Beaufort Timeline

1562: Huguenots (French Protestants) under the leadership of Captain Jean Ribaut established the short-lived French settlement of Charlesfort on present-day Parris Island.

1588: Santa Elena had been abandoned, though the Spanish continued to claim sovereignty over the region.

1663: Arrival of Captain William Hilton, the first Englishman to explore this region was Captain William Hilton. He gave a favorable report upon his return to Barbados.

1670: English colonists were dispatched from Barbados with the intention of settling on Port Royal Island, but were persuaded by the Indian chief and Dr. Woodward to move instead to Charles Town, some sixty miles to the North.

1686: Stuart Town was destroyed by a Spanish.

1711-1712: Colonel John ("Tuscarora Jack") Barnwell (died 1724), an early settler of the Carolina colony from Ireland, led a successful expedition against the Tuscarora Indians to North Carolina. He later helped drive the warring Yemassee Indians into Florida. His land holdings were on Port Royal and neighboring islands, and he is buried in St. Helena's Episcopal churchyard in downtown Beaufort.

1729: Transfer from the Lords Propritors back to the British Crown brought new stability, enabling Beaufort to develop into one of the wealthiest, most aristocratic and cultivated American towns of its size. Beaufort prospered under the plantation system with rice, indigo and finally cotton as prime crops.

1763: Spanish privateer captain Don Martin de Hamassa seized the schooner "Tybee," upon which Beaufort merchant John Gorgon had depended for his trade, and brought it to St. Augustine. This was, said The History of Beaufort County, the "last significant naval action among the sea islands of the Beaufort District during the colonial era."

1776-1778: The years during which Thomas Heyward, Jr. (1746-1809) served on the Continental Congress. Heyward was a Revolutionary War soldier and politician, a member of the Council of Safety in 1775-1776 and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

The Treaty of Beaufort fixing the boundary between South Carolina and Georgia was signed in the city in 1787.

The Arsenal is a building on 713 Craven Street in downtown Beaufort, built in 1798 to house the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery after it fought with the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

1821-1824: Publication dates of the two-volume Sketch of the Botany of South Carolina and Georgia by Beaufortonian Stephen Elliott (1771-1830). Elliott was a noted botanist, writer and co-founder of the quarterly Southern Review.

1844: On July 31, as many as 500 people met beneath its canopy of the Secession Oak in Bluffton. According to Janice Hunter Cantrell (in the Bluffton Historical Preservation Society's No. II: A Longer Short History of Bluffton, South Carolina and Its Environs, they had come to hear their congressman, Robert Barnwell Rhett of Beaufort, "who had been so vociferously agitating since the 1820s for ... Secession". And so began "The Bluffton Movement", which "led to South Carolina's withdrawal from the Union on December 20, 1860 - the first state to secede."

1854: Publication of Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (1845) by Richard Fuller (born in Beaufort 1804, died in Baltimore 1876). The book contains the beliefs of clergyman Richard Fuller (born in Beaufort 1804, died in Baltimore 1876) that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and the contrasting opinions of fellow Baptist minisiter Francis Wayland.

1861: In November, Union naval and army detachments subdued Confederate forts off Port Royal Island, established a strong blockade base on Hilton Head Island, and occupied the town of Beaufort not only for the duration of the war, but for years afterward. As a Federal base of operation in the South, the town escaped destruction during General Sherman's "March to the Sea". Most land owners suffered ruin, however, when their houses were confiscated by the Federal government and sold for taxes. On the other hand, many of the freed slaves were able to buy land for the first time.

1862: The Penn School was founded in September on St. Helena Island as a school for African-American Sea Islanders.

Mather School, established in 1868, provided education for newly-freed slaves in Beaufort County. The present-day Technical College of the Lowcountry traces its roots back to Mather School.

New beacon was lit in 1875.
Fourteen years later the lighthouse's curved cast iron panels weighing 1,200 lbs each was disassembled and moved 1 and 1/4 miles from the shoreline to it's present location.

1883-1885: J.W. Collins is Beaufort mayor.

The Beaufort Regional Chamber of Commerce was organized as the Beaufort Board of Trade in 1892 and has been active for more than 100 years.

1896: African-American lawyer, public servant and legislator Thomas Ezekiel Miller(1849-1938) was elected as the first president of the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College in Orangeburg, now known as South Carolina State College. Miller served as Beaufort School Commissioner (1872) and represented Beaufort in the state House of Representatives (elected 1874)and the U. S. House (1890-1891). He joined Robert Smalls in the S.C. State Constitutional Convention of 1895 in an unsuccessful attempt to block legislation disfranchising black citizens of the state.

1902: The Clover Club, a women's literary society, established a library in Beaufort, that became a publicly-funded institution in 1918.

1911-13: W.F. Sanders is Beaufort mayor.

1913-1915: W.R. Bristol is Beaufort mayor.

1915-18: G.E. Danner is Beaufort mayor.

1918-23: J.A. Kinghorn is Beaufort mayor.

1923-27: R.V. Bray Jr. is Beaufort mayor.

Prior to 1929, a ferry provided all transportation to and from Parris Island from Port Royal docks to the Recruit Depot docks. In that year the causeway and a bridge over Archer's Creek were completed, thus ending the water transportation era.

Beaufort Memorial Hospital, which opened in 1944, primarily serves northern Beaufort County and is licensed for 197 beds (169 acute, 14 rehab and 14 mental health).

On February 15, 1949, the Marines activated a separate "command" at Parris Island for the sole purpose of training female recruits.

On the night of April 8, 1956, the Ribbon Creek incident resulted in the drowning of six Marine Corps recruits, and lead to widespread changes in recruit training policies. Supervision of drill instructors was expanded, such as the introduction of the Series Commander.

1957: Bridge constructed over the Broad River.

Hurricane Gracie hit Beaufort about noon on Sept. 29, 1959, delivering winds of about 140 mph. Gracie killed 10 people in South Carolina and Georgia, most because of wind and rain-induced automobile accidents, falling trees and electrocution by live wires.

1963-67: F.W. "Willie" Scheper is mayor of Beaufort.

1967-70: Monroe Key is mayor of Beaufort.

1970-90: Henry Chambers is mayor of Beaufort.

The Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park was started in 1975 and opened May 4, 1979. It is located in downtown Beaufort, opposite Bay Street, includes seven landscaped acres and is named for Mayor Henry Chambers, who championed replacing abandoned docks with a park.

1986: Annual Gullah Festival begins.

1990-99: David Taub is mayor of Beaufort.

The cemetery underwent a $2.9 million, 15-acre expansion in 2006, 10 acres of which was donated by the National Guard, which had built an armory on the site in 1963.

The Beaufort International Film Festival was started in 2007 by the Beaufort Regional Chamber of Commerce's Beaufort Regional Film Commission to lure filmmakers back to Beaufort and to honor and preserve Beaufort's role in filmmaking.

February 2009: Lipsitz Department Store operated 107 years until closing in late February 2009.

Beaufort will celebrate its tricentennial on Jan. 17, 2011.