It’s a little known fact even among locals, but every time you drive from Charleston to Folly Beach, you cross over Sol Legare Island. The home of historic Sol Legare road, the island occupies 860 acres just east of James Island. One of the earliest Black military regiments trained at Sol Legare during the American Civil War and during the war, Sol Legare Island housed camps, artillery positions and even battles. The community living along scenic Sol Legare road today is mostly Black, with many residents tracing their roots back to antebellum freedmen.
The Seashore Farmer’s Lodge has served the Sol Legare community since the early 1900s. The Lodge was a center of community life on Sol Legare, and today beautifully restored, it stands as a historical artifact and museum to the history of Lowcountry African Americans.
“About 13 years ago, we did a rehabilitation of the Lodge,” said Ernest Parks, a 4th-generation Lodge member and community organizer. “We refurbished her, and now she’s a museum and a cultural center as well as a lodge, because the Lodge still meets once a month on Sunday as a part of the community.”
Parks is a historian and oversaw the restoration of the Lodge in 2008. But he and partner Jon Marceaux wanted to do more.
“Dr. Marceaux and I have been trying for a couple years to try to put something together to come in here and help us really establish the Seashore Farmers Lodge as an official museum,” he said.
Parks said all the exciting, ‘sexy’ work — turning the Lodge into a museum and restoring the place — is done. Parks and company were looking for a way to do the deeper work of building the art and artifact curation, restoration and appraisal work.
The answer came from the Donnelley Foundation. With their Broadening Narratives program, the Foundation wants to extend their philanthropy past land conservation and artistic endeavor to reach deeper into communities in a meaningful way. Through the grant, Clemson University’s historic preservation program is working with the Lodge to provide training and collections management to community members.
The $100,000 grant, paid in two $50,000 installments over two years, will allow the College of Charleston and Clemson University to help Seashore Farmers Lodge digitize its collection inventory. All the paperwork and artifacts that the Lodge has will be archived. On top of that, the Lodge will bring in community members to take classes on how to care for and digitally archive these antiques.
“When I go to community meetings here on Sol Legare and I tell the people that I got this project where; you gonna come in, we gonna train you how to take care of the artifacts, how to digitize the artifacts, how to have a registry for the artifacts and how to care for it — it was overwhelming,” Parks said. “I got more than enough people to come in here.”
An increase in traffic flow is but one of the benefits that Parks sees coming out of this project.
“What we’re doing here is kind of like a hands-on for the community, ” he said. “This is going to kind of, like, solidify her. And really put her in the level of really being a museum.”
The true benefit, Parks said, is giving people in the Sol Legare community a new education that could help them further down the line and grow the Lodge museum from within.
“I get calls from other African American settlement groups regularly,” said Kerri Forrest, director of Lowcountry programs for the Donnelley Foundation. “All looking for ways to preserve their stories. But not understanding the mechanics of how to do it, and not being looped with a group that can help them to do it. So this was a unique opportunity to really take hold of something that could really be beneficial, and not just for Seashore Farmer’s Lodge.”
This kind of community preservation work is a new avenue for the Foundation under the Broadening Narratives strategy, which Donnelley approved in 2020.
The hope is that once Seashore has this training system in place, they can share it with other small, culturally relevant communities that may need similar training and guidance to tell their stories. There are many communities with long histories and interesting stories to tell, but they lack the understanding or tools to turn those into compelling narratives. It’s something the Donnelley Foundation is looking for more and more with this particular grant program.
“We want the stories to be the stories of the Lowcountry that have not been told or have been under-told. There’s a dominant narrative in the Lowcountry about the south and slavery and plantations and communities who live here and who has privilege and who does not,” said Forrest. “But then you’ve got these very resilient African American settlement communities.”
Forrest and the Foundation are actively looking for more of these communities to work with in order to tell more of those stories. They welcome interested parties to reach out.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.