the disgust of Benjamin Franklin, who was a great swimmer himself and tried in vain to teach his American generation to take to the water.