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The $632 million Ravenel Bridge, the most expensive span ever built in South Carolina, opens next year and will be a fixture on the Charleston skyline for a century to come.
In a way that's fitting because for a half-century Ravenel has been a fixture on South Carolina's political landscape.
In a political career dating to the 1950s, the 77-year-old Ravenel has served in the state Senate, state House and Congress and ran for governor.
With his quick wit and friendly smile, he also helped build the modern Republican Party in a state that, during the past decade, has moved swiftly toward the right.
Now Ravenel, a businessman and lifelong politician, is retiring from public life.
He plans to spend time on his farm in Hell Hole Swamp near Charleston, travel to Africa to observe wildlife and attend the baseball, soccer, basketball and what-have-you games of his 19 grandchildren.
Ravenel, known as Cousin Arthur to friend and political foe alike, was defeated when he first ran for the state House in 1950. Two years later he was elected.
"In the Legislature then, everyone was a Democrat. Absolutely no one was Republican. You just heard about Republicans," Ravenel quips sitting in his den overlooking the harbor amid photos of family and grandchildren. "Sherman was one."
Ten years later, however, Ravenel got involved with South Carolina's fledgling Republican Party and was a national convention delegate in 1964 when Barry Goldwater was nominated in San Francisco.
That was the same year U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond announced he was switching to the GOP. With that, the party started growing and running candidates for offices in the state.
In 1974, James Edwards became the first Republican governor in South Carolina since Reconstruction.
Then, in 1980, Ravenel and state Sen. Glenn McConnell, now Senate president pro tem, were first elected to the Senate. It was the same year Ronald Reagan became president.
"We say we were elected and carried Ronald Reagan on our coattails," laughs Ravenel, who isn't surprised the party has grown.
"We saw it coming," he says. "The Democratic Party was getting more and more liberal. As it got more liberal, we were able to recruit more and more people to run."
In 1986, Ravenel won the open 1st Congressional District seat and went on to serve eight years in the U.S. House.
But he never enjoyed it all that much. "The whole time I was up in Washington, I was in the minority. It's just not too pleasant when you are in the minority," Ravenel recalls.
Leaving the seat, he ran for governor in 1994, losing in a GOP runoff to David Beasley who went on to become governor.
"I did just great around here," Ravenel says. "The farther I got from Charleston, the worse I did."
He returned to the state Senate in 1996 with an idea of creating an infrastructure bank to pay for big-ticket highway projects around the state.
It started as a way to finally get a new Cooper River bridge - something discussed for years but for which the dollars never seemed available.
"I wanted to get back to put together the funds to try to replace the bridge," Ravenel says, recalling when an engineering firm released a report on the narrow, aging Grace Bridge linking Charleston and Mount Pleasant. If a perfect bridge was a 100, the Grace Bridge would score only a four, that report said.
Now, Ravenel can daily watch the progress of the bridge bearing his name.
And now another generation of Ravenels is involved in political life. Ravenel's son, Thomas, came in a close third in the six-way GOP race for U.S. Senate this year.
Ravenel said he was surprised when Thomas Ravenel told him he wanted to run.
"He said, 'I'm thinking of running for the Senate.' And I said, 'You're running against (state Sen. John) Kuhn?' He said, 'No, the U.S. Senate,'" the elder Ravenel recalls.
He will miss his colleagues in his beloved South Carolina Senate, which he calls "the Cadillac of elective office."
"You're dealing with people with soft Southern voices, and everyone is very polite," he says. "It's small, and with 46 members, you can get something done."
He remembers sharing a Senate suite for a time with state Sen. Kay Patterson, D-Columbia.
Ravenel recalls asking Patterson if he could place a picture of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the anteroom. It was all right with Patterson, who already had a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall.
"He said, 'We'll just let them keep an eye on each other,'" Ravenel recalls.
Ravenel, who has a number of ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, flies a Confederate flag on the end of his dock and can see Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, from his den.
Amid the heated rhetoric over removing the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome four years ago, he once referred to the NAACP as the "National Association for Retarded People," bringing calls for his resignation.
He later voted to remove the flag from the dome and place a similar one at the Confederate Soldier Monument on Statehouse grounds.
"When you look at it dispassionately now, it was the wrong flag," says Ravenel. "It was up there for the wrong reason and naturally it got pretty contentious."
The flag atop the capitol was the Confederate Navy jack, not the battle flag, says Ravenel who says he took grief from flag supporters for supporting the compromise.
"Now it's the right flag placed at the soldiers' monument where most people seem to agree it belongs," he says.
