HHI airport growth brought safety concerns for historic Black church. A relocation has taken years.
- Jessica Wade
- Aug 20, 2024
- 4 min read
Published: July 30, 2024
The stained glass window illuminating a back office inside St. James Baptist Church was briefly cast in shadow as a plane came in for a landing at Hilton Head Island Airport.
“See how loud that is?” Herbert Ford asked, pausing his conversation as the commercial jet rumbled overhead.
Ford is chairman of the church’s board of trustees, a role that puts him front and center in the yearslong effort to relocate St. James Baptist Church from the home it has held for nearly 140 years.
The church for more than a decade has felt pressure to move away from the airport’s encroaching runway and increasingly busy air traffic. About five years ago church leaders accepted the relocation as both an inevitability and an opportunity to create a place of worship that meets the needs of the community.
Even with that long-awaited consensus, the project stagnated. A lack of priority from officials and occasional disagreements between Beaufort County and the Town of Hilton Head Island delayed the move.
In recent months, a new sense of urgency combined with new state funding reinvigorated what has been a turbulent process.
There remain hurdles to overcome, including how to cover the estimated $10 million price tag, but church leaders and project organizers said recent progress fosters renewed optimism that the congregation of the historic Black church will not only find a new home, but one that honors historic significance while meeting modern needs.
A church at the end of a runway
It was an aviation tragedy that brought the first whisper of a potential relocation nearly 50 years ago.
In the early hours of a spring day in 1975, a small plane departed the airport runway, failed to gain altitude and crashed in a fiery heap just 50 feet from St. James Baptist Church. Six passengers were killed.
At the time, the idea of moving to a new building was brushed off, and a verbal agreement was made with the county that when church was in session on Sundays, no airplanes were allowed to fly overhead.
That handshake agreement expired years ago, said Ford, whose father was a church leader at the time of the crash.
It’s now not uncommon for a plane to pass over during a Sunday service as airlines and private planes complete increasingly frequent flights to and from the island.
Safety concerns got a lot closer to the church’s backyard in 2018 when the airport finished a 700-foot addition to the runway. The expansion placed the church within the airport’s runway protection zone, an area defined by the Federal Aviation Administration to protect people and property on the ground in the event of a crash or landing beyond the runway.
The FAA’s safety requirements solidified the need for relocation, said Zenos Morris, assistant community development director with the Town of Hilton Head Island and the town’s representative for the relocation project.
“We’re definitely moving in a good way to mitigate the move of the church,” Morris said. “It’s been a complicated task over many years, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
He credited the state’s newly allocated funding as a major driver of that progress.
Republican state Sen. Tom Davis earlier this year requested and was granted $4 million from the state budget to assist in the move of St. James Baptist. That’s in addition to $750,000 previously allocated for the construction of a fellowship hall at the new location.
To Ford, the new funding signifies a major step forward and perhaps adds to the urgency among town and county officials to see the relocation and new construction through.
“(The process) has been very laborious and very frustrating because it hasn’t historically been easy to get answers,” Ford said. “It’s going better now than it was at the beginning.”
Along with state involvement, a changeover in county administration and new project leaders, like Morris, have helped to move things along, Ford said.
“I think it’ll get the attention it deserves now that it didn’t get when we made the decision (to move) five years ago,” Ford said.
Plans for a new church
Church leaders presented three criteria to town and county officials when they agreed to the move: They must get a new church facility, a fellowship hall must be built nearby and the church’s historic Cherry Hill Schoolhouse must be picked up and brought to the new location.
Exactly what the new church and fellowship hall will look like is still being drafted. All parties involved are looking to create a space that fits well into the island’s Lowcountry aesthetic and is big enough to meet the needs of the community.
The new facilities are planned to rise on five acres of town-owned property adjacent to Union Cemetery Road. Both county and town councils will have to vote on final approval of that location, Morris said.
An exact cost of the move and new construction is still unclear, though the county’s project lead, Jared Fralix, estimates the total cost somewhere near $10 million. With the state’s $4.75 million contribution, that leaves about $5.25 million unaccounted for.
The remaining costs will likely be split among Beaufort County, the Town of Hilton Head Island and the FAA. Both county and town councils are scheduled to hear an update on the project in August and are expected to advise on how to proceed, said Fralix, an assistant county administrator.
“This project has been out there for a long time, but since last fall we’ve made a lot of progress,” Fralix said. “The county and town have been working with the church closely to see this come to fruition, and we’re excited to advance the project to the next stage.”
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