BFT 2019 CPC Lowcountry Yellow Pages

250 TANNING–TAX H Celebrating 25 Years H
LOWCOUNTRY
PROFILE
The clanging of the Woods Memorial Bridge as it
swung open for a boat passing beneath. The
wisteria vine that enveloped the garage at his aunt’s
home on Bay Street. The pungency of low tide.
Larry Rowland was just a 3-year-old visitor when
Beaufort made this first impression.
By age 10, Rowland and his immediate family
were living here, too. By age 70, he had co-authored
three volumes chronicling Beaufort’s 500-year
history. The most recent of the trilogy, “Bridging the
Sea Islands’ Past and Present,” written with Stephen
R. Wise, was published in 2015. It is a capstone of
sorts to a career quite literally devoted to a place he
considers magical.
“I just got caught in the pluff mud,” said
Rowland, distinguished professor emeritus of
history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.
Since his parents moved him and his brother to
Beaufort in 1952, Rowland has left Beaufort only to
attend school or serve a 4 1/2-year hitch in the Navy
after earning his bachelor’s degree from Hamilton
College in upstate New York.
“And all I did during that time was read history
books and try to figure out how to get back to
Beaufort.”
Rowland went to graduate school on the GI Bill,
then surprised — and perhaps even upset — his
professors when he took a job teaching history at
the University of South Carolina Beaufort.
“They wanted me to go off to a major university,
but this was all I wanted to do,” Rowland said.
He found a patron in John Duffy, who was
trained as a historian and in 1959 helped convert
Beaufort College into a USC branch campus. Duffy
hired Rowland to be a professor and administrator
at USCB in 1971, and they became fast friends.
Through the years, Rowland had opportunities
to teach elsewhere. And he admits he was
sometimes tempted to find a more lucrative line of
work, the better to support a wife and three
children.
But leaving Beaufort was never a consideration.
Not even when Duffy, who oversaw USC’s entire
branch system, tried to lure him to another campus.
Rowland told him flatly: He’d rather be unemployed
in Beaufort than the mayor of the town Duffy was
trying to recruit him to.
Arguably, Rowland’s deep affection for both
history and Beaufort was inherited.
Rowland’s mother, Elizabeth Sanders Rowland,
traced her family’s Beaufort roots to the 1600s. She
kept her young son well-stocked in historical
biographies and read to him from “A Diary From
Dixie” — the Civil War journal of Mary Boykin
Chesnut, a Charleston socialite and wife of a
Confederate general.
“She loved Southern history, and she loved
Larry Rowland
by Jeff Kidd
Beaufort history, even though she was raised and
educated in the north,” Rowland said.
After Elizabeth Rowland’s mother died in 1910,
when she was just 8, her father sent her to live with
her grandmother in Beaufort every summer until
enrolling at Smith College in Massachusetts.
“She just never got over this place, and having
written this book in part about that era, I now can
see what got in my mother’s head and why she
loved it so much,” Rowland said.
Indeed, the task of writing the most recent
installment of Beaufort’s historical trilogy was
particularly intimate to Rowland. It covers the years
1893 to 2006 and frequently covers events he
witnessed or people he knew.
For instance, his mother was a close friend of one
of Beaufort’s great patrons, Kate Gleason, a wealthy
engineer, businesswoman and philanthropist
originally from Rochester, N.Y. Elizabeth Rowland
and Gleason met on a voyage to Europe in 1924.
Gleason hired her to be her secretary and traveling
companion, and in 1926 Rowland convinced
Gleason to visit the town she so adored. Gleason
stayed, and she began buying, developing and
donating land. She gave the community the
property where Beaufort Memorial Hospital was
constructed, built the renowned Gold Eagle Hotel
and developed Colony Gardens on Lady’s Island.
Gleason purchased Dataw Island, intending to
develop it, as well. However, she died in 1933 before
she could see her vision through. In her will, she left
the property to Elizabeth, and it remained in the
Rowland family for five decades. It served as a family
retreat. It was used to raise hogs and cattle, leased to
tomato farmers and cut for timber. With six children
in college between them and tuition bills to pay,
Rowland and his brother decided to sell the
property in 1980. Alcoa Properties purchased the
land and created an award-winning development
there.
Such intersections between Rowland’s life and
his life’s work led him and Wise to include a
disclaimer in their footnotes, which begins this way:
“Both authors of this volume have lived in Beaufort
County during most of the last half-century. We
make no claim of historical objectivity for this
concluding chapter.”
Though writing the three-volume history
consumed about 30 years of his life, Rowland said its
completion did not leave him wistful.
‘You just want to create the object,” Rowland
said. “Besides, I haven’t lacked for stuff to do (since
the book’s publication).”
Rowland is working on other book projects,
among them an edited collection of essays about
South Carolina during Reconstruction. Though he
stopped teaching at USCB in 2000, he still does
other work for the school and lectures there
occasionally.
Already, there is more interesting Beaufort
history to write. His work with Wise ended just
before the housing bubble brought an end to a
period of phenomenal growth.
“I ended on a high note, in a moment in history,”
Rowland says with a smile.
The crash will be an interesting place to resume
the telling of Beaufort’s history, but that is work that
will be left to others. That footnote about objectivity
that Rowland and Wise included in their final
volume? It ends this way: “We hope that it provides
useful encouragement to the next generation of
historians who might undertake to write volume 4
of The History of Beaufort County.”
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Photo By Jeff Kidd