Redrawing the lines: State review of Beaufort County boundaries is a trip through time

Over the summer, an Australian diver plunged into a marsh in Yemassee to search for a long-lost, century-old stone.

At the bottom of the muck, he found what he was hunting for: a concrete block with a pipe sticking out of it.

The stone marks the exact latitude and longitude of a former plantation's property line. And it's key to a team of state researchers and surveyors who are piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the original S.C. county boundaries that were established more than 100 years ago.

Through the S.C. Boundary Program, a dozen county lines are under review this year to retrace where boundaries are now as compared to how they were originally conceived in state codes dating back to 1912, said program manager Matt Wellslager.

Two of those reviews are taking place on Beaufort County's western edge, including its border with Jasper County along U.S. 278 and a portion of S.C. 170 and the stretch alongside Hampton County near Yemassee, according to program maps.

But going back to the original lines isn't as simple as walking down the highway, said David Ballard, a researcher with the program and member of the state Geodetic Survey team.

The markers identified in the original lines -- such as the concrete monument now at the bottom of the Yemassee marsh -- are no longer around, Ballard said.

"It'll have things like 'from the old dead pine tree to the bridge,'" said Rebecca Leach, who also works with the program. "We saw one that said 'black gum mark on the river bank.' That's how they established the county lines back then, but over time those things have been cut down and moved through population growth and expansion, or just done away with.

"We have been tasked to find these things, nail down where original boundary lines are, and now we use new technology with land surveying and geographic coordinates to update the law," she said.

That's required more heavy lifting in the archives and libraries than it has Aussie divers, though, Ballard said.

Working with Summerville-based Cornerstone Surveying and Engineering, which the program has contracted with to review the Beaufort County lines, researchers have relied heavily on old annexation documents, historic aerial photography and decades old plat documents to hunt down the original lines, Ballard said.

Now the team believes it has coordinates to retrace the exact property lines that once delineated the boundaries of the old plantations that existed then, such as the old Okeetee Club and Chelsea Club, Ballard said.

"Once we have what we think is a pretty firm hold on what we need to know historically, we go out and look at what we can find in the field, trying to kick the dirt around and see what is still remaining," Wellslager said. "We're not making new lines or new boundaries, we're trying to find out where they were and say without any question, 'This is the spot.'"

For Beaufort, Jasper and Hampton counties, "the spot" hasn't changed much and won't significantly impact any properties, said Wellslager and Dan Morgan, director of Beaufort County Mapping and Geographical Services.

The only discrepancies are over a few feet of Beaufort and Jasper counties' legal right of way on S.C. 170, which have shifted just off the exact county line after several highway expansions and improvements, Wellslager and Morgan said. County planning and legal teams have met to discuss how to fix those small issues, and they will hold public meetings on the changes this fall, per state law, Morgan added.

In the coming years, the S.C. Boundary Program intends to address all non-waterway county lines throughout the state, should the program continue to be funded by the S.C. General Assembly, Wellslager said. The program received $500,000 over the past two years to begin this year's surveys.

"We have a chance to review the history of the state in a way that not a lot of other people do," Wellslager said. "You can kind of do a genealogy, and you can see as the state was populated where different people came from based on their last names, where certain people were living. It's how people moved around in the state, where they set up, going back to the original King Charles land grants."

Follow reporter Zach Murdock on Twitter at twitter.com/IPBG_Zach and on Facebook at facebook.com/IPBGZach.

This story was originally published September 27, 2015 at 8:02 PM with the headline "Redrawing the lines: State review of Beaufort County boundaries is a trip through time."