In the late 1780’s, John Bowman of Peachtree Plantation hired millwright Jonathan Lucas to build a wind-driven sawmill on Cape Romain’s Mill Island, a project completed in 1792. William Lucas, the builder’s son, was born at the windmill site in 1789. Trees from plantations in the Santee region were rafted downstream to Mill Island, where they were cut into boards for construction. The mill may have resembled a Dutch-style windmill, with a small wooden superstructure atop a brick tower, its sails attached to a sixteen-foot iron shaft turned by ocean winds, and a system of gears and shafts powering several reciprocating saw blades. In the late 1820’s, the abandoned mill, by then without blades, was mistaken for the nearby lighthouse and considered a danger to navigation, so a wooden cross was placed on top to distinguish it from the light tower. It survived the Civil War but later collapsed or was demolished. Jonathan Lucas, from Cumberland County, England, was shipwrecked off the Charleston coast and settled there in 1783. After John Bowman noticed a small windmill Lucas had made, Bowman brought him to the Santee, where Lucas developed the first successful water-powered rice pounding mill, an innovation that helped transform South Carolina’s economy. A rice pounding mill at Wambaw Plantation was apparently ordered in 1792 by Harriett Pinckney Horry, widow of Daniel Horry II and daughter of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. William Lucas bought Wambaw Plantation in 1832, and the section containing the mill site and its ruins remained in the possession of Jonathan Lucas’s descendants. Near the mouth of Cedar Creek, foundation timbers, brick, the end of the earthen dam that formed the reservoir, and surviving mill parts remained.