Chimney Sweep in Meggett, SC

A year ago this month, Charleston boxing legend Al “Hollywood” Meggett was told the building that had housed his gym since 1973 was a “threat to human life and safety.”

The two-story brick structure at 1099 King St. that first served as a fire station when built in the 1930s was in need of major renovations after years of structural damage and decay.

Meggett had to leave, and hasn’t been able to train youth boxers at the Charleston Boxing Club since.

“We had to go in and take all the pictures down and pack them up because they said we had to get out of there,” Meggett said in December, three months after he got the notice.

Today, early steps toward massive renovations have begun to rid the facility of water leaks, termite damage and cracked walls, among other issues that have plagued the building.

The city of Charleston has largely stuck to its fix schedule, stating in December that would begin in mid-2019. A design should be finalized by the first quarter of 2020, with construction starting later in the year, said Cameron Wolfsen, a spokesperson for the city.

Wolfsen said about $13,000 has already been spent on structural analysis and code assessment. Now the city is seeking bids for lead abatement and architectural design services for the new gym.

A selection committee is evaluating proposals and will get contract approvals from City Council once the committee settles on candidates.

The city said in December that bringing the facility up to code would cost around $400,000. Now, with more information, officials aren’t sure if that number is accurate.

“Not yet,” Wolfsen said when asked this week if they knew how much it would cost. “An estimate or probable construction costs will be required from the design team.”

Following the walk-through last year, a report prepared by a structural engineer said no one should be occupying the facility because of the termite damage, large cracks and various other code violations.

That forced Meggett to pack up memorabilia that once graced the walls of his gym, including reminders of famous boxers and leaders who have visited over the years. Boxing greats Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier, and former U.S. Sens. Fritz Hollings and Strom Thurmond, both of South Carolina, are just a few examples.

Meggett has still been active, including earlier this year when he held a boxing event at the Arthur W. Christopher Community Center on Fishburne Street.

But he still wants back in his gym, which gets support from all sides. The city has covered costs for water and power, and donors have provided boxing equipment.

That has allowed Meggett to focus on mentoring kids, something he’s done in Charleston since he moved from Harlem, N.Y., about 40 years ago.

“I have half of my life in that building,” Meggett, 89, said. “So I’m ready to get back in there and keep doing what I’ve been doing for the community.”

The final product will be different from before, Wolfsen said. The gym, which was housed on the second floor, is being moved to the first floor. Support space for the gym, such as offices and storage, will be upstairs.

Meggett said he’s eagerly awaiting a call from city officials when the repairs are complete so he can go over design documents with them.

Reporting from Meggett, S.C. —

Hewitt Emerson stuffed himself into a wetsuit, took a deep breath and plunged from a barge into the murky black waters of the Edisto River.

Emerson swam down to the muck of the river bottom more than a dozen feet below. On deck, his buddy Justin Herrington scanned the banks for alligators and monitored drooping live oak limbs for dangling water moccasins — his Ruger P35 pistol close at hand.

They were in search of treasure — hand-cut logs well over a century old, the forgotten legacy of milling operations that flourished along the river until after the Civil War. Emerson was trying to locate the butt end of a shapely longleaf pine he’d spotted from the barge. The logs can command thousands of dollars for their intricately beautiful grains and long, straight cuts.

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Across the coast of the Southeastern U.S., pine and cypress were harvested into the late 1800s. Most logs were lashed together with metal “spike dogs” and floated or towed downstream to mills.

Inevitably, many of the timbers broke loose and tumbled to river bottoms or became embedded in riverbanks. They are now perfectly preserved specimens prized for milling into tables, mantles, bed frames, flooring and bar surfaces.

The special properties of the Edisto River turn old logs into sustained jewels. The Edisto is a “black water” river — the color of black tea because of tannins, or humic acid, released by rotting vegetation. The tannins preserve the wood, which spends generations in waters depleted of oxygen that would normally cause decay.

For the last three years, Emerson, 28, has steered his barge along rivers in South Carolina in pursuit of “sinker wood,” as the logs are known. With his unruly hair and shaggy beard, he looks like a laid-back nature child, but is actually a successful Charleston entrepreneur — with interests in Internet services, a restaurant and woodworking.

On this sunny day, he and Herrington were searching for logs to be sliced into slabs at Herrington’s sawmill nearby. Herrington is 34, slender and cleanshaven, with curly black hair. He’s a self-described “country boy” woodworker who lives next door to the sawmill.

Young, active and physically fit, the men are drawn by the lure of the hunt for attractive artifacts they consider potential works of art.

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Underwater, Emerson found the end of the pine and struggled to wrap the log with a steel cable. His find was a beauty — nearly 20 feet long, 15 inches in diameter.

Emerson fought the log for a long while, coming up for air several times. He finally got the cable around it and clamped a huge set of metal tongs on the wood.

Herrington cranked the electric winch. The log slowly emerged from the cloudy water like some sea beast, thick and massive, a mottled green and brown.

“Oh, yeah — got it!” Emerson shouted from the water. “You can see the ax-cut on the end.”

Herrington’s yellow lab, Sinker, padded across the barge to sniff the funky-smelling specimen.

After considerable effort, the men lashed the log to the side of the barge.

“Oh, that’s a fine log,” Herrington said, inspecting the prize. “It has a giant heart — I can see that from here.”

Known colloquially as a “heart pine” and commercially as “hard pine,” the log’s core had matured and hardened in the water over the decades to a swirling, tightly packed grain.

“That’s a beautiful piece,” Emerson said. He shook his head briskly to expel river water from his hair and beard. “The rings are tighter than I thought.”

The log could be worth up to a couple of thousand dollars, Emerson figured, once it was cut and milled, then dried in a solar-powered kiln.

Herrington said he sold a cypress table for $7,500 and is asking $10,000 for a massive fish he carved from a cypress log. In his workshop, he’s also using cypress to fashion an expensive 20-foot-long bar commissioned by a tavern owner.

The two men cut most recovered logs into long slabs that expose the grain. “Slabs are what people want,” Emerson said. “An old tree is great, but a giant slab out of that tree is even better.”

Despite the commercial value of sinker wood, few people in South Carolina expend the cost and effort to recover it, said William B. Barr, who owns a marine and terrestrial archaeology company in Leesville.

“It’s exceedingly dangerous work — not the easy money it might look like on TV,” Barr said. “If you’ve got a log on a winch and it slips off on top of you, you’re dead.”

Barr said he knows of only seven people who hunt sinker wood in the state besides Emerson and Herrington. Only a couple turn a profit.

Sinker wood is also gathered in North Carolina and Florida, said Jim Spirek, South Carolina’s state underwater archaeologist.

“I get calls from people interested in it — until they find out how much money you have to invest and how hard the work is,” he said.

An annual South Carolina recovery permit costs $500 for in-state residents and $1,000 for others, Spirek said. But to legally recover sinker wood, one also must pay $8,000 to $10,000 for a “submerged cultural resource survey” to inspect and map a mile of river bottom for artifacts such as schooner wrecks, fossils, and “man-made artifacts” such as sinker wood.

Spirek said Emerson and Herrington were operating with expired annual permits and needed to renew them to avoid fines if they removed any logs from the water. Emerson said he discovered belatedly that the Edisto permit was three days out of date.

Cypress trees were harvested for use in boat hulls and boat decking because of their length and density. Longleaf pines were in such demand for their long, straight trunks that they often were designated “king’s trees” during the colonial era and reserved for making ship masts, Barr said.

The pines were also tapped for rosin and turpentine. Many pine sinker logs recovered today still bear “cat face” cuts, or chevrons, where the trees were slashed to drain resin.

The standard log was cut 14 1/2 feet long, Barr said, though some logs exceed 16 feet and can weigh hundreds of pounds. Emerson said the biggest specimen he’d recovered was a 30-foot cypress. Some trees, especially cypress, were well over a century old when felled.

To locate logs, Emerson often relies on sonar or studies old railroad maps to determine where logs were unloaded from the river. But on this day on the Edisto, he and Herrington used a more basic method — the naked eye.

They scanned the river for “floaters” — logs that had broken free from the river bottom or banks. They also looked for “big naturals” — trees that were never logged but tumbled into the water on their own. Those may be taken without a permit, Spirek said, as long as the root ball is left intact.

The men plunged into the water wearing wetsuits and flippers and swam down to search for logs.

Emerson and Herrington discovered several promising specimens and marked the locations on a hand-held GPS device for later retrieval.

Along the weedy riverbank, they stumbled across a massive, partially submerged cypress. Emerson went under and fought to get a cable around it but couldn’t shoulder the log out of the muck. He marked the spot on the GPS.

Toward dusk, Herrington turned the barge back toward home. They chugged along the glassy, deserted river past abandoned rice plantations, lurking alligators, white egrets and turtles that slid off logs and plopped into the dark water.

At the landing, sweating and cursing, they managed to get the longleaf pine log tied up along the bank. Then they slogged onto dry land, wet and sunburned, one more sinker log closer to payday.

MEGGETT, S.C. (WCBD) – Lowcountry Leadership Charter School is celebrating ten years of creating leaders through Project Based Learning experiences. Students say their school is the G.O.A.T. literally.

For students at Lowcountry Leadership Charter School in Meggett, South Carolina, a day of learning involves feeding and tending to goats and chickens.

“We have wonderful CTE programs in our high school, that’s Career and Technical Education. Our largest CTE program is agriculture. We have a farm on campus,” said school leader Julianne Lang.

“Here on the farm, we feed animals. We learn how to use heavy machinery. We take the eggs, we sell them. The milk from the goat we use to make lotion and lipstick,” explained tenth-grade student Braden Van Dort.

Students there are excelling in agricultural business.

“Our AG teacher makes it fun. We experience new things. It’s more than just agriculture, we learn business, life goals,” he said.

Agricultural education teacher Katie Bell says, “It’s a learning laboratory. Every animal and plant here has a purpose. We teach everything from plant science to animal science. Students in high school can become completers, which is CTE program here, that’s an extra certification at graduation. They can also be a part of our FFA chapter, Future Farmers of America. We do a lot of leadership activities, so the students not only learn hands-on real-world skills in the program, but they’re also becoming leaders in the community, and in the nation.” Junior Keziah Darby is planning a career in agriculture and says she has a major head start. “If you take four classes, you get a certificate. It basically helps you with your scholarships. I like that we’re hands-on, and not just you do this, you do that. Everyone is hands-on with it.”

This is just one of the Career Technical Education opportunities at LLCS.

School leader Julianne Lang said the focus is on developing leaders through Project Based experiences. “So, our mission is to have a safe exceptional academic environment that cultivates independent learners through hands-on experiences,” she said.

LLCS serves more than 500 students in K-5 through 12th grade, in Charleston, Dorchester, and Colleton counties.

And the state charter school has academic bragging rights. “We do outperform all of our local schools academically,” said Lang.

Inside the classroom, students in Mrs. Jasmine Winn’s math class are learning about statistics and probability with a fun twist.

“Every Wednesday, we have fantasy football Wednesday, our big project for the first two quarters. They get to take actual NFL players and use their points and stats to calculate using formulas to see how many points their players got, and they’re competing against other students in the class in healthy competition. Lots of math, they learn how to graph, analyze charts and data, statistics and probability,” said Winn. “It helps keep kids engaged, who don’t respond well to traditional learning, really respond well to project-based learning when they get to have real-world experiences. Our school is the coolest school.”

LLCS renews its charter this year, as they celebrate ten years, and look ahead to the next ten.

Lang says, “The mission for us to develop accountable leaders, community stewards, and diverse thinkers is really what we’ve seen come to fruition with our school. We’re still continuing to grow some of our programs, and we’re really excited about that growth. We’re starting an addition to the facility soon, and expanding a little bit, and so we’re really excited about the future at LLCS.”

If you would like to nominate a Cool School or educator, send an email to Octavia Mitchell at omitchell@wcbd.com.

OPINION AND COMMENTARY

Editorials and other Opinion content offer perspectives on issues important to our community and are independent from the work of our newsroom reporters.

Opinion

A Sunday morning national news program has a weekly segment titled “Lives Well Lived” to honor the lives of recently deceased people who have used wisdom and compassion to make meaningful contributions to society. South Carolina lost one such person last month, a lady whose life was redolent with creativity, compassion and love for her native Edisto Island.

Emily Meggett was not necessarily a household name in our state, but she should have been. And although she received national praise and attention last year for the publication of her cookbook, “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island,” she remained what she had always been — a lady who loved the place where she was born and where she spent her entire life, the place she and her husband raised 10 children.

“Ms. Emily,” as everyone called her, died at the age of 90 in April.

In a day in which we spend too much time fascinated about infamous and scandalous citizens of our state, it’s refreshing to take a breather and recognize a lady like Ms. Emily.

For the past year, her culinary skills and her philosophy of life have made her a revered figure, ever since the cookbook she wrote appeared on The New York Times bestseller list and was nominated just last week for a 2023 James Beard cookbook award, an honor that came only a few days after Ms. Emily’s death.

Called by the Times, “the first high-profile cookbook centered on the food of the descendants of the enslaved people of the coastal South,” the book’s 123 recipes were ones Ms. Emily made for her husband and children, her large church family, and for families for whom Ms. Emily had worked as a cook over the years. It was one of these families who encouraged her to write the cookbook and helped her put it together.

She never used a recipe herself, never measured her ingredients, and created her dishes based on what had been handed down in her family for many generations.

According to those who knew her well, Ms. Emily spent much of her life giving to people on Edisto Island who needed her help. Long before her success as a cookbook author, she spent nearly 70 years gaining the reputation of someone who gave what she could to people who needed help, especially those who needed food to eat. She often drove around Edisto Island with a pot of food in her car, seeking people who needed a meal, and as she once said, “asking God to lead her to especially needy people.”

Her cookbook fame publicized the fact that everyone who knew Ms. Emily understood that, if her kitchen door was open, anyone could stop by for food. Evidently, this inspired several of her cookbook fans to travel across the country to see if her kitchen door was open, not to eat her food but to thank her for her amazing recipes.

I was one of those folks who wanted to just drop by and say hello and thank her for the best deviled crab recipe on the planet, as well as marvel at her life of helping others.

When a friend and I arrived at her house, the kitchen door was closed, so we turned to leave. One of Ms. Emily’s daughters appeared at the door to tell us that her mother was not at home, and I asked if I could leave a note for her.

My note didn’t say all I wanted to say, but I was happy to have left it for her. I just wanted to thank this lady who loved the land, who loved her heritage, who offered help to others as part of her everyday life, and who gave the world a glimpse of our state that is inspiring.

Hers was indeed a life well lived.

On Sunday, Johnson encouraged her peers to participate in the study, titled "A Journey to Equal Education: Stories from Historic African-American Communities." The oral histories would be a gift to future generations of African-American students, she said.

"We didn't realize we had a story to tell about coming here, but we do," she said. "We can truly let the world know the people on James Island have a story to tell."

Interviews with alumni, former teachers and staff members will likely begin in February, said lead historian Mary Beth Reed. This spring, New South Associates researchers plan to host a "heritage day," in which alumni are encouraged to bring any photographs, documents and artifacts they may have from their high school days. Examples of relevant artifacts would be yearbooks, engagement rings or prom boutonnieres, she said.

Of the 30 alumni who attended a recent informational meeting, only a dozen raised their hands when asked if they wanted to be interviewed.

A 1954 graduate asked Reed who would benefit from her sharing her memories.

"You're telling your story the way it happened to you during this time period," Reed said. "You're adding to the historical record."

The documentation of the segregated Charleston-area school is timely given the state of education for black children today, Johnson said.

"Amen," said Barbara Brown, W. Gresham Meggett class of 1966.

Brown said she often describes her high school experience to her children, who attended James Island High School. Though their school was integrated, the quality of their education was inferior to what she received, Brown said. Her children were years behind in reading, for example.

A recent Post and Courier investigation found that de facto segregation continues to permeate the state's education system today. One in eight public schools have a student body that is comprised of 90 percent or more minority students. About 36,000 children, mostly white, choose not to attend the public schools each year and go to private ones instead, the newspaper found.