The heart of the city is Front Street, along the waterfront, where you can find the usual collection of restaurants, gift shops, art galleries, pubs and quite a few restored Victorian buildings and homes. Once again, I will let photos tell the story.
This is a shot of Front Street, which looks to me a lot like any other main street in small town America. In the middle is Clawsons (red sign) which is a very good restaurant (more shrimp & grits for me, flounder for Art) located in a building that has a long history. All variety of shops and services have been housed there, and you can see much of this history inside the restaurant like the photo of the entry below:
Next on my brief tour of the city are a few of the old homes that we always enjoy seeing in these small towns--and knowing they are there is what gets us out for that much needed walk after a day on the water.
Going back to the marina, I have a few more photos of the waterfront to share (mostly because it was really very nice and definitely scenic):
A look at the small park that separates the marina from Front Street. The building on the left is a dock-side restaurant and bar. The marina gave us tokens for free beer, so we spent our last night there downing a few with fellow boaters who we had met along the way.
Here is our boat in the marina with art swabbing the upper deck (okay, so no one uses that term any more, but I couldn't resist and he was in the process of washing the boat anyway when I took this shot). Another interesting note: the sailboat to the left of us came across the Atlantic from England! It was owned by a very nice young couple and I can't believe they were brave enough to sail all that way in a relatively small boat.
And just when we were thinking we had a pretty nice boat ourselves (and not so small either), along came this monster and we were instantly humbled:
That's our little boat on the far left.
Back to a little more history for my last note on this stop. Only a block off Front Street is the Beaufort Historical Association offices and they have a small park where several of the more famous old buildings have been located and restored. Here is Art in front of the jail, which was used until the 1950s!!
But even more interesting was the cemetery, the Old Burying Ground, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was deeded to the town in 1731, but some of the graves are much older. Buried here are soldiers from the Indian wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War (both Union and Confederate soldiers) as well as local citizens. Most of the graves face East because those buried there wanted to face the sun when they arose on "Judgement Morn." The grounds are beautiful and well-kept as you can see in these photos:
The stories of several of those buried there are worth sharing, but I will limit this to the one I like best--the grave of a girl buried in a barrel of rum (bet that got your attention). Here is what happened: In the 1700s an English family emigrated to Beaufort and their daughter grew up with a desire to see her native homeland. She persuaded her parents to let her go to England and her father promised her mother that he would return the girl safely. The girl loved her visit to England, but died on the journey home. She would have been buried at sea, but her father wanted to keep his promise and so he bought a barrel of rum from the Captain, placed her body in it and brought her back to Beaufort for burial. This is a photo of her grave:
That's it for my Beaufort report. Our next destination is Portsmouth, Virginia.
such beautiful houses!
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