As a final act, will President Obama recognize Reconstruction in Beaufort County?

Inside the historic Beaufort church on the site where Robert Smalls is buried, a group of state and local officials built a case for national recognition of the area’s role in Reconstruction.

A similar effort that was attempted in the same building 16 years ago fizzled for various reasons. But now momentum is growing for the creation of a national monument to the Reconstruction Era in Beaufort County.

Supporters believe their best chance could be the pen of soon-to-be outgoing President Barack Obama. But the clock is ticking.

“And so I stand before you here tonight as I stood with many of you all 16 years ago, believing in my heart, mind and spirit this is the place, this is the time,” Michael Allen, of the National Park Service, said during a spirited community gathering at Tabernacle Baptist Church on Thursday night. “I’m standing here to encourage you to work together as a group to make this happen. I know it can.”

There are typically two ways to create a national monument, Allen noted Thursday — by Congress passing a bill or the president designating the monument via the Antiquities Act of 1906. Before the proposal gets to Obama, it has to go through the National Park Service’s regional office in Atlanta and to the desk of Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell.

A potential national monument could include multiple sites, and there are several in Beaufort County with a case for the designation.

U.S. Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-SC, and Mark Sanford, R-SC, introduced a bill in June to make Penn Center on St. Helena a national monument. Penn Center was the site of Penn School, the first school for freed slaves.

Camp Saxton, on the site of what is now Naval Hospital Beaufort in Port Royal, is where the Emancipation Proclamation was read in 1863 and the home of the first black Army regiment during the Civil War.

Mitchelville, on Hilton Head Island, was the first self-governing community of freed slaves.

In Beaufort, there is the home and grave of Robert Smalls, a slave, Civil War hero and congressman whose story historian Lawrence Rowland called extraordinarily dramatic. He noted that Smalls’ funeral at Tabernacle in February 1915 was the most well-attended in Beaufort’s history.

“I don’t know why this hasn’t been recognized before,” Rowland said Thursday of a Reconstruction monument.

The monument could be sites or buildings. But as a condition of the Antiquities Act, it must be donated — either outright or by the owner granting an easement.

Port Royal has offered to donate a portion of Naval Heritage Park for an interpretive center or monument off Ribaut Road, just outside the gates of the Naval Hospital. Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling talked Thursday of a donated building convenient to Smalls’ home, Tabernacle and the city’s visitors center that could become a Reconstruction hub.

The Reconstruction sites and any designated national monument would be key to a push by area tourism officials to better explain the area’s history to visitors.

Beaufort County Councilman Stu Rodman raised the possibility of a series of visitors centers, at a cost of several million dollars, adding that the economic impact of a national monument would be many millions more.

South Carolina could become known for Reconstruction as Alabama is for civil rights, said Duane Parrish, director of the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.

“This is a story that has not been told completely,” Port Royal Mayor Sam Murray said. “But it must be told, and it must include the good and the bad.”

The National Park Service conducted a recent study of sites significant to Reconstruction and concluded the agency has ignored the window of the nation’s history to this point, Allen said.

But the spotlight on Beaufort County now isn’t by mistake, Allen said. It has been a focused effort.

In a Washington Post op-ed this month, a pair if history professors called on Obama to create a national monument in Beaufort County. They cited the president’s words at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., when he said the country should confront all of its history.

“Reconstruction lives on around us, critical but often unrecognized,” University of California Davis professor Gregory Downs and Northwestern University professor Kate Masur wrote in the Washington Post. “By designating a Reconstruction monument in Beaufort County, Obama would help ensure that this period’s crucial history is better understood.”

When asked what could be done to advocate for the monument, Allen pointed to community engagement like the meeting at Tabernacle Thursday.

“Over the last year, President Obama has used his pen,” he said. “Long before he used his pen, there were conversations like this.”

This story was originally published October 21, 2016 at 3:30 PM with the headline "As a final act, will President Obama recognize Reconstruction in Beaufort County?."