LOWCOUNTRY SUPPER
A Taste of Tradition
story by HEATHER STEINBERGER
photos by SK, SIGNS, DESIGNS & MARKETING and courtesy of BEAUFORT WATER FESTIVAL
If you visit Beaufort’s Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park on the evening of Thursday, July 17, you’ll be greeted by the scent of hot shrimp and sausage from a fresh Lowcountry boil, rollicking music from the Beaufort Water Festival stage, and the joyful hum of a community coming home to itself.
Welcome to the Lowcountry Supper — one night only, and one of Beaufort’s most beloved traditions.
Now in its 69th year, the Water Festival has grown from a modest 2-day gathering in July 1956 into a 10-day extravaganza that welcomes as many as 80,000 visitors. And yet, on this one night, it still feels like a hometown picnic.
Sponsored by First Federal Bank and with Standing Committee Chairman Alan Langford at the helm, this year’s Lowcountry Supper will kick off at 6 p.m. with supper served until 7:30 p.m. For an hour and a half, volunteers will serve a hearty meal of shrimp, sausage, corn, and red potatoes (a Lowcountry boil, also known as Frogmore Stew), as well as coleslaw, rolls, watermelon, iced tea, and lemonade.
All this for $15 per person. Children ages 5 and under are free.
As guests get comfortable with their plates, local musician Campfire Tyler will kick off the evening with his family-friendly opening act. Next up is another cherished Beaufort tradition: The Whistlers.
This unique act has been performed at the Beaufort Water Festival since 1982. Comprised of five past commodores in costume with painted stomachs, the group performs their classic theme song with a solo from the lead Whistler. Their identities are revealed at the end.
“Where else can you see adults with trash cans on their heads pretend to whistle out of their belly buttons?” muses Todd Stowe, 69th commodore of the Beaufort Water Festival, who has been a festival volunteer since 1995 and works as a teacher at Bridges Preparatory School. “My biggest fear is to be a past commodore and having to take my shirt off up there!”
The headline act this year is a Buford, Georgia-based band called Departure. Now celebrating 17 years together, Departure is widely considered to be one of the country’s top Journey tribute bands.
While the Lowcountry Supper is a highlight of the modern Beaufort Water Festival, its roots run deep. And it didn’t always look like this.
Festival organizers came up with the idea of a “family night supper” in 1973. That year, students at Beaufort Technical Education Center (originally the 1868 Mather School and now Technical College of the Lowcountry) caught 500 pounds of rock shrimp to donate for the occasion. Overseeing the project was Richard Gay, one of the founders of St. Helena Island-based Gay Shrimp Company and the man credited with naming Frogmore Stew.
The 7-acre Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park wouldn’t be built until 1979. In those early years, Beaufort Rotary Club volunteers served the Lowcountry Supper at Freedom Mall just off Bay Street, where the marina parking lot and boat ramp are now.
Lowcountry Supper numbers grew quickly. In 1976, the Beaufort Gazette reported that “1,500 people feasted on 750 pounds of local shrimp and trimmings prepared by the food services department of Beaufort TEC,” with 150 watermelons for dessert.
One enthusiastic interviewee remarked, “The taste of this year is seasoned by the last.”
Volunteers served 3,000 people in 1979, and a year later, 4,000 people consumed a whopping 2,000 pounds of shrimp. In the 1990s, attendance stabilized in the 2,500-to-3,000 range.
Creating a meal for thousands of hungry, excited festivalgoers is no small undertaking, and no one understands this better than the cooks.
After all, it falls to the chief cook to make sure there is enough food and to anticipate the myriad things that might go wrong. Jason Dangerfield, Larry Swigart, and Jim Handrinos were Lowcountry Supper kitchen trailblazers, carrying the torch and laying the groundwork for today’s volunteers.
“One year, we had packed up the truck, ready to deliver the shrimp, and the truck wouldn’t start,” said Handrinos to the Beaufort Gazette in 1990. “I just about had a stroke. We cook all that stuff, and it won’t keep. One year, it rained so hard, water was up to my knees.”
The show must go on, however.
“Sure, it’s a lot of work,” remarked Gary Willis to the Beaufort Gazette in 1994 who cooked with Handrinos and Don Carver. “But it gives you a sense of accomplishment. You see people enjoying it, and that’s all the pay you need.”
Dangerfield was the first chief cook to handle meal preparation on-site in the waterfront park. Prior to that, volunteers cooked in a mess hall at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and, later, at the Naval Hospital.
“Cooking was at Parris Island for decades,” says Craig Reaves, current chief cook. “Then, one year, there was a gas leak. The commodore reached out to me and Jason Dangerfield to see what we could do.”
“Jason had a catering business that he called ‘a hobby that got out of hand,’” Stowe says with a chuckle. “He scrambled to figure out where we were going to cook.”
“We pulled it off without too much trouble,” Reaves remembers. “It’s so much better to be cooking on-site, where everything is hot and fresh — and in sight of the buffet line.”
Reaves has been cooking the Lowcountry Supper for roughly 10 years. He is a natural fit for this role, as shrimping runs in his blood.
Born and raised in Holden Beach, North Carolina, Reaves started shrimping at age 14 and started running his own boat at 17. The family relocated with their boats to Beaufort in 1992, and in 2007, he and his wife, Jana, purchased Sea Eagle Market.
As he told the Island Packet earlier this year, “When we say, ‘From our boats to your table,’ we mean it.”
Reaves says he is expecting 2,000 to 2,500 people at the Lowcountry Supper on Thursday, July 17. He and his team of five to six people will be preparing 1,200 pounds of shrimp, 1,000 pounds of sausage, 2,500 ears of corn, 700 to 800 pounds of red potatoes, a couple hundred pounds of coleslaw, 80 watermelons, and 100 gallons of iced tea and lemonade.
Ready to serve the six enthusiastic buffet lines will be more than 100 volunteers comprising Rotarians, members of the military, and other community volunteers. It requires significant effort and coordination, but each year, everyone brings their best to the endeavor.
“We don’t make a profit on this,” Stowe says of the all-volunteer event. “We do this for Beaufort.”
This sentiment echoes through the decades.
Don Carver, one of the early festival organizers and a longtime volunteer, told the Beaufort Gazette in 1996 that one of the things that makes the Lowcountry Supper unique is the “tremendous amount of people involved. It cuts across a wide section of the community.”
“It’s one of our best nights,” reflected festival spokesperson Jack Little in 2008. “It’s our biggest family night.”
So, it remains. And Beaufort welcomes all to the table.
To learn more about the 69th Annual Beaufort Water Festival and to buy tickets to events including the Lowcountry Supper, visit BftWaterFestival.com.
