Column: Timeless need for benevolence reaches milestone in Beaufort

The Beaufort Female Benevolent Society sounds like an anachronism.

But as it celebrates its 200th anniversary this week, it is still quietly putting a salve on real-time problems.

It was started by an elite group in 1814, when governments offered virtually no social safety nets, and death and disease lurked behind every door.

Historians record long lists of benevolent societies from that era. The Hebrew Benevolent Society of South Carolina, which also is still alive, was founded in Charleston in 1784. It is the oldest Jewish charitable society in America.

The societies strived to instill habits of industry and worship, and perhaps teach a trade. Education was stressed because ignorance "leads to idleness, idleness to vice, and vice abandons to ruin."

Charleston has the only Female Benevolent Society older than our own.

The Beaufort society was founded to help destitute women and young girls. Its original subscription sketches its purpose in handwriting as flowery as its speech:

"Being touched with sympathy and commiseration for the suffering and destitute condition of many young females who are often presented to our observation; and being under a confident persuasion that it is a solemn duty binding upon all who have the means to extend practical beneficence to the helpless and needy; and desiring to fill up the space of time allotted to us with duty and usefulness, that at the close of our probationary state we may not then appear to have lived altogether in vain."

Women of that era had no place in society. But women held the organization together through war and hurricanes. They bought valuable land, built two homes for those it served, and made investments that enable it to write checks today to these charitable organizations: HELP of Beaufort, Citizens Opposed to Domestic Abuse, the Child Abuse Prevention Association, Hope Haven of the Lowcountry and Family Promise of Beaufort County.

It still gives aid to the poor, the homeless and the abused, but it has long since expanded its benevolence to males and people of all races and ethnicities.

The home it built in 1895 on Scott Street also served through the years as the Clover Club's library for white people and an infirmary. The building was sold in 1982. Interest from that principal, along with bequests and annual dues of $25 from its 35 members, fund today's relief to people in need.

Requests are presented by word-of-mouth, and a club investigator checks out all applications.

The society meets quarterly in a member's home. It has no fundraisers and seeks no publicity.

President Renee Levin said today's members have the same intent as their mothers and grandmothers did.

"They did it, not because they had to, but because it was the right thing to do," she said. "To me, that says a lot."

Longtime member Becky Trask, after assuring me, "I am not a chah-tah mem-bah," said, "In a small, practical way, the Benevolent Society still does some good in our community in a quiet, nice way."

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This story was originally published October 16, 2014 at 8:20 PM with the headline "Column: Timeless need for benevolence reaches milestone in Beaufort."