Date Published: July 2, 2006   

One man makes a difference in slowing development

The Associated Press

Fred Lincoln has been a modern day hero for residents seeking to hold onto their land and quiet way of life in out of the way places along South Carolina's coast.

The 60-year-old retired fire captain is fighting now to get land returned to families after officials decided against building a State Ports Authority terminal at Daniel Island.

The state had already begun the process of condemning land for use at the terminal.

He is fresh off a fight against a dirt mine in nearby Huger.

Much of his work is with black families who have what is called "heirs property." The land has been passed down for generations without a will and is owned by dozens of descendants of the original property owners.

But those who know Lincoln say his years of effort have paid off.

"Fred just very quietly works, works, works," said Jane Lareau of the Coastal Conservation League. "He has a calm demeanor. He has a clear head. He has a strong sense of what is right for his community.

"To me, he is nothing short of a modern-day hero."

When Lincoln was a child, he said, he could sit at night where his family lives and not hear a car. Today, a sprawling Mikasa Inc. distribution plant sits on one side of that road and a condominium development has broken ground on the other and the trucks keep coming.

"We never thought anything like that would happen. We never dreamed," said Lincoln's father Harold Lincoln, 92. "He opened our eyes. He opened the whole community's eyes."

Fred Lincoln lives just a little ways from his parents' home - his house hidden in the woods near the Cooper River marsh. His brother keeps cows as a hobby. His father still tends his garden and cuts wood for a stove.

Like many of his generation, Lincoln left his home after graduating from high school. He went to New York City, looking for opportunity. He said while he was working there, he met civil rights activist Malcolm X.

"Oh, this is the guy everybody fears," Lincoln recalls thinking. "He doesn't look that bad."

Lincoln said he talked politics with the fiery leader.

"Once you have met people like that, it has to leave an impression on you," Lincoln said. "You don't have to accept the odds. You think, we have got to do for ourselves."

Lincoln returned to South Carolina in the 1980s, looking for a place to build a home where he knew his neighbors and where he would get "lost in the shuffle."

He chose the area he had grown up, but it was just a few years before the city annexed Daniel Island and an interstate expressway came through. The State Ports Authority bought land on the island and planned to send its trucks and a railroad through Lincoln's Cainhoy community.

"All of a sudden speculators were stopping by people's houses to ask if they wanted to sell," Lincoln said. "You couldn't have blinders on. I had an idea what we were going to have to deal with."

It was then that people living on heirs property began to feel the pinch. If developers could persuade one heir to sell, the others' claims could be challenged. More than two-thirds of the Cainhoy family property that was intact in 1989 has been sold.

Lincoln recalled how Lillie McCall was intimidated into selling her family home. She was 99 years old at the time and still knitted without a light in the back room of her lifelong home. She moved into a nursing home, and the congregation of her church was forced to move to Mount Pleasant.

"I was incensed they would do something like that to her. I had promised her we would get her property back," Lincoln said. He wasn't able to fulfill that promise, but he did co-found the Wando-Huger Community Development Corp. and the East Cooper Planning Council.

Today, he says, it's mostly about getting families a fair price - sometimes millions of dollars - when they do sell. "We're not going to lose it all," he said.

"They didn't come as investors, they came as homeowners," Lincoln said at a recent hearing about the dirt mine in Huger. "Sons and daughters of slaves set up a community here. To think of someone coming in thinking of only financial gain and to diminish the quality of life is unacceptable. We have to stand up."

Lincoln sounded more like a preacher than a volunteer fire company chairman, but he said the work is a calling.

"It's not something you get up in the morning and want to do," Lincoln said. "It's something you have to do. I don't consider myself a hero. I consider myself someone working to try to make things better for me and for everybody around me.

"And for future generations."

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Information from: The Post and Courier,