Help us prepare for our latest historic preservation project, a historic resource survey of unincorporated Beaufort County on St. Helena Island and south of the Broad River

Beaufort County is conducting a historic resources survey of St. Helena Island and unincorporated areas south of the Broad River. The county has retained professional historians and architectural historians from Stantec Consulting Inc. to complete the project. Historic resource surveys are an important planning tool and will help the county prepare for future preservation projects and honor and celebrate our diverse and unique heritage. Prior historic resources surveys have focused on the county’s history before 1950. The current project will identify and document historic places built between 1950 and 1979 and will prioritize resources associated with underrepresented communities. Survey fieldwork will occur between July and August 2024 and will consist of taking photographs, noting architectural features, and mapping each property, all from the public right-of-way.

As an initial step, we ask community members to participate in an online questionnaire. You can contribute to the success of the project by helping us identify places in the survey area that we should know about. We want to tell the full story of our community, so we are particularly interested in places that may not have received much attention from historians in the past. Community input is essential to identifying historic resources, and we encourage you to share the questionnaire. It can be accessed at the following link until April 4, 2024: http://tinyurl.com/BCHistoricPlaces.

We encourage you to attend the next Historic Preservation Review Board Meeting on March 21 to learn more about the project. The meeting will be held at 1:00 p.m. in the Executive Conference Room, Administration Building, Beaufort County Government Robert Smalls Complex, 100 Ribaut Road, Beaufort, SC. The meeting can also be watched online live or on-demand here: www.beaufortcounty.tv.

Photo Credit: William D. Workman, Sign for Frogmore, South Carolina, no date, William D. Workman, Jr. Papers Photographs, University of South Carolina Digital Collections.