By Tim Wood
Around 1987, I was fortunate enough to be appointed the project manager for the conversion of the Rhett House on Craven Street into its present form as one of Beaufort’s finest Bed & Breakfasts. Before that, I think the Thomas Rhett House had last been a boarding house for women or a funeral home, depending on who you’d wish to believe.
Steve and Marianne Harrison brought the building into its final variation, after many (relatively) recent ones, as it became The Rhett House Inn. The last time it had actually been an inn was as The Cherokee Inn sometime in the 1940’s. Through ongoing variations during the 50s through the 70s it came to house the corporate offices of Alcoa as they developed Dataw Island. Steve and Marianne basically took it from there.
When the Tucker family owned it, sometime in the late 1930’s, I believe, the patriarch of “The Tucker Inn” built the iconic curved staircase that’s on every other souvenir post card in almost all our gift shops. I personally think he built the staircase around the two planters that crown the two huge newels of brick and stucco, showing them off, so to speak. Those pots today now seem to have flowers in them year round. I can also attest that Mr. Tucker did not intend for that staircase to ever come down, let alone those two flower pots.
When it came time for the final decorating and staging of their inn, for some reason Marianne felt that the planters did not fit into her vision. I was asked to remove the planters and did so, obediently. There are one-and-one-half-inch threaded rods anchored through the center heart of those two newels, that bolt those planters to the newels.
As I started the work to remove them, the bolts and rods were just two huge lumps of hardened rust deposits. Working gently to not damage the newels themselves, it took two days to saw through the rods in order to save the planters and keep the newels intact.
A well known Beaufortonian by the name of Dottie McDaniel lived beside the Rhett House during this time. I knew Dottie well, as she had become a good friend with my own mother here in Beaufort. She came up to me during the work and asked what I planned to do with the planters. I asked Marianne and the planters were sold to Dottie for around $25 each. Dottie was extremely excited and Marianne has happy to part with them.
I think it was the very next day of all this activity that Mrs. Jane Ridings, (Jane bought the Tucker Inn from her parents and she and her husband both created The Cherokee Inn), made a formal complaint to the Beaufort Historical Foundation and city hall that the Rhett House had basically been crudely vandalized by taking the planters down. It horrified Steve and Marianne, as well as me, that we had offended any Beaufort natives within our adoptive home; We just didn’t think of the planters as being “historically” vital. I immediately went back to retrieve the planters from Dottie in order to reinstall them.
The only problem was that Dottie would not sell them back to us. She told me she bought them fair and square and that they now were indeed hers. I must say I was shocked. I thought we were friends because of my having known Dottie and having had numerous cocktails with her and my mother at various times. It was an upsetting issue for me.
Dottie and I went back and forth a number of times for two weeks as I tried in vain to get her to sell the planters back to us. During this time the city deemed that the planters needed to go back and a certificate of occupancy was riding on it. I became furious with Dottie; she would not budge. Out of desperation I finally told Dottie that I would go to the police and confess that I had removed the planters without permission and that I also sold them without permission and that certainly she would be viewed as having bought stolen goods. This finally broke her, but we ended up paying $75 each for the pair in extortion fees.
It took another two days to reattach the planters. My friend Jimmy Pender came over to carefully weld two new rod extensions onto the buried old rods and we re-bolted the planters down, grouting them in. All in all it was a costly fiasco and to this day, when I ride or walk past that staircase, I think of crazy and stubborn Dottie McDaniel, but being even more impressed with the strength of Mr. Tucker’s (and his daughter’s) mark in history.
Tim and Kristy Wood moved to Beaufort in 1974. He worked as a carpenter in both restoration and new home construction, as well as operating a shop specializing in custom woodwork, Wood on Wood Specs. He is semi-retired, involved with fine woodworking and formerly sat on the City of Beaufort Zoning Board of Appeals.
