Chimney Sweep in Meggett, SC

Charleston County Councilwoman Anna Johnson grew up in rural James Island during the 1950s and ’60s, a time when South Carolina schools were on the brink of integration.

Like others on the island, Johnson attended W. Gresham Meggett High School, the only school for black children. She graduated in 1966 and went on to pursue a political career.

“I never dreamt of becoming a politician,” Johnson said at a gathering of Gresham Meggett alumni on Sunday.

As part of a federally funded effort to document African-American history and the civil rights movement across the country, the Charleston County Zoning and Planning Department and researchers from New South Associates LLC will document the memories of the students who attended W. Gresham Meggett High School.

The school was one of several South Carolina equalization schools created in 1951 from state funding for “separate but equal” education. It was James Island’s only school for black children and provided K-12 education from 1953 to 1966. The school was named for W. Gresham Meggett (1903–1990), a former chair of the James Island School Board. In 1994, the Septima P. Clark Corporate Academy vocational school moved to the campus.

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.

“I always said, ‘Give us equal education,’” Brown said. “Integration was almost a disadvantage for our children.”

Mosquito Beach project seeks to highlight Charleston history

This effort was one of four South Carolina history projects to receive help from the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grants Program. The Obama-era program was created in 2016 with about $8 million in revenue from federal oil leases.

The Gresham Meggett project received a $50,000 grant, while a second Charleston-based project, “Documenting and Sharing the History of Mosquito Beach and its Role in the Civil Rights Movement,” received a $43,084 grant. Two Orangeburg projects also received funding: The historic Trinity Methodist Church received $500,000 toward its repair; and Claflin University, a historically black college, received $50,000 toward a plan for its South Carolina Trustee Hall.

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Reach Hannah Alani at 843-937-5428. Follow her on Twitter @HannahAlani.

WhenWhen it’s time to make fried chicken, 89-year-old cook and cookbook author Emily Meggett always starts by grabbing a brown paper bag. A woman who appreciates simplicity, she relies on only four key ingredients: raw chicken, seasoning salt, vegetable oil, and White Lily self-rising flour. She cleans, seasons, coats, shakes, and batters the chicken before placing it in unbelievably hot vegetable oil, where it cooks until it floats to the top, showing off its golden brown and crisped exterior. One bite of the chicken, and Meggett’s process makes sense: The thin layer of crunchy, seasoned, flaky skin heightens the tenderness and juiciness of the meat. It’s a marriage that Meggett officiates regularly, alongside thousands of Black cooks around the country.

“This kind of cookin’? This is the cooking that’ll keep you full for a while,” she says as she serves the fried chicken with sides like dirty rice and stuffed yellow squash and zucchini. For Meggett, fried chicken can be the centerpiece of a meal that tells a story about food, culture, and family. It’s also an important part of the story that Meggett tells in her first cookbook, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, which came out earlier this year.

Fried chicken is a crucial component of Black American foodways, especially in the South and Lowcountry region. Along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, and the northern coast of Florida, Gullah Geechee people have preserved their culture and played a fundamental role in the proliferation of Lowcountry favorites like red rice, fried seafood, and fried chicken across the greater South. Meggett, considered the matriarch of Gullah Geechee home cooking and a winner of the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award, has been instrumental in those efforts.

“Miss Emily’s 89 years old, and she got [the culinary traditions] from her grandmother,” says BJ Dennis, a Lowcountry chef and Gullah cultural bearer who has been deeply influenced by Meggett’s culinary knowledge and intellect. As someone who has stopped by her home on Edisto Island — one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands — to learn and enjoy a plate of Lowcountry food, Dennis remains captivated by not only the crisped exterior of the matriarch’s perfectly battered and fried chicken, but also by the tradition that’s preserved within each and every bite.

“When you do the math and connect those dots, [cooks like Meggett] held on to the traditions that we’re talking about, at a minimum, 100-plus years,” says Dennis. “I think it’s really important because you’re getting not only a legacy, but a history lesson with something as simple as fried chicken.”

Like countless other Black women who turned to cooking — and fried chicken specifically — as a vehicle for economic opportunity, Meggett has been able to use her fried chicken, along with dishes like fried fish, red rice, and chicken perloo, to forge her own path in South Carolina’s culinary space. That space was previously dominated by white cooks who labeled Black food as “Southern food”; Meggett’s work has served as a reminder of the critical role Black people continue to play in the development and proliferation of dishes that have become synonymous with the South. Her storied career — which includes contributing to her local church cookbook during the 1980s, catering for her community on Edisto Island, and cooking for various prominent homes in her neighborhood — has also allowed her to support her husband and 10 children, all while continuing a rich culinary lineage that’s endured across generations. In doing so, she has avoided what Dennis believes could be an irreparable loss. “You lose part of your heritage, you lose part of yourself,” he says.

For Meggett, the best fried chicken continues to be made by Black hands. “There are so many ways to enjoy fried chicken,” she says. “Our community has figured out how to make the chicken shine.” Meggett is eager to teach her guests her “paper bag method,” instructing them, “You’ve got to hold the bag from the bottom!”

While Meggett’s instructions are vital, it’s always the story behind the food that matters most to her. “When I was growing up, everybody had fried chicken — everybody,” she recalls. “You didn’t even have to go to the store for it. Folks raised their own in those days, and they knew how to clean it, cook it, and serve it. We looked forward to it in those days; we look forward to it now.”

Fried Chicken Recipe

Serves 20 to 30

Ingredients:

Chicken pieces: 8 legs, 8 thighs, 8 wings, 4 whole breasts (10 pounds/4.6 kilograms total)1½ tablespoons seasoning salt, plus more to taste4 quarts (3.8 liters) vegetable oil4 cups (500 grams) self-rising flour, preferably White Lily

Instructions:

Step 1: Peel back the chicken skin to reveal some unnecessary fat. Remove by scraping with a knife, and then put the skin back in place.

Step 2: Season the chicken with seasoning salt.

Step 3: Heat the oil in a cast-iron Dutch oven over high heat. Heat the oil to a high temperature, but be careful not to let it smoke.

Step 4: Pour the flour into a large paper bag, such as a grocery bag. Add 6 to 8 chicken pieces to the bag at a time. Use one hand to close and grip the top of the bag, and one hand to support the bottom of the bag. Gently shake the bag from side to side, coating the chicken pieces with flour on all sides.

Step 5: Fry these pieces, carefully placing them into the oil one at a time. Do not flour all the chicken pieces in advance. Flour them just before frying.

Step 6: Once the first batch of chicken is placed in the oil, reduce the heat to medium-high and cook the chicken on one side for about 20 minutes. When the chicken is golden brown, turn it to brown on the other side, 8 to 10 minutes longer. The chicken will float when it is fully cooked. Regulate the temperature as needed. If the oil is not hot enough, the chicken will absorb the oil and become greasy.

Step 7: When the first batch is finished, place the chicken on a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Repeat this process until done.

Reprinted with permission from Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island by Emily Meggett with contributions by Kayla Stewart and Trelani Michelle, copyright © 2022. Published by Abrams Books.Photography by Clay Williams, copyright © 2022.

The Lowcountry has many outdoor offerings for parks and preserved land that make for excellent destinations for recreation. Hiking trails in area parks are particularly enjoyable on flat, sandy coastal paths and former roads. They may not offer the challenge of foothills’ verticality, but they usually include unparalleled vistas and abundant wildlife viewing.

You can pedal along bikeways and paths in many parks and wildlife refuges, but usually those are in specially designated areas.

Adventure can also be found if you are equestrian-minded and prefer horseback riding beneath a canopy of sea island trees.

Few parks and preserves combine all three of these pursuits, but one local destination does — and it is dog-friendly too!

Meggett County Park is one of Charleston County Park system’s newest additions and offers a quiet place to experience the natural wonders of the diverse Lowcountry landscape. At a little over 400 acres, Meggett County Park offers nearly five miles of trails and paths that are open for hiking, biking and equestrian pursuits. Plus, your dog can join you for friendly, four-legged company along your path.

When you visit Meggett County Park, you will discover sandy, well-tended paths that incorporate old farm roads and hint at the agricultural past and present of the surrounding land. Your path will take you through new-growth forests where the woods are working to reclaim old farmland.

Soon after your journey begins, you will discover an island of stately live oaks amid the young pines, where resurrection fern and Spanish moss form a verdant crown in the canopy above. A trail junction reveals the remains of a farm shed, offering a window to the past. The occasional fence post and rusted twist of wire beckon to a day when the land represented the livelihood of families in the community.

The trail takes you into the wild sunlight on the edge of the vast tidal marsh, where a raised path joins a causeway to a small island perched on a deep tidal creek. A maritime forest of palmetto and pine above your head capture the Atlantic breeze and myriad songbirds chatter and call in the woods around you. Meggett County Park makes it easy to love the natural beauty of the Lowcountry.

My family and I recently visited Meggett County Park for a day hike. The quiet parking area offered an easy spot for a tailgate picnic. Our 7-year old beagle, Lucy, had joined us, and she eagerly greeted other canine and human visitors as they arrived for their own outdoor adventure. The trails offered easy walking, and at one point we were captivated by the tunnel-like effect of tall trees formed along a former farm fence row where sweetgum and maple seemed to touch tops in the sky.

Near the marsh, where the path entered the margin, a recent rain had left deep puddles from the hoofprints of other visitors on horseback. These were easily avoided — although neither our beagle nor our young sons seemed to mind at all.

We soon crossed the marsh on the raised causeway, and the path took us around the edge of a small wooded island, offering views of seemingly endless marsh and sparkling tidal waterways. After a brief rest to enjoy the scenery, we found ourselves back at our vehicle and heading home, feeling happy and longing to return.

Meggett County Park is located at 7247 Ethel Post Office Rd., Meggett, S.C., and is fairly easy to find. The Meggett community is in a rural section of Charleston County, between Beaufort and Charleston and near the town of Ravenel. To get to Meggett County Park, head north on U.S. 17 to Ravenel and turn right onto S.C. 165, where you will pass through the small town of Hollywood, S.C. After 1.5 miles, take a slight left turn onto Wilson Rd./S-10-1159. At 1.5 miles further, turn right at the crossroads onto Ethel Post Office Road. The entrance to Meggett County Park is on the left side of the road at 1.4 miles.

There is an unpaved parking area. There are no facilities, so bring water and bug repellent as the season demands. Remember to show courtesy on the trail; you will share it with hikers, bicyclists and equestrian visitors. Dogs are allowed on a 6-foot leash, and you will need to clean up after them.

Meggett County Park is open year-round and requires a day-use fee of $1, to be paid at the box. It’s a tremendous bargain for hours of enjoyment in the Lowcountry outdoors. For more information on Meggett County Park and other Charleston County parks, visit ccprc.com.

This story was originally published February 9, 2021, 6:00 AM.

Perched on the ways at Yonges Island, S.C., the 174’x42’x9’ landing craft Brandy Station was being readied to launch this week, the latest of the U.S. Army’s fleet to be overhauled at Metal Trades, Inc.

The family-owned shipyard and steel fabrication plant has deep roots in the island community of southern Charleston County. When I visited this week for an upcoming WorkBoat story, I found out how company founder J.E Corbin Jr. started out in 1962 with a pickup truck, a welding machine and his own expertise working with metal.

Yonges, nearby Wadmalaw Island, and towns like Meggett and Hollywood were tidewater farm country; in the 1920s Meggett had a reputation as the “cabbage capitol” of U.S. agriculture, with its concentration of truck farms, water transport, and a railroad line that connected them and fish and oyster canneries to national markets.

In the1960s there was the need to fix workboats, plus the escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. MTI became certified as a master ship repair contractor to the Army and Navy, a key business line today.

Army LCMs at the Metal Trades Inc. pier at Yonges Island, S.C. Kirk Moore photo.

But with the end of the Cold War, Congress created the Base Realignment and Closure process to take on the messy process of downsizing the U.S. military infrastructure. South Carolina took a big hit at the Charleston Navy Yard, where Metal Trades had a major operation.

As the Navy work wound down, costs went up and “we were spending $1 million a year there on maintenance,” recalled MTI president Shaun Flynn. In 2006 the company sold its lease there and retrenched at the Yonges Island facility, investing $18 million in new improvements, he said.

“We had a period of time when we really had to reinvent ourselves as a heavy steel fabricator,” said Flynn. Military contracts are still a big part of the business – Army landing craft have been the company’s bread and butter for years, and the MTI yard is full of modules for Army floating causeways that are being reconditioned. But the ratios have turned to where about 70% of the work now is commercial, he said.

Specialty barges are one line, including double hull fuel barges, crane and ferry landing barges, and the first new railroad freight car barge for New York Harbor in decades, delivered last year to the Port Authority of NY/NJ.

“New York has been a great customer of ours,” said Flynn.

MTI remains a family business – five brothers and two sisters have been involved over the years – and the company is planning for the next generation.

Heavy steel fabrication, building housings for heavy power generators, barges and ship repair are strong business lines, and helped MTI come out of the 2008 recession relatively unscathed. Flynn says, “We diversified in time to stay out of trouble.”

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.