Hilton Head graveyard safe from wedding venue. But it won’t be the last fight
On a chilly Wednesday afternoon, Bruce Chaplin stood by his mother’s grave on the north end of Hilton Head. Clusters of mossy old gravestones underneath tall oak trees surrounded him.
“This, for me, is a sacred place,” Chaplin said.
The Drayton Cemetery, located near Fish Haul Beach, has served as a resting place for Hilton Head’s Gullah-Geechee residents for over a century. It is unknown how many people are buried there, but many of Chaplin’s family members made it their final resting place, alongside soldiers who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War.
In the past three years, two new short-term rentals have popped up in what was once an undeveloped lot next the cemetery. The properties are divided only by a green fence; noise easily bleeds from one lot the other.
Last month, the owners of the neighboring property came before Board of Zoning Appeals to ask for permission to operate the property as a wedding and event venue. Their request was denied.
Bruce’s sister, Nadine Chaplin, thinks the board “did the right thing.” Both weddings and funerals commonly occur on Saturdays, she noted, which makes burying loved ones during weddings a nightmare.
Although Bruce Chaplin said he was “relieved” the board turned down the request to operate a wedding venue in his neighborhood, he also expressed fear that the developers would keep fighting to get a return on their investment.
“I know that was only round one,” Bruce Chaplin said.
A community at stake
The cemetery and proposed wedding venue are located in the historic Mitchelville neighborhood, a stronghold of the island’s Gullah-Geechee community since the Civil War.
After the Battle of Port Royal on Hilton Head Island, wealthy white residents and plantation owners fled inland, taking as many enslaved people as they could with them, according to Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park.
The Union Army set up a headquarters on Hilton Head, allowing roughly 10,000 formerly enslaved people left behind to begin their new lives working with pay on base. Mitchelville was officially founded in 1862 as the first self-governed town for formerly enslaved people — children were required to go to school and most people worked on base.
The community began to decline after the war ended and the army started to leave; efforts by slaveowners to reclaim their pre-battle land made things worse. The last straw for historic Mitchelville was a major hurricane in 1893 — the largest and most powerful to hit South Carolina up until that point.
In recent years, Hilton Head residents have been fighting to preserve and promote the history of Mitchelville and the Gullah-Geechee community. In August, Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park broke ground on a new archaeological research facility that will service as a community hub for uncovering and sharing the stories of Mitchelville.
The proposed wedding venue created an “atmosphere of fear” that the community the Chaplins had known for years could be changed by forces outside their control. Residents worried the new development would raise property values in the area, increasing the tax burden on many of its retired residents living on a fixed income.
‘It was truly one village’
Bruce Chaplin grew up in the Baygall neighborhood of Hilton Head, a predominantly African American community with roots that date back to the Civil War.
Chaplin and his sister fondly recalled childhood memories of growing up on Hilton Head outside the surveillance of a gated community: outdoor cookouts with music at a volume you can feel, playing kickball in the road and picking fresh plums from the neighbor’s yard. “It was truly one village,” Chaplin said.
For 45 years, Bruce Chaplin worked as a diplomat for the United States Department of State. When he retired and moved back to Hilton Head, he hoped to come back to “some semblence of what I had left,” he said.
“This is one of the last vestiges that we have here on Hilton Head, where the Gullah Geechee community can thrive without a tremendous amount of influence from outside forces,” Bruce Chaplin said.
Town blocks use of homes as venue
In December, Nadine Chaplin received a letter in the mail notifying her of a public hearing regarding the property near the cemetery.
The letter was “very vague,” Nadine Chaplin said. It didn’t provide any indication that the owners wanted to use the property as a wedding venue, and only mentioned that the property would be used as an “outdoor recreational facility.”
“I don’t think the community understood exactly what was happening there until the hearing,” Nadine Chaplin said.
She and about a dozen residents of the Baygall community made their way to a Dec. 22 meeting of the Board of Zoning Appeals to see what was going on.
Here, they learned that a North Carolina couple, Steven and Lisa Weston, sought to operate a wedding venue in their neighborhood that could accommodate up to 200 guests.
The Westons had been told by town officials that a wedding venue could not be operated on the property, and that they would have to ask the Board of Zoning appeals to grant them a special exception, called a zoning variance.
Local attorney Chester Williams called the restrictions “odd” and argued that not granting the exception would place a “hardship” on the property owners.
Nadine Chaplin stood up during the public hearing on behalf of her neighbors to voice strong opposition the proposed wedding venue.
“Introducing a commercial use that doesn’t meet that town’s own access standards threatens the very character we spent generations preserving,” Nadine Chaplin said at the meeting.
