Lowcountry Profiles

Henry Chambers

By Jeff Kidd
Henry Chambers pulled the car over at the Whale Branch River Bridge and let his family out on the shoulder. Inhaling deeply, he savored the sulfurous perfume of low tide.

“I smelled that pluff mud, and I knew I was home,” Chambers recalls with a smile, 60 years later. Much had changed for Chambers since he left for Clemson University seven years earlier. He returned with a civil engineering degree, a wife and children, and a discharge from the U.S. Army.

But the Beaufort he was returning to was not much different from the one he had departed. Residents still knew most everyone in town and greeted each other on the streets. 

Church and civic organizations were still central to social life, and men still spent weekends “going up the river” to fish camps. However, many of the city’s streets remained unpaved, its waterfront wharf grew ever-more dilapidated and job prospects for the college-educated were limited. Chambers at least had a measure of security — upon his return, he helped run the family’s ice company and eventually expanded into concrete, asphalt and real estate ventures.

And not long after easing his car across the Whale Branch River that day, he and a handful of his contemporaries punched the accelerator on Beaufort’s sprint toward modernity. In addition to his business ventures, Chambers served 20 years as Beaufort’s mayor and became “the most effective city leader of the 20th century,” historians Larry Rowland and Stephen Wise assert in the third volume of their book “The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina.”

Chambers was born in 1928 in a home on Port Republic Street. His parents and grandparents were divorced at about the same time, in an era when divorce was rare, and he was raised from about age 4 by his grandfather. They lived on The Old Point, where young Chambers made friends with neighbors Willie Scheper, Brantley Harvey and Wyatt Pringle. They swam the Beaufort River, dock to dock and creek to creek. When they dried off, 15 cents at a downtown counter bought them a hot dog and a Coke. When they got a little older, Chambers starred for the Beaufort High School football team and the Tidal Wave’s 1945 state-championship basketball squad.

Then, it was off to Clemson. Chambers’ grandfather Hal Pollitzer lettered there for John Heisman’s football team in 1902 and promised his grandson a stake in the family ice business — if he, too, graduated from Clemson. Chambers obliged and earned his civil engineering degree in 1949, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula were peaking. “I joined (an Army) reserve unit that I thought would be called right after the women and children,” Chambers quipped, “but the minute I joined it, it was called to active service.” While most of his unit was called to Korea, he was assigned to remain behind at Fort Huachuca, where the U.S. Army had trained its “Buffalo Soldiers” from 1913 to 1933. Chambers was part of an engineering team that helped update the fort, and he was an instructor in a leadership school there.

He considered a career in the military, but his wife’s father wouldn’t hear of it — “ ‘I don’t want you dragging my grandchildren all over the world,’ he told me” — so he packed up Betty and the kids and brought them back to Beaufort. He went into his family’s ice and concrete businesses, then into politics. He was a former chairman of the county development board, but his 1969 run for mayor was his first attempt at elective office. At that time, the city’s infrastructure creaked, and Chambers led an unprecedented period of intense improvements. Since the mid-1960s, when Chambers’ friend Scheper was mayor, the city had toyed with the idea of ripping out the docks along the Bay Street Riverfront and replacing them with a frontage road and parking lot.

Chambers envisioned something more grand — a 7-acre park built atop a cantilevered platform that would beautify downtown and provide access to the waterfront for residents who lacked it. The project was at first opposed as too grand and too expensive. Chambers and City Council hired 23-year-old Ed Duryea as city manager, and his job became helping Chambers chase funding from banks and the federal government. By the time the park was opened in May 1979, the once-controversial project was named for Chambers — who, as it turned out, was less than halfway through his run as mayor.

At the opening ceremony for the park, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond remarked that he had never met anyone as good at extracting money from Washington, D.C., as Chambers. Indeed, by the mayor’s estimate, the city secured about $53 million in federal funding for various projects over his 20-year run. The park was the glitziest of these projects, but hardly the only one. Early in Chambers’ tenure, the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control declared the waters of the Beaufort River unfit for recreational use. In response, the city constructed a modern water and waste-management system that took downtown homes off septic tanks and meant untreated effluent no longer poured into the Beaufort River.

Also under Chambers’ watch, fire service was improved and city workers’ pay increased. Gutters were built and streets paved in the city’s Northwest Quadrant neighborhood. “The Beaufort Preservation Manual,” also known as the Milner Report, was completed in 1979, cataloguing the city’s historic assets and providing a guide for their preservation. With his name attached to a park that figures to be a city centerpiece for decades to come, it’s likely future generations Beaufortonians will know Henry Carroll Chambers’ name. But what would he like to be known for? “He led Beaufort,” said Chambers, who will turn 90 in July 2018, “and made it better than it was.” Indeed, Chambers’ hometown is better, bigger and more modern than it was the day he recrossed the Whale Branch River.

See and hear Chambers reminisce about the transformation of Beaufort’s dilapidated wharf into gleaming Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park in this Beaufort History Museum video: http://bit.ly/BHM_Chambers_Waterfront_Park.

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