A sacred space: CAES professor wins an international competition to design a South Carolina heritage park

In the South Carolina Lowcountry, there lies a community with a remarkable history that’s fading away.

This community known as Scanlonville was a settlement for freed slaves right after the Civil War and a hub of Black life near Charleston. To keep alive this memory as gentrification threatens to erase what remains, a local civic group decided to build a heritage-based public space.

It held an international competition to find a designer. The winner was W. Chris Harrison, coordinator of the N.C. A&T College of Agriculture and Environmental Science’s Landscape Architecture Program.

“It was a very compelling project for me,” said Harrison, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Design. “The mission of our program is working on projects like this, to be a voice for folks who don’t have a voice.”

A ‘really cool competition’

In early 2020, Harrison heard that Clemson University was coordinating an international design contest for a new public space in South Carolina to highlight a Black community. The judges were professors and professionals from New York City, Boston, Clemson and the West Coast.

Intrigued, Harrison assigned his spring semester Materials and Construction Studio class to tackle this project.

“I thought it would be really good for the program just to have us participate in this really cool competition that’s relevant to African American heritage,” said Harrison, who earned his bachelor’s degree in the college’s landscape architecture from A&T in 2007.

N.C. A&T’s program is the only majority African American landscape architecture program in the nation, and the nation’s only HBCU to offer a bachelor’s degree in the subject.

The 13 juniors in the class dug into the history and culture of Scanlonville. The students drew up initial concept sketches — rough ideas of what they thought the site should look like — and were critiquing each other’s work when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Students returned home, the class went remote and the students’ work on the project fizzled.

One of those students, Martrell Mosley, called it an interesting assignment that taught him a lot that he’ll carry over into his career.

When designing a park, “especially for a memorial design, you want to know who you’re designing it for and who’s going to be there,” said Mosley, a 2021 A&T graduate who now works as a landscape architectural designer in Charlotte. “You want to be able to design for the people who might know (Scanlonville’s founder) or are descended from him.”

A brief history of Scanlonville

Scanlonville was founded in 1868 when a carpenter named John Scanlon bought a former 614-acre plantation where the Wando River flows into Charleston Harbor. The plantation had been owned by the Remley family, which is why some call the area Remleys Point.

The park includes a representation of a praise house, the simple wooden structures built by enslaved persons on plantations for worship and gatherings that also often served as the center of many African American communities. Harrison’s design proposed that the entire park would serve as a place of gathering, spiritual reflection and community.

Scanlon formed the Charleston Land Company, which laid down numbered streets and avenues and subdivided the property into half-acre and 2-acre lots. Black residents — other recently freed slaves like John Scanlon and the descendents of slaves —built homes and farms here.

The close-knit and self-sufficient community thrived. Scanlonville had a park and a wharf, stores and nightclubs, a school, a hotel and a cemetery. It was home to Riverside Beach, one of the few area beaches open to Black people. During the 20^th century, its waterfront pavilion drew A-list musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and James Brown.

Today, there’s little left of the old Scanlonville except for a historical marker at the community’s entrance where the new park is planned. The community is now part of the town of Mount Pleasant. Black residents have been fighting for years to save the park site and cemetery from development.

Less than 10 percent of Scanlonville remains in the hands of the descendents of the original owners. Because Black residents historically lacked access to the legal system, many homes were passed down to the children of the owners without clear titles. This so-called heirs property made it easy for developers to snap up valuable waterfront property for cheap. New waterfront mansions threaten to crowd out the modest ranch homes — and the memories of generations of Scanlonville residents.

“The community is one big family,” said Edward Lee, a longtime Scanlonville resident and a 1980 A&T graduate. “Everybody is a cousin to somebody.”

‘Landscape is everlasting’

When the pandemic sent his students home, Harrison picked up the project. His winning design — he called it Praise House Park — blends the community’s history and the natural world.

A praise house was a simple wooden structure built by enslaved persons on plantations for worship and gatherings. During slavery times and after, the praise house served as the center of many African American communities. Harrison’s design proposed that the entire park would serve as a place of gathering, spiritual reflection and community.

In his design for this half-acre park, a spiral walkway will take visitors to the middle of the park called the spirit circle. Nearby will be the weave pavilion — a living sculpture of interlaced willow trees that resemble the baskets made by the Gullah people, descendents of those who were enslaved along the South Carolina coast.

The park will include plantings of rice, cotton and indigo, which enslaved persons grew on area plantations. There also will be a plot of sweetgrass, which is used to make baskets.

Throughout the park there will be several cast bronze statues, include those of the Sewee Indians who inhabited the land before European settlers arrived; of a Gullah woman; and of a praise house. Virtual and augmented reality will let visitors use their phones and other devices to hear the long-ago stories of these people and the place where they once lived.

The park will respect the natural environment. The rice planting will hold water runoff, and concrete alternatives will be used for walkways and other built features. Many of the current trees, including live oaks draped with Spanish moss, will remain.

Harrison said the park is designed to unite people and give them a sacred space to reflect and escape whatever is oppressing them.

“This place is about change, but the landscape is everlasting,” said Harrison, who got $2,500 for his winning entry. “It’s ubiquitous and connects us all through this string of time.”

Efforts to raise money to build the park are ongoing, said Lee, who’s also president of the East Cooper Civic Club Inc. that owns the park and sponsored the design contest.

Lee, meanwhile, had nothing but praise for Harrison’s winning entry.

“(Harrison) did his research. He dug into our community,” Lee said. “Every element in his design was inspired by something that happened or is in Scanlonville.”