Beaufort County, SC
Decades ago, Philip Rhodes gave the University of South Carolina an extraordinary gift: A Beaufort County barrier island.
While few strings were attached, they were significant. Rhodes wanted Pritchards Island — with a south-facing birds-eye view of Hilton Head — to remain in a wilderness state, and to be used for scientific, educational, charitable and general public purposes.
But now, Rhodes’ family says USC isn’t fulfilling its obligations to the island. If they’re right, the deeds say USC could lose control of the island to the University of Georgia or The Nature Conservancy. In a statement issued last week, the family said it has been “disappointed” by the university’s lack of engagement as it relates to the deed signed nearly four decades ago.
One USCB official says the school is eager to conduct research on the island and believes it now has the biologists to do it. The challenge is identifying revenue sources to fund the work.
Rhodes wanted Pritchards Island to always be what it was when he had the good luck to walk its sand and fish its waters. He knew that more development nearby was coming. He knew how barrier islands worked. And he knew he wanted Pritchards to remain a testament to what nature had put there.
He thought he knew how to do that.
In December 1983, Rhodes gave USC half the island. By February 1989, he donated the other 50% to the university.
Then, in the early ‘90s, Rhodes funded another gift. He paid for the construction of a raised wooden lab, set back from the ocean and among live oaks and palmetto trees. Inside was a kitchen, dorm-style rooms with bunk beds and a teaching space. The building was an idyllic and visceral experience for students and professors to study the island’s ecosystems, monitor threatened loggerhead sea turtles and grasp erosion impacts. Then-island director David McCollum said it would make research life “a whole lot easier.”
He’d made a good decision, Rhodes said during the lab’s 1994 dedication ceremony. The outdoorsman and sea turtle enthusiast called USC “great stewards of the island.”
Researchers, professors, students and community members took to the island to study and learn about loggerhead sea turtles, tides, shorebirds, barrier island dynamics and salt marsh ecology. Some stayed in the lab and others took day trips.
The university’s glossy promotional materials once lauded the pristine island, with its soft rippled sand and rampant wildlife, as a “jewel in its crown.” It was a place unlike any other. Undeveloped. Quiet. It wasn’t bustling like Fripp Island, just 100 yards away.
It’s a place that even today Joe Staton of the University of South Carolina Beaufort can’t find all the right words to explain.
“You can’t even put your finger on why it’s so special, except that you get that feeling,” said Staton, USCB’s natural sciences department chair. “You feel the untouched, relatively unspoiled coastal environment. You get a feeling of what people saw when they first came.”
“It’s almost like feeling you’re arriving in Jamestown,” the first permanent English settlement in North America.
But it’s a feeling few now know.
By 2009, the lab had become weather-worn and unusable — the price of letting Mother Nature take her course. Leftover equipment sat like antiques until the Rhodes family urged its removal a year later. That year, funding to keep Pritchards afloat — a combination of state, federal and private funding, including that of media mogul Ted Turner — had dried up. Since then, the island, a venerable research treasure trove, hasn’t shown up in promotional material from USC or its sister campuses.
Pritchards’ future hangs in limbo and under a caveat that Rhodes, who died in 2009, placed on the gift.
If USC can’t live up to its promise to uphold its end of the bargain? It can ship out and the island would go to the University of Georgia, Rhodes’ alma mater, if UGA officials want it.
The prospect was dangled by the Rhodes family in a 2010 email to several Pritchards Island staff, noting his “primary concern [was] the protection and good stewardship of Pritchards.”
“If USC is to be that steward, well and good,” a Rhodes family member wrote. “If not, let’s move on.”
Twelve years later, with little movement but the rapid erosion of the barrier island’s shoreline, Philip Rhodes’ family is asking for the patriarch’s wishes to be revived.
It’s not a simple fix to restart university-led efforts. They’ll need funding, which USC has yet to identify, and ample staff to run programs. And logistically, Pritchards requires a boat ride or kayak trip when the tides are just right. But the storied island, ripe for research and education, isn’t one USC and USCB officials say they want to let go of.
Halcyon days
Philip Rhodes, an Atlanta businessman in his time, was enamored with the loggerheads. It’s one of the reasons he bequeathed Pritchards to USC. Even before Rhodes donated the island, he’d fostered sea turtle research and education. USC’s takeover worked as a catalyst, he believed.
He “hoped to build on the history of education, and research, including barrier island research and loggerhead turtle research, already established on the island,” said the family statement penned recently by the patriarch’s granddaughter, Martha Rhodes. “It was of the utmost importance to him to partner with an institution that would continue this work for the good of the Lowcountry and beyond.”
An avid camper and an even more avid fisherman and golfer, he would be remembered as a generous and modest man who “did what he saw as right with little fanfare,” according to his obituary.
He was just that kind of guy, family friend and former Pritchards adviser Ray “Boogie” Tudor recalled.
“You won’t hear one bad thing about him,” his old friend said.
Tudor knew Pritchards like the back of his hand; even better, he knew Rhodes’ intent. He managed Ted Turner’s property, St. Phillips, and was often called on when university maintenance staff needed help putting Pritchards onto a power grid. He jokes and holds seriously that he and St. Phillips were “the closest neighbors down the river.”
And so it went for over a decade. Tudor would cruise over when help called to tow a boat or when solar panels and desalination equipment required assembling.
But what Tudor remembers most is the students. High school kids, some of whom had never seen the ocean, took to Pritchards like a research park. Hands in the sand or feet strolling the island to help professors with turtle nesting efforts.
“To see those kids and talk to some of them, we might have gotten some marine biologists out of the visits,” Tudor said.
Amber Von Harten remembers that program, though it was one of many when Pritchards was in its halcyon days.
In 1999, days after Von Harten married, she and her husband moved onto Pritchards. For about six years, they managed it, ran programs and conducted research, including a feasibility study into how to make the island and facility into a more long-term ecological research center — what organizationally, financially and structurally needed to happen.
How much space would that take? It couldn’t be too much because any construction would need to fit within the confines of Rhodes’ deed. How would it impact the habitat? That was considered heavily to maintain the wilderness state that Rhodes longed for.
And, how much would it cost? It had a price tag in the millions.
But back then, when funding wasn’t as strained, the project might have felt more feasible. Over time, the state — specifically, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control — ponied up money for Pritchards. And so did several private donors and numerous community members. The lab, which housed overnighters, also pulled in a cash flow from those who paid to stay.
Pritchards saw tons of guests, students and professors, environmentalists and volunteer groups who studied there. People would take day trips or stay in the dorms of the lab building, waking up to the waves’ lull and the gurgling ecosystem.
But this was real work. University students conducted research on tides. With the help of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, phytoplankton — microscopic organisms — were monitored. Then there was shorebird research, and teachings on barrier island dynamics and salt marsh ecology. The sea turtle program, spanning months had participants staying out late in the evening tagging the turtles to follow their movements.
But by the time the Von Harten’s left in the early 2000s, the island was quickly eroding and so was private and state funding.
In 2007, USC was looped into a multi-million federal program to measure ocean currents and waves using a radar system — a radar array. Two years later, the once lively Pritchards would go quiet. The lab was too far deteriorated.
“We tried to do as much as we could to keep it running as long as possible,” USCB’s Staton said. “But it became kind of clear that [the lab] was only going to have a limited lifespan based on the changes in the beach there.”
The coast’s natural life cycle, sending crashing waves and wind into Pritchards’ shoreline, nearby development and rising seas battered the island so much that hundreds of yards of dune were gone.
And by that time, so were the funds.
Island standstill
It’s hard to nail down the exact day Philip Rhodes’ sons and grandchildren became upset that Pritchards sat in attrition.
Emails between the Rhodeses and the university date back to January 2010. Fewer than four months had passed since the patriarch’s death. Based on the chain of messages, trash had piled up on the island, remnants of the once-eminent plot proclaimed as a university gem.
“The University of SC should be appalled at the state of Pritchards,” one of the Rhodeses’ emails read.
Another email circulated around that time. Under the deeds, signed by Philip Rhodes and then-Carolina Research and Development Foundation (reorganized in the early 1990s and now called the USC Development Foundation), if USC does not abide by the underlined rules, the island can go to the University of Georgia. If UGA is unwilling or unable to abide, Pritchards goes to The Nature Conservancy.
“We’d love to buy or otherwise protect [Pritchards Island], but it would be an 8-figure transaction. No one has that kind of money right now,” The Nature Conservancy wrote in a June 2010 email.
By July 2010, the Rhodeses wrote back. If USC and UGA declined the offer and The Nature Conservancy would align with the deed, there’d be no eight figures. As Rhodes agreed over two decades before, the island would be given to those who could be good stewards to it.
A year after the Rhodes family sought to get trash removed from the island, USCB’s environmental health manager sent a laundry list of to-dos.
It included: Remove computer equipment, drugstore supplies, biological samples, microscopes, sea turtle shells and propane gas tanks. Drain liquids from the two tractors, cut them up and scrap the metal. Turn the building to a salvage company: take out the fiberglass tanks, the air conditioning units, rogue shingles, plastic piping and insulation. And any tractors need to go.
Eleven years have passed since the list was disseminated and a tractor remains buried deep in sand, its wheels protruding around the high tide line. From a recent walk on the north side of the island, despite startling erosion typical to barrier islands that’s been accelerated by nearby development on Fripp, debris is largely cleared. Some power lines wrap around bone-dry oaks, vellum balloons have drifted onto the shore or into the trees. But mostly, the crumbling lab building is the only great remaining hazard.
“There’s always been a bit of debris over there, even before USCB started,” Tudor said. “There’s no easy way to remove [big equipment] off the island. If a vehicle stopped, it sat until it rusted down. Trying to do something on a barrier island is major and you stand a good chance of putting out more debris.”
Even the smaller items needed to be transported by boat. And larger things would require cranes or backhoes for removal. In essence, more money.
Despite dwindling support from public and private sources, the Beaufort community didn’t back down. Sea turtle nesting research is still in full-swing under a SCDNR-permitted group, and with permission from USC.
“With the decline in private funding, USCB has tried to continue its efforts there but large research projects like the radar array have not been feasible,” said Jason Caskey, the foundations’ president and CEO, referring to the federally funded program.
However, he noted USC hopes the potential of Pritchards Island being vested in UGA is “unfounded.” The University of Georgia did not provide a response upon learning Pritchards Island could be offered to it, because officials there were “unable to find anyone with knowledge of this matter” and there was not enough information to respond to the deed.
But the Rhodes family refuses to abandon how they believe the island should be overseen and what they believe Philip Rhodes so desperately wanted.
“Efforts to remain engaged with the appropriate parties at USC have been trying for several years and the Rhodes family has been disappointed by USC’s apparent disengagement from its commitments pursuant to the deed,” the statement said.
In a recent response from The Nature Conservancy, David Bishop, coastal and Midlands conservation director, said Pritchards is a place to protect, an important haven for shorebirds and a protective buffer to the Port Royal Sound for hurricanes and coastal storms.
“ We’d love to see it protected — by The Nature Conservancy or another conservation partner — so it can continue to serve in that role for generations to come,” Bishop said Friday. “It would also be a great addition to the legacy of the Rhodes family, who have been strong and consistent supporters of conservation in South Carolina for decades.”
The Rhodeses aren’t shutting the door on USC yet: “The family remains hopeful.”
But they want a plan.
Pritchards’ future
For a scientist, Pritchards Island is a research dream.
It’s relatively untouched — rare for barrier islands along the Atlantic coast — which can serve as an example to study surrounding barrier islands in Beaufort County. Those like Fripp and Hunting, that have shorelines stabilized with man-made materials.
There’s rattlesnakes, ghost crabs, a bobcat family, loggerhead turtles and countless native birds. Salt marsh and maritime forest can also be studied.
It’s a place that hasn’t left Staton’s mind.
“We want to do right by the island. And it was impossible to do that before for whatever reason,” USCB’s Staton said. “Now the biologists we have here, they’re actually world class, are interested in pursuing work out there.”
USCB’s built up its biology sciences faculty in the past few years. Many have traveled the world to do research.
Neither Staton nor the foundations’ Caskey can lay definite plans, mostly because Pritchards’ revival is reliant on getting enough funding and staffing, but Staton and other USCB professors certainly think about the possibilities. He can’t delve into the research he’d like to conduct, that’s under wraps. However, Staton can share the outlook.
His short term plan? Not to give up on Pritchards. Long-term? Get sustainable research momentum on the island to attract other researchers for partnerships?
And by forming partnerships outside of the university, they might get bigger grants. It’s what the university would need to get Pritchards up and running. As of recently, though, no one can say how much it would cost to get research started.
“There’s plenty of people in Hilton Head to fight for Hilton Head. Hunting Island is one of the most popular national and state parks in the system. There’s plenty of people who will fight for Fripp,” the department chair said.
But the same fight hasn’t happened on Pritchards. Not in a long time.
“The Rhodes family understood this when they gave it to us … that they wanted us to try and do work not just on the sea turtles, but on the island itself,” Staton said. “I’m sorry more of that hasn’t happened. But now we’re in a position to actually make that happen. And I want to try and make it happen.”
The onus, however, can’t fall entirely on USCB’s natural sciences department. Again, the university would need to identify money and secure enough staff to run programs.
And, this time, there will be no lab building.
Under SCDHEC, the lab is scheduled to be demolished by the fall due to “significant damage from hurricanes and storms over the years,” Caskey said. It’s not financially feasible to repair, he added.
Tudor tried problem-solving this years ago. Why couldn’t the university deploy portable labs set on a skid base that could stay on high ground? There were no takers.
He’s far removed from it all now. He’ll fly over it from time to time.
“Mr. Rhodes was a very generous man to do what he did to donate [Pritchards],” Tudor said.
For his children and grandchildren, Pritchards Island is an emblem of Philip Rhodes. For USC and USCB, with the right backing, it’s an opportunity. And for some in Beaufort County, it’s a strong and positive memory.
What Rhodes saw in the near-pristine barrier island, sandwiched by development, was something he felt everyone needed to see: Unbridled territory with great minds learning and teaching the environment’s heart.
