‘There’s calm here’: Camp St. Mary’s Catholic sister still has something to say
Camp St. Mary is one of Beaufort County’s most beautiful places.
It seems odd to think today that this 9-acre piece of paradise on the Okatie River near Bluffton was once a war zone.
The “war” conducted there for 30 years was the war on poverty.
The general in charge was a white-haired nun named Sister Ellen Robertson.
In 1972, when she began offering hope to teenage mothers and their babies, and to children with mental illness and other disabilities, only George Custer could appreciate the odds she faced in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
“It’s important for me as a person and an administrator to have direct contact with women and children who are at the bottom of the heap,” Sister Ellen once told our newspaper.
“They need the hand up. I see myself as the hand up.”
The quiet beauty of Camp St. Mary in the Baileys community attracted the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston to establish a camp there around 1930 to provide religious teaching to children in a remote area.
And it is that peace and quiet that Beaufort County needs to maintain — and open to the public — on the tract it bought in the late 1990s.
Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner suggests a portion of it could be used for a new regional communications center for fire, EMS and police.
A regional communications center is probably a good idea. The more we do regionally, the better.
But there’s plenty of other land for that purpose.
Camp St. Mary is special. It’s hallowed ground. And it’s past time for Beaufort County to open it to the public for quiet, peaceful enjoyment.
Adrian Dominican Sisters
Catholic nuns are known for their miracles in Beaufort and Jasper counties.
For decades, they have courageously touched the untouchables, and spoken truth to power.
They have clothed, fed and educated migrant workers on St. Helena Island, as well as a flood of Latino workers and their families that began showing up in Hardeeville in the 1990s.
Sister Ellen was in the Adrian Dominican Sisters Order for 55 years before her retirement in 1994.
When she came to the Lowcountry in 1972 at the invitation of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, she had already been a teacher and principal in Chicago. She had degrees — even a doctorate — in Latin, the classics and education.
But her expertise was poverty.
“Racism, sexism, classism and patriarchy. I believe they are the underlying causes of these problems,” Sister Ellen said.
No one told her what to do here. She turned to helping young women. Her Low Country Human Development Center at Camp St. Mary grew to a staff of more than 30.
When Sister Ellen died in May 2002 at age 74, a Beaufort County Council proclamation said:
“The center offered alternative education programs for teenage mothers, child development for infants and preschoolers, a parenting program for mentally handicapped mothers and Camp Sunrise, a summer program that mixed handicapped and non-handicapped children. At its height the program enrolled 40 teen mothers and 135 babies and preschoolers and kept a waiting list of more than 100 children. Its annual budget approached $700,000, which Sister Ellen worked tirelessly to raise.”
The County Council, under chairman Thomas C. Taylor of Hilton Head Island, resolved to “acknowledge that Sister Ellen was a force for the underprivileged and changed the Lowcountry, one struggling life at a time.”
Equal Rights Amendment
Sister Ellen’s vision of social responsibility included a strong stand against the production, deployment and use of nuclear weapons.
In 1984, she led a prayer vigil with another sister and a Hampton County farmer who stood by the train tracks in Yemassee as a 22-car train carrying nuclear weapons to the Charleston Naval Weapons Station passed through.
She pushed for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
In a 1977 interview she said local members of the AAUW and League of Women Voters supported it, but “I did find in Jasper County, people who didn’t know what it was. They had never heard of the ERA.
“Then in starting to talk about it they say, ‘Oh, that’s the thing that’s going to keep us from getting our Social Security,’ or ‘We’ll have to use bathrooms with men,’ or be drafted.”
She got around the Camp St. Mary campus on a bicycle, with her constant companion Bruce, a collie dog.
She knew the property was a special place.
“For some reason, what we do here works,” Sister Ellen told the paper. “I’m still amazed at the quiet. You don’t hear children crying. The students attend here when they didn’t stay in the public schools.
“Maybe it’s because what we do happens in a very natural, aesthetic environment.
“There’s calm here.”
