Beaufort: The Newport of the South

Beaufort, South Carolina, likes to call itself the Newport of the South, and the comparison earns its keep. Both towns are built around a harbor and a collection of antebellum mansions that seem almost too grand for the towns around them. But Beaufort's history is older, darker, and more complicated than any architectural comparison can capture.

Founded by the English in seventeen eleven, Beaufort is the second oldest incorporated city in South Carolina, behind only Charleston. It was named for Henry Somerset, the second Duke of Beaufort, one of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolina colony. The town sits on Port Royal Island, surrounded by tidal creeks and marsh, on a harbor that the Spanish had visited as far back as fifteen twenty six and that the French had briefly colonized in fifteen sixty two.

For the first century of its European history, Beaufort was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. The Yemassee War of seventeen fifteen reduced the early settlement to ruins. Colonial conflicts and hurricanes battered the rebuilt town.

None of it stopped Beaufort's growth, because the soil and climate of the surrounding Sea Islands were suited to growing something that made men spectacularly rich: first indigo, and then, after the American Revolution, the highly prized long staple cotton called Sea Island cotton. By the eighteen fifties, the Beaufort district was one of the wealthiest areas per capita in the United States. The planters who owned the land and the people who worked it built mansions along Bay Street and the surrounding avenues that still stand today.

Then in November of eighteen sixty one, the same Union fleet that seized Hilton Head Island also landed troops in Beaufort, and the planter class fled the town. Because Beaufort was held so early and so firmly by Union forces, it escaped the burning and bombardment that destroyed other Southern towns. The mansions survived because the occupiers lived in them.

The downtown core, with more than fifty architecturally significant antebellum structures, was designated a National Historic Landmark. A walk along Bay Street is a walk through the built environment of a slave society preserved almost intact, not as an act of reverence but as an accident of military history.