Beaufort plans $900,000 park upgrade. This place was an ‘anchoring point’ for Black kids
A Beaufort park — once the only park in the city where Black residents were legally allowed and an important neighborhood gathering place for 80 years — will get a new pavilion and basketball court if the city succeeds in securing a $250,000 grant.
They’re part of a more than $900,000 improvement project at Washington Street Park, 1003 Washington Street, which opened in 1942.
The park was once called the Beaufort County Negro Recreational Center. Descendants of the original families who founded it make up a not-for-profit that still owns it. The city manages the park for the non-for-profit.
“This was like an anchoring point for the community,” said former Beaufort County Coroner Ed Allen, 73, who grew up playing in the park.
Allen, a member of the non-profit, sees the proposed improvements at the park shaded by palmetto and live oak trees and surrounded by homes a plus for the entire city.
“We want to see families come out and have a good time,” Allen said. “As it is now, the playground is used by the total community.”
Allen has seen a lot of changes in the neighborhood. Beauty and shoe shops that once surrounded the park are gone. Boy Scouts once conducted drills in the park, where kindergarten graduations also were held and ice cream was hand-churned during community gatherings and “everybody could discipline you.”
But, he adds, the park “is still actively being used” today.
On Tuesday, the City Council OK’d a resolution to apply for a $250,000 federal Community Development Block Grant through the South Carolina Department of Commerce to build a 30- by 60-foot pavilion and a half-court basketball court that would replace aging facilities. The city’s match would be $25,000.
The work would be part of a larger, $925,879 project, the city says, that will be completed in phases and includes on-street parking, sidewalks and street lighting.
In March 2021, new playground equipment was installed. Restrooms were added in 2019.
“It’s a vast improvement,” said 68-year-old Charles Henderson, who also grew up playing in the park, where he hit his first home run, played football — hoping he wouldn’t get tackled in the briar patch — and climbed mulberry trees with his friends playing “Tarzan.”
At Washington Street Park, Henderson says, he also learned how to deal with adversity and how a community comes together.
Every year, recalled 79-year-old “Big Bobby” Jenkins, who was the city of Beaufort’s second full-time Black police officer, the entire community looked forward to visits to Washington Street Park by “Silas Green from New Orleans,” a Black-owned tent and entertainment show that toured the South through the 1950s.
Back then, said Jenkins, noting it was before integration in the 1960s, “There weren’t too many places for us to go.”
This story was originally published September 16, 2022 at 3:09 PM.
