By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, early, and I’m in Port Royal. This morning I have my coffee (Green Mountain Breakfast Blend) and a Thomas “Easy to Split” English Muffin. This morning we read the U.S. Army has rebranded Ft. Hood and other confederate general-named posts.
Bragg, Benning and A. P. Hill are no more.
In this connection I’ve been thinking monuments and statues and, in particular, the bust of Robert Smalls rendered by Marian Etheredge in 1975. That bust is located in the side yard of Tabernacle Baptist, but I first saw a clay prototype in an empty oil change bay at Discount Tire just off Boundary Street.
The bust was commissioned by County Council, but I don’t remember who came up with the idea. I’ve got to think Leroy Browne, the first African-American to sit on Council, had a hand in the project.
Marian Etheredge was an unlikely choice (as the artist) because she had never done a sculpture before; and her nude paintings were routinely removed from competition at Beaufort art shows. But somehow Marian won this commission and taught herself how to work with clay and bronze.
I interviewed Marian one afternoon and found, of course, there was controversy surrounding her work. She wanted to render Robert Smalls with an African-styled “frontispiece”; her patrons wanted a standard 19th Century waistcoat. The Council-appointed committee would eventually prevail with a period jacket, vest and bow tie. All of which brings me to another monument; this one would memorialize a recently removed live oak just off 12th Street in Port Royal.
Many of you know the story of Elizabeth Bergmann and her effort to stop the chainsaw-assisted removal of a 43-inch oak by Coastal Homes and Sunrooms last July.
One remembers the public meeting in July. And the widespread opposition to the cutting. And finally the issuing of the permit by the Town. One may also remember Bergmann’s appeal to the Zoning Board of Adjustment. And then the compromise that eventually saved a second, threatened oak — this oak being a 60-inch landmark.
The parties in this controversy signed a settlement agreement in October 2022, allowing the larger, 60-inch tree to remain in place with “reduction cutting and/or removal of limbs.” The Agreement also called for the donation of a “portion of the 43-inch oak tree” — the tree removed — to be repurposed “into a monument or memorial.”
And so I met with Elizabeth Bergmann to discuss the re-purposing and rendering of the (three-ton) trunk into a sculpture that would reinforce the notion that Port Royal values its tree canopy.
Notwithstanding profit projections that call for placing hundreds of new apartment units on Port Royal’s “unimproved property,” the local folks — a clear majority of the local folks — want the old specimen trees to stay in place without “reduction cutting and/or removal of limbs.” How do the local people convey to Charlotte-based MBAs, the New York based REITs, the real estate heavy mutual funds that they should honor local sentiment before reducing our landscape to billiard table flatness.
Bergmann’s repurposed tree trunk could depict Mother Earth planting a sapling — Mother in the same disheveled attire first seen in Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” Or, perhaps, we could show a dazed man having a Road to Damascus revelation. A revelation that will cause him to remove his hard hat, drop his chainsaw and spend the rest of his life preaching the gospel of tree conservation.
One might imagine a wooden tableau showing Elizabeth Bergmann, Wendell Varnes and Van Willis signing the “October Accords” ending the troubles between those of us who share this small, precious peninsula. A device could be placed inside the trunk connected to ear phones that would have a short message from each of these three people.
But whatever the truncated tree memorial eventually looks like, it is clear that Elizabeth Bergmann, Kit Bruce, Jessie White, Wendy Zara and Noah Krepps made a much stronger tree ordinance in the wake of this controversy.
Now the removal of a 30-inch Live Oak will cost the applicant a mitigation fee of $22,500. This money is likely to make a developer pause, do a little back of the envelope math, wondering if the offending Oak can be somehow worked into his development plan.
Maybe this revised ordinance is the enduring, actual monument to Bergmann and the Port Royal people who jumped, feet first, into the fray last summer.Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com
