The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 3: Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past and Present, 1893–2006 by Lawrence S. Rowland and Stephen R. Wise (review)

Bridging the Sea Islands’ Past and Present, 1893–2006 is the third of three excellent volumes on the history of Beaufort County, South Carolina, written by Lawrence S. Rowland and Stephen R. Wise. Rowland is distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and past president of the South Carolina Historical Society. Wise is the director of the Parris Island Museum and the author of Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running during the Civil War (Columbia, S.C., 1988) and Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863 (Columbia, S.C., 1994). As historians, storytellers, and regional experts, they have set a very high bar.

Rowland and Wise continue to draw heavily on the “names, not numbers” tradition that they used so effectively in the previous two volumes (p. xix). By this technique, readers are introduced to a dizzying array of individuals that represented and gave life to the particular phenomenon under discussion. Captain Henry Von Harten, “the most experienced pilot on the Port Royal bar,” appears among the losses of the damaging hurricanes of 1898 (p. 17). The death of merchant F. W. Scheper in 1913 “marked the end of an era of great enterprise” (p. 61). Robert Smalls, the “King of Beaufort County,” was seemingly ubiquitous, and his 1915 death was marked by the “bittersweet irony” that he had lived long enough to see the Reconstruction-era political revolution give way to the beginnings of the Great Exodus of African Americans from the sea islands (pp. 32, 183). Sidney Benton is described as “the lettuce king” during the heyday of truck farming between 1908 and 1928 (p. 212). Congressman James F. “Jimmy” Byrnes, “Beaufort’s man of influence in Washington,” played a pivotal role in the construction of the bridges and highways built between 1908 and 1929 that “determined the patterns of transportation, settlement, and commerce for the county for the next half century” (pp. 276, 225). J. Edward McTeer, the legendary “high sheriff of the lowcountry,” battled moonshiners during the Prohibition era (p. 271). Leland Grayson, the seven-foot-three “Beaufort Behemoth,” is highlighted as “the physically largest soldier from South Carolina during World War II,” and boxer Smokin’ Joe Frazier claims title to “the most famous Beaufortonian of the twentieth century” (pp. 365, 388). These and a potpourri of other such characterizations bring to life the narrative in a very readable and memorable way.

In addition to these rich explorations of personalities, Rowland and Wise succinctly and expertly analyze the region’s themes of “frontiers and revolution—if not always progress” (p. xvii). They explore the demographic changes that “transformed Beaufort County from a 90.5 percent majority black population in 1900 to a 61 percent majority white population in 1960”; that made it a “Marine Corps town,” complete with “a working middle class,” thanks to the establishment of the recruit depot at Parris Island in 1915; and that created a haven for leisure seekers and retirees that began with wealthy northerners in the late nineteenth century and resurged with the opening of Del Webb’s Sun City in 1993 (pp. xviii, 364). The authors trace the region’s agriculture and economic journey through the prominence of cotton, truck farming, and phosphates. Rowland and Wise tell the impressive story of the fusion politics that “transformed a former Confederate and Democratic stronghold into a model of biracial democracy that survived into the worst years of Jim Crow political tyranny” (p. xix). The authors go on to relate the county’s “exemplary” response to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s that stood as “a worthy tribute to its pathbreaking Reconstruction history” (p. 387). Unsurprisingly, given the book’s title, they convincingly make the case that “[t...