Lighting Store Showroom Near Mc Clellanville, SC

CHARLESTON COUNTY, S.C. (WCSC) - The debate between the people of McClellanville and nearby organizations continues as a developer pushes to bring a sand mine to the rural community.

The land at Lofton Road off Highway 17 is empty for now. It sits about 900 feet across from Lofton Road from St. James Santee Elementary and Middle. In 2023, the community mobilized and opposed a special allowance for a sand mine through petitions and public hearings.

“So the BZA, the board of zoning appeals, they denied Blessing Investment their special exemption requests to establish a mine at the Lofton Road site. They didn’t like that decision. And so they appealed that,” Riley Egger with the Coastal Conservation League says.

Blessing Investment is now suing the board over its denial. The Coastal Conservation League and Friends of Coastal South Carolina applied to intervene in the legal case, to continue advocating against the mine. Their intervention was granted, and they will be at the table for the next mediation meeting.

“We’re really happy that we can intervene and be part of this case and reaffirm the decision from the BZA because they made the right call here and really speak up for the McClellanville area,” Egger says.

The concerns about the mine are its impact on the nearby school and wildlife.

“It’s primarily rural and mines are disruptive. There’s going to be trucks coming in constantly throughout the day, and it’s only 900 feet from St. James Santee Elementary Middle School. That’s not appropriate. The community was clear,” Egger says.

Grace Gasper, Executive Director at Friends of Coastal SC says in her conversations with neighbors in McClellanville, they are all in agreement.

“The area and the impacts need to be considered and our main concern over this one is the proximity of the school and the property also adjoins designated Wilderness Area, Little Wambaw Samp Wilderness and the Francis Marion National Forests,” Gasper says.

Gasper and Egger say once a wildlife area is disrupted, it’s changed forever and unable to be perfectly restored.

“The potential ecological impacts to an area that’s designated to be kept pristine and unimpacted by humans, you know, is unknown at this point,” Gasper says.

Gasper highlights again that it’s not just about wildlife habitat, but also the nearby school.

“We’re really concerned about the disruption to the kids during the school day. What that will do to their use of their outside facilities, and also the safety concern that the dump truck traffic having to make U-turns to enter the site on 17 would cause and they would actually have to either use the road that the school traffic uses,” Gasper says.

Charleston County is already home to more than 30 sand mines according to DHEC’s records.

“There are going to be areas where there’s sand and dirt mining and we’re not unilaterally opposed to that. We think the environmental impacts need to be more closely considered, and that’s, you know, honestly a statewide issue,” Gasper says.

Egger agrees, saying the organization is looking into mines across the state level to gauge the current situation.

“The Lofton Mine is a prime example of where mines shouldn’t exist. And there needs to be a broader reform at the state level so that these don’t happen again,” Egger says.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

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Three decades have passed since the killer storm, Hurricane Hugo, cut a path of destruction through South Carolina and beyond.

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As the floodwater rose, Elizabeth Young hoisted her two grandsons, ages 3 and 4, on top of a refrigerator, and said a silent prayer that they would survive Hurricane Hugo.

The electricity in Lincoln High School in McClellanville had gone out hours before as the killer storm descended on South Carolina Sept. 21 and 22, 1989.

Now, Young and hundreds of other residents who had sought shelter in the Charleston County school huddled and cried in the dark as the north side of the eyewall passed over.

The water in the school kept inching higher and higher.

To their knees.

Then, their waists.

Then, their chests.

State and local officials had directed residents of the tiny fishing village, population 400, to seek shelter at the school as the storm moved in.

“(The school) never should have been a shelter, but no one knew that then,” said Young recently. “The water took over the building. We thought we were going to die. We knew we were trapped and couldn’t get out.”

With every door sealed tight by the rising water, evacuees climbed on top of tables, chairs, a stage in the cafeteria. One man in a wheelchair was lifted onto a table.

Young and her pregnant daughter, Sharon Brown, then 27, remained standing in the school’s home economics room so they could take turns holding Brown’s squirming boys on top of the refrigerator. The warm water inching up their chests, the two women prayed as small fish, crabs and bits of sea shells floated by.

“Miss Young,” said a friend standing nearby. “We came over here to drown.”

McClellanville — just 30 miles from where Hugo made landfall — was one of South Carolina’s hardest hit spots. And the stories that came out of Lincoln High School are some of the most harrowing.

With no major hurricane directly hitting South Carolina in about 30 years, many S.C. coastal residents chose not to evacuate.

But Hugo would be a different storm. A storm that South Carolina will never forget.

At Lincoln High, some tired of being overcrowded and elected to swim around in the water, clinging to buoyant belongings.

Jaynian White and 14 other members of her family floated near the ceiling of the band room, according to reporting by The State in September 1989. White tied her 1-year-old son to her while someone else lifter her 5-year-old son of top of a shelf. Her 82-year-old grandmother was held afloat by two other family members.

Even emergency personnel stationed at the shelter were caught off guard and rendered as helpless as the evacuees.

As paramedic George Metts wrote later: “The enormity of our situation was staggering. We were totally trapped. The tidal surge had risen so rapidly that we had no time to call for help. My walkie-talkie had gotten wet earlier and now it had fallen into the inky darkness. We were on our own. The water was still rising and those that could were packed like sardines on the stage.”

A few men managed to climb out a window and climb to the school’s roof. They had escaped the floodwater but were now buffeted by ferocious winds and flying debris, including terracotta shingles being ripped from the school’s roof.

Then, the water stopped rising. Perhaps two or three hours after the floodwater penetrated Lincoln High School, it began to seep out, the storm having moved inland, toward Columbia and Sumter.

“It was horrible but it was also a miracle,” Sharon Brown recently told The State. “Not one soul, not one person drowned.”

Daylight soon came, and people exited the building to inspect Hugo’s toll.

Homes were blown off their foundations. Cars had floated every which way, too, some deposited on top of each other. Coffins lay in the streets, washed out of their graves in nearby cemeteries.

As South Carolina picked up the pieces in the months to come, officials learned that a mistake had been made when Lincoln High was designated a storm shelter. The school, just a quarter-mile from the Intracoastal Waterway, was wrongly thought to stand at a much higher elevation.

These days, the school is closed — shut down in 2016. Outside its darkened cafeteria is a plaque, mounted slightly above eye level, marking the high water line of the storm surge.

Young, now 82, doesn’t need to see the plaque to remember.

“When I hear about a storm coming, Hugo comes back on me — all the memories of it, everything flashes right back on me,” she said. “It was bad but it also gave us courage. To be able to survive anything.”

Editor’s Note: This story includes 2014 reporting by writer Jason Ryan. Reporter Cody Dulaney contributed to this report.

This story was originally published September 21, 2019, 5:00 AM.

MCCLELLANVILLE — Selden B. "Bud" Hill may be South Carolina's most accidental historian and preservationist.

"I just had some time to kill after I retired from Haverty's," he said, briefly summing up his unlikely career transition two decades ago from managing a furniture company to founding The Village Museum here.

Born here and then raised in North Charleston, Hill never went to college, but he always had a passion for history, beginning with Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion.

During Hill's second career, which he describes as his best project by far, he has taught himself — and created a new institution that has preserved this area's history and continues to teach many others.

Some of them recently gathered at Town Hall for an event celebrating Hill's contributions, including his recent photographs in his new book, "Carolina Rambling," a collaboration with poet William Baldwin. The event included the unveiling of a portrait of Hill for display in the museum. It was a pretty heady moment for someone who fibbed his way into his first job.

"If you would have told me years ago that I would have my portrait made, I would have laughed at you like you were out of your mind."

Hill said any credit for the museum's success should be shared with the many people who have donated their time or personal artifacts — or both. It has taken a village to raise this museum.

"I've got a whole village of volunteers," he said. "I can't get them to come on a regular basis, but I can get them to do a project."

Converting tragedy into culture

When The New York Times ran a feature on McClellanville in the 1970s, it was dubbed "the village nobody knows."

The museum currently displays an advertisement about the original Cooper River Bridge's opening in 1929 — an event many felt would transform this tiny fishing village 30 miles to the north.

The new bridge did bring change, just not the change many had expected and hoped for.

"The Cooper River bridge was going to connect us to the outside world, finally," Hill said. "We were finally going to be discovered. We were finally going to grow. Exactly the opposite happened. Our people started going to Charleston to shop, and our stores closed."

"The blessing is though it sucked our businesses out of town, it kept us small," he added. "That's a good thing."

The bad thing roared ashore in 1989, as Hugo, South Carolina's most destructive hurricane, pummeled this town harder than anywhere else. Hill had the notion to create a museum and eyed the abandoned old town hall, where floors were still covered with a thick layer of muck.

The town moved its offices to a new, more elevated town hall next door, but some were still skeptical about Hill's plans.

"It was all washed out, muddy and filthy," Hill said of the old town hall. "The town asked, 'What if you fail?' I said, 'You still end up with a building that's air conditioned and heated with a roof on it.'"

Hugo not only provided a building for the museum but also a new sense of urgency to save what remained of the area's story.

"Old photographs were soaked and lost or blown away," he said. "So much was lost during that event."

'Rare to find high standards'

Hill was able to open the doors of The Village Museum in 1999, and its collection has doubled or even tripled since then.

The largest and most striking object is a rusting metal pin just outside the front door. Inside, visitors can see a working model of the former island sawmill from which that metal pin was taken.

The museum's small displays also cover many other topics, from the area's wildlife, its plantation past, rice cultivation, the Civil War, rural medicine, sweetgrass baskets, the Sewee Indians, shrimping, the Cape Romain Lighthouses and Archibald Rutledge, the state's first poet laureate and someone with whom Hill had visited as a child just a few blocks from the museum.

Hill said most items have trickled in over time, such as a scrap of a U.S. flag that flew over Fort Sumter and was cut into souvenir pieces for Confederate troops who occupied it. A 1790 land document was discovered for sale online, bought for $67 and put on display.

He also arranged for the dried rice stalk nearby. "I got tired of people asking me what it looked like, so I grew some and put it on display."

The museum also offers more than historical displays. Upstairs, visitors can find "the family room," which is lined with bookshelves whose contents can guide those tracing their genealogy.

"I get a lot of people who come to the museum and research their family," said Hill, whose ancestors were among the town's original settlers in 1685. So it's not uncommon Hill knows a visitor's ancestors, too.

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"I say a lot of times, 'You know you and I are cousins,'" he said. "It's a small state, a small world."

The museum has drawn praise from many, including experts such as Fath Ruffins, a curator with the Smithsonian's new Museum of African American History and Culture.

After she visited a few years ago, she wrote Hill a letter and praised the "gem" he created.

"I have toured many, many museums throughout this nation and other places around the world," she wrote. "While most small museums are run with a boundless enthusiasm, it is quite rare to find such high standards of care, such a detailed and complex understanding of different parts of a local community's history, and such a gracious and cordial host."

'Not just a facility'

But the museum's legacy lies beyond the exhibits within its four walls.

Hill and the museum have pitched in with efforts to erect a Lowcounty Seaman's Memorial and a new bandstand built in honor of the late local character Don Britt. Both are located just steps from the museum and the new Town Hall.

And the museum also has helped preserve parts of the wider St. James Santee Parish. It helped nominate Old Georgetown Road, also known as Kings Highway, a 6.6-mile-long dirt road just west of town, to the National Register of Historic Places.

Hill helped with a complicated effort to protect from development about 100 acres across Kings Highway from the St. James Santee Church, also known as Brick Church, which is marking its 250th year.

Mike Prevost has seen this unfold up close as a museum board member who worked for the Nature Conservancy before becoming president of White Oak Forestry, a division of Evening Post Industries, which owns this newspaper.

Prevost said the protection of the 100 acres involved the Nature Conservancy, state and local conservation dollars and private fundraising, and it ultimately led to the protection of more than 2,000 additional acres nearby.

"It was a very innovative and highly innovative partnership," Prevost said. "At the end of the day, the museum under Bud's leadership has been very instrumental in the preservation and conservation of eastern Charleston County."

Meanwhile, the museum has placed a number of plaques around historic homes in the town, too, and his research and resources have been used to document and stabilize Tibwin Plantation, a historic home nearby owned by the U.S. Forest Service, and to protect some of the last privately owned islands in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.

By year's end, Hill also hopes to erect a new historical marker here to Robert Blake, a former slave who was liberated from a Santee River plantation and soon became the first black to receive the Medal of Honor. (Hill notes Blake received his medal first, though another black soldier later received the medal for an earlier act of heroism).

Hill hopes Blake's new marker will inspire black students, adding, "The young ones need to know someone in their community made a difference."

The museum has made preservation and education part of its mandate, and it has self-published about 15 booklets covering different aspects of the region's past.

"We're not just a facility that tells a story in artifacts and displays," Hill says. "More than anything, we're educators. We teach people history."

A new horizon

Despite Hill already having his portrait painted and hung on the wall on the museum's second floor, he is not out the door yet.

Hill continues to serve as "director emeritus" but remains suspicious of the new title.

"As soon as I get a few minutes, I'm going to look that word up," he joked. "I think I get more work out of that title than honor."

Hill also is working with new director Randy McClure on yet another important project, digitizing the museum's records and recordings and finding a home for them on the web.

"The greatest opportunity is the computer. The computer will free up space for us," Hill said. "We've got recordings of Archibald Rutledge reading his poetry that soon will be available to everybody."

Hill refers to McClure as "the computer whiz," while McClure calls Hill "the Supreme Leader."

Both agreed that even if the museum is able to expand its building a little, bringing the museum's contents into the digital age is crucial in making sure the museum serves the town in future years.

"If you collect it and nobody knows you have it, it's worthless," Hill said. "It might as well be under your bed at home."

The digitizing of the museum's ever-growing collection of genealogical and other town records also will help make sure they're not lost the next time a major storm draws a bead on this town.

Reach Robert Behre at 843-937-5771. Follow him on Twitter @RobertFBehre.

Shallow redfish rule in McClellanville’s vast backwater areas

Winter has set in, and many anglers have retired their boats until spring. But along the South Carolina coastline, fishing opportunities are far from over. The shallows make the McClellanville area a redfish hot spot.

Anglers know where the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge is and will head to this relatively desolate area to take the wide-open spaces. One is Matt Burke of Skinny Water Guide Service. He spends as much time in the area midway between Georgetown and Charleston, chasing redfish in super-shallow water.

“Redfish congregate in schools over the winter in shallow water about as skinny as they can get it,” said Burke (843-340-6705). “They choose shallow water for thermal warmth and to avoid predators.”

Cape Romain and Bulls Bay offer a wealth of habitat in the super skinny category. The scattered islands and shallow marsh is pristine and a perfect situation for harboring a wintering population of redfish. They congregate in groups in shallow flats back in the bays and along the shallow margins along the ICW.

Redfish travel in groups from 15 to 100. Burke doesn’t think the size of the school is as important as its level of activity.

“The size of the school really doesn’t matter. I prefer active fish. I like to see some fish movement of some sort. It can be the fish pushing around or even just with bait flipping,” he said.

“I look for mid-day low tides between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. The exposed mud will heat up with the sun that warms up the water as it rises. When the water warms up, the fish are a little happier.”

Burke approaches a school carefully and makes deliberate casts.

“I prefer to cast nearly weightless flies in the winter to have the lightest presentation as possible,” he said. He prefers No. 4 flies that could be a small shrimp, minnow or crab. It’s the gentle presentation that will get a red’s attention. He also uses spinning tackle and small scented soft plastics on a light jighead.

Apart from duck hunters and some transient traffic along the ICW, most saltwater estuaries are void of traffic due to the chilly conditions. But for anglers looking to have a little wintertime fun, McClellanville is a redfish hot spot. It can be epic and well worth the price of admission.

MCCLELLANVILLE — Surrounded by pine trees and empty fields off a dirt road, a historic brick church and its rural surroundings look a lot like it did centuries ago.

On Sunday, the scene at the St. James-Santee Episcopal Parish church will mirror its Colonial-era roots even more when worshippers pack the boxed-in cypress pews for a Colonial-style service to celebrate the church’s roots.

Also known as the Brick Church at Wambaw, named after a nearby creek, the structure will host a Thanksgiving Harvest service on Sunday to celebrate its 250th anniversary. A traditional Episcopal worship service will honor those who laid the foundation of the parish along with modern-day parishioners who've helped preserve the site.

“This is where we celebrate our beginnings,” said Bud Hill, director of the Village Museum whose ancestors attended the church.

Built in 1768, when South Carolina was still a British Colony, the brick church's congregation consisted of several French Huguenot families that operated successful rice plantations along the nearby Santee River.

The edifice was placed on King’s Highway (present-day Old Georgetown Road), which connected Charleston to Boston in the Colonial era and was used by President George Washington during his tour of the South.

But navigating the dirt road's muddy potholes became an obstacle, so the St. James-Santee Episcopal Chapel of Ease was constructed farther inland in McClellanville by 1890.

This caused worship to dwindle at the brick church and the structure wasn't well-maintained. Over the 20th century, the church’s roof became worn, timbers under the floors rotted and pews needed to be repaired.

“It was kind of ratty looking,” Hill said of the church during the early 1900s.

This sparked the formation of the St. James-Santee Brick church restoration and Preservation Committee in 1992. The group, which includes members of the nearby Chapel of Ease and other concerned residents, secured funding to care for the structure.

A brick and wooden enclosure was recently completed to surround the site, and the building's leaking roof was replaced by a copper covering two years ago. Vandalism also had been an issue, so a house was built where Hill now lives and watches for perpetrators.

To ensure that the church and its the surrounding property maintain their historic character, both the church and present-day Old Georgetown Highway have been placed on the National Registry.

Today, the Brick Church is only used twice a year for worship: the Sunday after Easter and the Sunday before Thanksgiving. The doors are unlocked and it's open for guests to visit. Hill said the open-door policy is used so people won't break down the doors to come in.

It is similar to several other historic Episcopal structures throughout the tri-county region. While the edifices are seldom used for worship, they are cared for by committed vestry members.

“If we did not have the committee that we have today, it would probably look run-down,” Hill said.

Meanwhile, the Chapel of Ease in McClellanville is active. The church brings in about 40 parishioners each Sunday and participates in a community Bible study on Wednesdays.

It also has a children’s art ministry, supports the local senior center, funds overseas mission efforts and hosts weekly coffee gatherings in its parish hall.

The Rev. Caroline Goodkind, interim vicar of St. James-Santee Episcopal Church, said it’s important for the congregation to reconnect with its past. On Sunday, she said the church will recognize the “value of the saints that went before us.”

“It’s just part of who we are,” she said.

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