By Bill Rauch
The Beaufort City Council is currently grappling with what to do about Beaufort’s iconic Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park. The park’s foundations are deteriorating.
The park is built on a steel reinforced concrete relieving platform (shelf) held up by steel reinforced concrete pilings that were driven into the Beaufort River’s riverbed. The shelf extends about 65 feet inland from the seawall, and it runs the full length of the park, from the Woods Bridge to the marina parking lot.
Council has received various reports regarding the extent of the deterioration to the shelf and pilings. It was one of these reports from the city’s engineers that prompted the city to close the seawall promenade during this summer’s Water Festival.
Not that it will help solve Council’s problem – it will take money, and lots of it, to do that – but those who wonder “How did we get here?” are entitled to an explanation.
At the close of World War II, what we know now as the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park was a series of docks, wharves and slips, many of which were deteriorating. They extended out the back doors of the buildings we now know as, for example, Saltus and Luther’s. But in those days those buildings did not house restaurants. Although Luther’s was a pharmacy, many of the other downtown riverside buildings housed what was left of Beaufort’s once-thriving seafood processing businesses.
In 1946, Beaufort elected Angus Fordham its mayor. Fordham, a U.S. Army reservist who was called to active duty after Pearl Harbor and who served with distinction in the Pacific throughout the war, had just returned home to open the hardware store that for two generations would bear his name.
These were exciting years in Beaufort. Mayor Fordham, who served as Beaufort’s mayor until 1963, did many things. Among them was the creation in the mid-1950’s of “Freedom Mall,” the area we know now as “the marina parking lot.” Downtown needed parking, and Mayor Fordham arranged for the city to secure easements to the riparian rights of the various landowners there. Then the city built a seawall around where the docks used to be and they pumped dredge spoils into the area bordered by the seawall and the high ground, thus creating what we know now as the marina parking lot. The marina came later.
The effort was very successful. Half a surplus quonset hut was hauled in to serve as a bandshell, and the first Beaufort Water Festival was held at the city’s new Freedom Mall in the summer of 1956.
By 1959, according to the city’s 1959 Annual Report, plans were being made to secure the riparian rights of all the businesses from the marina parking lot down to the old bridge to Lady’s Island (the Woods Bridge hadn’t been built yet). The idea was to build a city street along the newly filled in and cleaned-up waterfront that would open up more parking and relieve traffic on Bay Street.
When Henry Chambers became Mayor in 1969, all the necessary riparian rights had been secured and, according to the minutes of council meetings in the early 70’s, the plans for the “Waterfront Thru-way” were moving ahead.
However, from Council minutes it appears that it was at a March 1973 meeting in Washington with U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond that Mayor Chambers first learned of a pot of Federal money called “Outdoor Recreation grants.” It was apparently the availability of large sums of this “new money” that gave Mayor Chambers the idea of jettisoning the “Thru-way” in favor of a larger project that came then to be known as the “Waterfront Recreation Project.”
Clemson friends of the mayor’s, engineers at the prestigious Spartanburg firm of Lockwood Greene, were brought in to engineer the new project and there was, according to a councilmember who served at the time, “no controversy regarding the state-of-the-art relieving platform plan. If Lockwood Greene said that that was the way to go, then that was the way the city was going to go.”
Council minutes show bids were set to be opened on June 14, 1974, but without explanation the bid-opening process was at the last minute pushed back by three weeks. In that Mayor Chambers’ company, Burton Block, was one of the bidders, the delay raises questions. Nonetheless, although Council’s minutes are mysteriously sketchy, those involved at the time agree that Burton Block who fabricated the seawall sections, the pilings and the deck sections, and Trans-Atlantic Construction out of Savannah who with their barge-mounted steam crane drove the seawall and the pilings into the riverbed and lifted into place the deck, were the park’s major builders. Lockwood Greene supplied the engineering and Robert Marvin out of Walterboro drew the above-ground plan.
After the bids had been opened, Mayor Chambers told Council the “bulkhead” (which apparently included constructing and placing the seawall, the pilings, and the deck) would cost $2.7M. When the job was complete, Chambers, who had in innumerable trips to Washington raised the money from an array of Federal agencies, said the park’s total cost was $6.5 million, a figure that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator is equal to about $64 million in today’s dollars.
According to Council’s minutes, in a telephone meeting “exclusive of the mayor” on Oct. 6, 1976, Council voted to name the new park “The Henry C. Chambers Park,” and to celebrate Oct. 22, 1976, as “Henry C. Chambers Appreciation Day.”
In 2005, the city spent about $7M updating structural and use deficiencies in the park. This year’s price tag is yet to be known.
Bill Rauch was the Mayor of Beaufort from 1999 to 2008 and has won multiple awards from the S.C. Press Association for his Island News columns. He can be reached at TheRauchReport@gmail.com.
