With nearly five hundred years of history, Beaufort teems with intriguing tales from the past. In this engaging book, historian and Beaufort native Alexia Helsley brings that past to life and provides a useful guide to the city's most historic streets, buildings and neighborhoods.

With nearly five hundred years of history, Beaufort teems with intriguing tales from the past. In this engaging book, historian and Beaufort native Alexia Helsley brings that past to life and provides a useful guide to the city's most historic streets, buildings and neighborhoods.

Beaufort, South Carolina, the Palmetto State's second-oldest town, is a paradigm of the Low Country. Historic mansions overlook the bay with century-old oaks standing sentinel. Visitors to Beaufort feel right at home, and those with a love of history have a true appreciation of the area. Since its discovery by the Spaniards in the early 1500s, Beaufort has experienced numerous personalities and ways of life, from plantations to war, phosphate mining, hurricanes, and large-scale truck farming. Gullah, a culture and dialect spoken by ex-slaves and their descendants, is kept alive at Penn Center, the first school for the newly emancipated. Three military installations are here: Marine Corps Recruit Parris Island, Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, and the U.S. Naval Hospital Beaufort. Various forts, churches, and schools served the area in their specific ways. Today, some lie in ruins offering peaceful repose while others remain intact and are well preserved. Beaufort's quaint downtown is a National Historic Landmark District.

As one of the oldest settlements in North America, Beaufort, South Carolina, can trace its roots deep into the rich history of the New World. This charming city beneath moss-draped oaks has a heritage that is as diverse as it is sweeping. This comprehensive look into Beaufort s past reveals a wide-ranging set of influences that helped to shape the island city s development. From the landing of Spanish sailors in 1514 to the influx of present-day sun seekers, Beaufort has played host to a variety of inhabitants that have each added a distinct element to its captivating milieu. Author Alexia Jones Helsley calls upon a lifetime of experience as one of South Carolina s premier archivists and historians to illuminate all aspects of Beaufort s history. Herself a native of old Beaufort and an accomplished genealogist, Helsley uses elegant, thoughtful prose to convey the duality of this Lowcountry jewel, from sparkling tides and majestic homes to hurricanes and hidden slave quarters. It is through the prism of this intriguing dual nature, present in many forms throughout Beaufort s past, that Helsley shows readers the ways in which the city fits into the history of the region, the nation and the continent. This vital text is unmatched in its ability to bring to life the fascinating story of a city nearly five hundred years in the making."

Beaufort, South Carolina, is well known for its historical architecture, but perhaps none is quite as remarkable as those edifices formed by tabby, sometimes called coastal concrete, comprising a mixture of lime, sand, water, and oyster shells. Tabby itself has a storied history stretching back to Iberian, Caribbean, Spanish American, and even African roots—brought to the United States by adventurers, merchants, military engineers, planters, and the enslaved. Tabby has been preserved most abundantly in the Beaufort area and its outlying islands, (and along the Sea Islands all the way to Florida as well) with Fort Frederick in 1734 having the earliest example of a diverse group of structures, which included town houses, seawalls, planters' homes, barns, agricultural buildings, and slave quarters. Tabby's insulating properties are excellent protection from long, hot, humid, and sometimes deadly summers; and on the islands, particularly, wealthy plantation owners built grand houses for themselves and improved dwellings for enslaved workers that after two hundred-plus years still stand today. An extraordinarily hardy material, tabby has a history akin to some of the world's oldest building techniques and is referred to as "rammed earth," as well as " tapia" in Spanish, "pisé de terre" in French, and "hangtu" in Chinese. The form that tabby construction took along the Sea Islands, however, was born of necessity. Here stone and brick were rare and expensive, but the oyster shells that were used as the source for the tabby's lime base were plentiful. Today these bits of shell, often visible in the walls and forms constructed long ago, give tabby its unique and iconic appearance. Colin Brooker, architect and expert on historic restoration, has not only made an exhaustive foray into local tabby architecture and heritage; he also has made a multinational tour as well in search of tabby origins, evolution, and diffusion from the Bahamas to Morocco to Andalusia, which can be traced back as far as the tenth century. Brooker has spent more than thirty years investigating the origins of tabby, its chemistry, its engineering, and its limitations. The Shell Builders lays out a sweeping, in-depth, and fascinating investigative journey—at once archaeological, sociological, and historical—into the ways prior inhabitants used and shaped their environment in order to house and protect themselves, leaving behind an architectural legacy that is both mysterious and beautiful. Lawrence S. Rowland, a distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and past president of the South Carolina Historical Society, provides a foreword.

The complex, colorful history of South Carolina's southeastern corner In the first volume of The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, three distinguished historians of the Palmetto State recount more than three centuries of Spanish and French exploration, English and Huguenot agriculture, and African slave labor as they trace the history of one of North America's oldest European settlements. From the sixteenth-century forays of the Spaniards to the invasion of Union forces in 1861, Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers, Jr., chronicle the settlement and development of the geographical region comprised of what is now Beaufort, Jasper, Hampton, and part of Allendale counties. The authors describe the ill-fated attempts of the Spanish and French to settle the Port Royal Sound area and the arrival of the British in 1663, which established the Beaufort District as the southern frontier of English North America. They tell of the region's bloody Indian Wars, participation in the American Revolution, and golden age of prosperity and influence following the introduction of Sea Island cotton. In charting the approach of civil war, Rowland, Moore, and Rogers relate Beaufort District's decisive role in the Nullification Crisis and in the cultivation, by some of the district's native sons, of South Carolina's secessionist movement. Of particular interest, they profile the local African American, or Gullah, population - a community that has become well known for the retention of its African cultural and linguistic heritage.

Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands. Rehearsal for Reconstruction, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose’s chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose demonstrates how Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South’s postwar era was acted out.

An oral biography that reveals the Southern author's true voice Pat Conroy's memoirs and autobiographical novels contain a great deal about his life, but there is much he hasn't revealed to readers—until now. My Exaggerated Life is the product of a special collaboration between this great American author and oral biographer Katherine Clark, who recorded two hundred hours of conversations with Conroy before he passed away in 2016. In the spring and summer of 2014, the two spoke for an hour or more on the phone every day. No subject was off limits, including aspects of his tumultuous life he had never before revealed. This oral biography presents Conroy the man, as if speaking in person, in the colloquial voice familiar to family and friends. This voice is quite different from the authorial style found in his books, which are famous for their lyricism and poetic descriptions. Here Conroy is blunt, plainspoken, and uncommonly candid. While his novels are known for their tragic elements, this volume is suffused with Conroy's sense of humor, which he credits with saving his life on several occasions. The story Conroy offers here is about surviving and overcoming the childhood abuse and trauma that marked his life. He is frank about his emotional damage—the depression, the alcoholism, the divorces, and, above all, the crippling lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. He also sheds light on the forces that saved his life from ruin. The act of writing compelled Conroy to confront the painful truths about his past, while years of therapy with a clinical psychologist helped him achieve a greater sense of self-awareness and understanding. As Conroy recounts his time in Atlanta, Rome, and San Francisco, along with his many years in Beaufort, South Carolina, he portrays a journey full of struggles and suffering that culminated ultimately in redemption and triumph. Although he gained worldwide recognition for his writing, Conroy believed his greatest achievement was in successfully carving out a life filled with family and friends, as well as love and happiness. In the end he arrived at himself and found it was a good place to be.

The South Carolina Historical Marker Program, established in 1936, has approved the installation of more than 1,700 interpretive plaques, each highlighting how places both grand and unassuming have played important roles in the history of the Palmetto State. These roadside markers identify and interpret places valuable for understanding South Carolina's past, including sites of consequential events and buildings, structures, or other resources significant for their design or their association with institutions or individuals prominent in local, state, or national history. This volume includes a concise history of the South Carolina Historical Marker Program and an overview of the marker application process. For those interested in specific historic periods or themes, the volume features condensed lists of markers associated with broader topics such as the American Revolution, African American history, women's history, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. While the program is administered by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, most markers are proposed by local organizations that serve as a marker's official sponsor, paying its cost and assuming responsibility for its upkeep. In that sense, this inventory is a record not just of places and subjects that the state has deemed worthy of acknowledgment, but of those that South Carolinians themselves have worked to enshrine.

A “miraculous” (Newsweek) human drama, based on a true story, from the renowned author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw Island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence unless, somehow, they can learn a new way. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher—until one man gives a year of his life to the island and its people. Praise for The Water Is Wide “Miraculous . . . an experience of joy.”—Newsweek “A powerfully moving book . . . You will laugh, you will weep, you will be proud and you will rail . . . and you will learn to love the man.”—Charleston News and Courier “A hell of a good story.”—The New York Times “Few novelists write as well, and none as beautifully.”—Lexington Herald-Leader “[Pat] Conroy cuts through his experiences with a sharp edge of irony. . . . He brings emotion, writing talent and anger to his story.”—Baltimore Sun