At 90, Tom Barnwell has left a lasting legacy on Hilton Head Island

Yahoo

01-06-2025

Thomas C. Barnwell Jr. was born on an incoming tide on Hilton Head Island 90 years ago, and he's been riding a flood of change ever since.
When Barnwell was inducted into the Hilton Head Island Hall of Fame in 2013, he was called 'an outspoken community leader, bringing an energetic voice — as well as affordable health care, public water systems and economic and educational opportunities — to the powerless.'
Add affordable housing to the list. Between 1978 and 2000, he and his family have developed 100 units in five different projects on Hilton Head.
And add environmental protection, from the days the Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative he and others founded joined the fight against a petrochemical plant coming to Bluffton.
But as he and I talked ahead of his birthday on Monday, June 2, the dominant theme turned out to be family.
Barnwell lives on Katie Miller Drive, named for his grandmother, his home in a rural setting amid the island's hubbub.
We looked at a snapshot showing generations five through eight of his family on the island. It began when Caesar and Mariah Jones paddled over from Bluffton — seeking freedom during the Civil War, and presumably setting up home in the freedmen village of Mitchelville.
Barnwell — a born entrepreneur who sold candy to his elementary school classmates and could always get the teacher off topic — has hair of gray and white now. He was wearing a starched oxford shirt, blue jeans and suspenders when he mentioned his ongoing second battle with prostate cancer.
He and Susan Carter Barnwell will celebrate 52 years of marriage in September. Two of his children — Thomas 'Curtis' Barnwell III and Paulette Barnwell Ervin – live on the island. A third, Jason S. Barnwell, who has an engineering degree from MIT and a law degree from the University of Southern California — works for Microsoft in Seattle.
He wants them to remember where they came from.
Barnwell was born in the Squire Pope area of an island with no bridge, electricity, paved roads, hospital or telephones.
As a child, he saw trees, sand and more trees.
But his grandfather, Benjamin Walter White, 'used to say to us, 'Hold onto your land because Hilton Head Island one day will be the Garden of Eden place of the South.'
That has remained one of Barnwell's mantras.
'I was just a little boy when I heard that,' he said. 'I said, 'This old man has got to be crazy.' I said that to myself. I wouldn't dare say that to him. I would have been told to go out there and get a switch and he would have whipped me.'
That grandfather was a farmer who purchased a lot of land.
'He'd put us in a wagon when it was time to grind the cane and show us where his property lines used to be,' Barnwell said.
Barnwell said he is saddened to see how much land has left Gullah hands 'for many reasons.'
He said families should treat land as a business.
His family leases the sandy soil on which a large, blue-roofed timeshare project rises on Skull Creek today. The family still owns the place where Paulette recalls as a child getting chased up a tree by a big bull named Jupiter.
Barnwell's parents were bright lights guiding both him and the Gullah community.
Tom Sr. was a farmer, ferryman and doorman — educated at the Penn School on St. Helena Island, as was Tom Jr.
Island Packet co-founder and columnist Jonathan Daniels wrote that Tom Sr. was a 'shrewdly humorous, impeccably polite man' who served both the Gullah and the newcomers as a 'quiet and perceptive counselor.'
But Barnwell said it was his mother, Hannah White Barnwell, who set him onto perhaps his most important life's work.
She was educated at The Mather School in Beaufort, and at a nursing school for Black people in Columbia, and she was a force for both health care and child care on her isolated island.
Barnwell recalled: 'She, as an adult, called me and said, 'There's this doctor in Bluffton named Dr. Donald Gatch. He is a very good friend of (public health nurse) Ann Pitts. You need to meet him. You need to spend some time with him. You need to understand what he has discovered as a problem in our area. And you need to spend some time working with him on that problem.'
That was in 1968. The problem was children infested with intestinal parasites, and the associated poverty.
Barnwell holds up the transcript of testimony about Lowcountry conditions he and others made before the U.S. Senate Select Subcommittee on Nutrition and Human Needs in February 1969.
It became a national story. Gatch was known as 'The Hunger Doctor.'
Among the outcroppings of that public reckoning was the creation of the Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services Inc., offering medical care to the indigent and organizing public water systems in rural areas. Barnwell was its director for a decade, and its administrative building in Okatie is named for him.
Ninety years of rapid advances in the Lowcountry may have left one important thing behind.
That is family.
Commuting a couple of hours both to and from work on Hilton Head each day, 'disrupts the opportunity for families being able to blend and grow together as a unit,' Barnwell said.
'The jobs are important. They keep people financially afloat. But the family is more and more deteriorating.'
Technology also plays a part, with every child holding a cellphone.
'Those things don't capture the kind of things we used to get from the older people, sitting next to the fireplace.'
And that leaves a society not knowing — or appreciating — the dignity, sacrifice and work that brought today's opportunities.
'You'll find it in these books,' Barnwell said, tapping his stacks of documents.
'I hope maybe one of these days my grandchildren or great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren will look at these books and see that I, along with a lot of other people, have been helpful.'
David Lauderdale may be reached at [e-mail] .