USC could lose its island to UGA. Donor’s family says the school isn’t upholding the deal

BY SARAH HASELHORST

JUNE 23, 2022 5:00 AM

Decades ago, Philip Rhodes gave the University of South Carolina an extraordinary gift: A Beaufort County barrier island. While few strings were attached, they were significant. Rhodes wanted Pritchards Island — with a south-facing birds-eye view of Hilton Head — to remain in a wilderness state, and to be used for scientific, educational, charitable and general public purposes.

But now, Rhodes’ family says USC isn’t fulfilling its obligations to the island. If they’re right, the deeds say USC could lose control of the island to the University of Georgia or The Nature Conservancy. In a statement issued last week, the family said it has been “disappointed” by the university’s lack of engagement as it relates to the deed signed nearly four decades ago.

One USCB official says the school is eager to conduct research on the island and believes it now has the biologists to do it. The challenge is identifying revenue sources to fund the work. Rhodes wanted Pritchards Island to always be what it was when he had the good luck to walk its sand and fish its waters. He knew that more development nearby was coming. He knew how barrier islands worked. And he knew he wanted Pritchards to remain a testament to what nature had put there.

He thought he knew how to do that. In December 1983, Rhodes gave USC half the island. By February 1989, he donated the other 50% to the university. Then, in the early ‘90s, Rhodes funded another gift. He paid for the construction of a raised wooden lab, set back from the ocean and among live oaks and palmetto trees. Inside was a kitchen, dorm-style rooms with bunk beds and a teaching space. The building was an idyllic and visceral experience for students and professors to study the island’s ecosystems, monitor threatened loggerhead sea turtles and grasp erosion impacts.

By 2009, the lab had become weather-worn and unusable — the price of letting Mother Nature take her course. Leftover equipment sat like antiques until the Rhodes family urged its removal a year later. That year, funding to keep Pritchards afloat — a combination of state, federal and private funding, including that of media mogul Ted Turner — had dried up. Since then, the island, a venerable research treasure trove, hasn’t shown up in promotional material from USC or its sister campuses.

The framework of dead trees and driftwood greets visitors before they get to the abandoned Pritchards Island laboratory formerly used for coastal research and loggerhead turtle research and conservation efforts. Pritchards’ future hangs in limbo and under a caveat that Rhodes, who died in 2009, placed on the gift. If USC can’t live up to its promise to uphold its end of the bargain? It can ship out and the island would go to the University of Georgia, Rhodes’ alma mater, if UGA officials want it.

The prospect was dangled by the Rhodes family in a 2010 email to several Pritchards Island staff, noting his “primary concern [was] the protection and good stewardship of Pritchards.” “If USC is to be that steward, well and good,” a Rhodes family member wrote. “If not, let’s move on.” Twelve years later, with little movement but the rapid erosion of the barrier island’s shoreline, Philip Rhodes’ family is asking for the patriarch’s wishes to be revived. It’s not a simple fix to restart university-led efforts.

They’ll need funding, which USC has yet to identify, and ample staff to run programs. And logistically, Pritchards requires a boat ride or kayak trip when the tides are just right. But the storied island, ripe for research and education, isn’t one USC and USCB officials say they want to let go of.

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