Along the South Carolina coast sits a quaint town known as “The Village” to those whose families have lived among its oak trees for centuries. It’s here that Rutledge Leland III ’66 has served as the mayor and a leader of industry for nearly 50 years. From steering the town through recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo to supporting the livelihood of the shrimping economy, his humble leadership has been recognized with the Order of the Palmetto, the state of South Carolina’s highest civilian honor. But that’s only the beginning of his story — and the story of a town.
Historic U.S. Route 17, north of the coast from Charleston, South Carolina, is home to the commerce of seemingly every other modern American thoroughfare, flanked by fast food restaurants, gas stations and sprawling big-box stores. Except these retail mainstays somehow remain hidden from the view of passing motorists. Instead, sturdy stands of tightly packed bald cypress, slash pine and oak hug the sides of the highway. The result is like driving through a never-ending forest.
The farther north one travels from Charleston, the more civilization seems to fade away entirely. Only the occasional intersection hints that more may lie beyond the vast green wall if you make the turn. I was sent here, to this uniquely South Carolinian place, to find a man who is legendary in these parts and who had become a bit of a mystery to us on the Clemson World team.
In January 2024, a package was delivered to our office containing a stack of submission letters for the South Carolina Order of the Palmetto award along with a letter from Seldin “Bud” Hill, director emeritus of The Village Museum. His letter suggested that someone at Clemson University might want to write about the man the citizens of McClellanville, South Carolina, and their representatives had nominated for the highest award given by the state.
Rutledge Leland III was awarded the Order of the Palmetto on March 28, 2023, Hill explained, but even more notable is that he has been the mayor of McClellanville for the last 50 years.
“How is that possible?” was my first thought when reading the letter.
The second was, “I want to know this guy’s story.”
And so, as the first cool hints of fall pricked at the air, I made the five-hour drive from Clemson’s main campus, south to the Atlantic coast and up through that long, green canyon to a crossroads leading to a fragmented edge of coast. There, the small town of McClellanville sits like a pocket of the past, seemingly untouched by time.
The Accidental Politician
Driving into McClellanville is like driving through a movie backdrop. Giant oak trees dripping with Spanish moss stretch their limbs over quiet streets flanked by regal colonial and craftsman houses with neat lawns, tree forts and tire swings. It’s the kind of place that makes you nostalgic even if you grew up a thousand miles away. It was easy to imagine myself as a small boy, riding a bicycle down the sidewalks toward the harbor with a buddy on the handlebars and a fishing pole in one hand.
On the other side of town, the trees open to a seagull- and pelican-filled sky and a long, sturdy dock holding about a dozen shrimp boats in two rows next to a couple of well-used warehouses. This is Carolina Seafood, the business Rutledge has owned and operated for as long as he’s been the mayor. The unassuming docks are also a primary source of income for many of the town’s residents. I park in the dirt lot and enter the metal office building under a faded “Carolina Seafood Wholesale Market: Fresh Daily” sign.
The administrative assistant, JoAnne Jackson (who tells me she’s worked there for 38 years), ushers me behind the front counter to meet the man himself, who steps briskly to his office door. I recognize the steady gait of someone who’s done hard work his whole life. Rutledge clasps my hand with an easy strength that belies his 80 years.
He moves some stacks of paper around as we make our way to either side of his cluttered desk.
“Sorry about the mess -—- I was digging up some memories so I could remember them when I talked to you today,” he explains in a soft-spoken Southern accent. Despite his salt-white hair and bushy eyebrows, he has a boyish air. His countenance conjures images of 1950s music and screen icon Burl Ives or actor John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Clavin in Cheers.
I ask the question that had been on my mind since I read Hill’s letter: “How on earth does someone come to be the mayor of a town for 50 consecutive years?”
He smiles and settles back in his chair.
“Well, that’s a story,” he says.
He explains that the former mayor, Robert Ashley, who was his friendly competitor in the town’s small seafood industry, approached him outside his warehouses one day in 1974 to inform him that he’d written Rutledge’s name in to run for town council.
Rutledge was flabbergasted.
Ashley explained that nobody was signing up for the one open spot, so he put Rutledge’s name down, presumptuous as that might be. A few weeks later, Rutledge found himself sitting down for his first meeting as a member of the town council and mayor pro tem. When Ashley passed away about eight months later, Rutledge became mayor.
“I never even signed anything,” he laughs. “I am an accidental politician.”
A Bucolic Boyhood
Rutledge’s roots in McClellanville reach back generations. His father, Rutledge Leland Jr., a World War II veteran, and his mother, Harriette, moved to McClellanville as Rutledge Jr. was finishing a stint in the U.S. Navy. The young sailor, then 28 years old, took over the operation of an Esso dealership from his father, Rutledge Sr., and started a freight boat business. Harriette got a job in the high school teaching the sciences. Rutledge III was born in 1944, just as World War II was ending.
He describes his childhood as idyllic and purely American. When asked what his favorite memories of his boyhood are, he answers without hesitation.
“The creeks,” he quips, his eyes sparkling with memories. “I’ve been on this waterfront pretty much all my life. I had a little outboard, nothing fancy, and we’d go out fishing, crabbing and gigging for flounder. We were given free rein. I could pretty much go anywhere I wanted by the time I was 10.”
Our interview is interrupted by the sound of an electronic bell. He pulls a flip phone out of his pocket and glances at it vexingly.
“People keep texting me all this stuff, and I don’t even know how to read it,” he says, mostly to himself, before flicking the phone closed and tossing it onto his desk. One can’t help but think he is anchored in the past but beholden to the now, just like the town he leads.
Clemson Calling
Before he was a mayor, businessman and recipient of the Order of the Palmetto, Rutledge left his little slice of coastal paradise to attend Clemson. There was never any question where he’d end up when it came time to seek higher education after high school.
“It was the only place I wanted to go,” he says. “Both my father, his two brothers and numerous cousins went there, so when I was growing up, I just heard the name. I didn’t want to go full military at The Citadel, and nobody mentioned going anywhere else, so Clemson it was.”
When he made his first trip to campus to begin his first year, it was the farthest he’d ever been from home.
“This is how countrified I was: I had everything I wanted here, so I just never left home. The day my father dropped me off at Clemson was the first time I ever set foot on campus,” he says. “I didn’t even know what it looked like, so that was an eye-opener.”
He took to college life quickly and soon fell in love with the school. That love, however, didn’t translate to the best grades.
“One thing I’m not going to tell you is what a great student I was,” he laughs. “I did graduate, but it was a struggle.”
He graduated in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science in industrial management and, in a bid to keep some control of his life during the time of the military draft, immediately joined the Air Force, extending his time away from his beloved home on the water for four more years.
Clemson doesn’t just decorate McClellanville; it plays a vital role in the many marine, agricultural and environmental protection operations in and around it. With the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge on one side of town, and the Francis Marion National Forest on the other, Clemson experts have provided invaluable research and data to help preserve and protect the areas’ singular beauty for as long as anyone living there can remember. Today, a new maritime apprenticeship school born from a partnership between Clemson and the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium brings young people to McClellanville, training them in the business of commercial fishing and mariculture.
Radar Controller
Later that afternoon, Rutledge takes me for a tour of the town in his SUV as early Willie Nelson songs play softly through dusty speakers. Unsurprisingly, he has memories on every corner. We pass the house his grandfather built in 1916 and then the one his great-grandfather built, “probably the oldest house in town.” A few blocks later, he points out the house he grew up in and, right across the street, the house his wife, Kathy Leland, grew up in.
“We’d walk to school together as children, and now we’ve been married for 56 years,” he says. “She’s been by my side through it all and made a lot of sacrifices on my behalf along the way.”
The pair wed in 1968, just as he was about to ship out to Vietnam as a radar controller in the Air Force. He spent a year stationed in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, on the Mekong River, directing air traffic in and out of the Vietnam and Laotian theaters.
“It was an exciting year, to say the least, but it was very stressful,” he says. “We had hundreds of planes coming through our area every day.”
When Rutledge completed his commitment to the Air Force in 1971, he and Kathy returned to McClellanville, where Rutledge’s father still owned the Esso dealership and a small seafood company. He told Rutledge to take his pick — he would sell one and turn the other over to his son.
“I said, ‘That’s easy, Dad. I love seafood, so sell the oil company,’” he laughs, sweeping his arm to encompass his whole operation. “That was 1972 when I got this property and the docks.”
South Carolina state Rep. Lee Hewitt writes about Rutledge’s business’s impact on the region in his Order of the Palmetto nomination letter.
“Mayor Leland’s commitment to service benefits the entire state and coastal region,” Hewitt writes. “He … has been instrumental in preserving and protecting the special coastal area entrusted to him as Mayor. He is supportive of not only environmental protections and tourism but also of protecting and promoting the local, state and regional seafood industries. … Put simply, if you enjoy eating South Carolina shrimp, you have Mayor Leland to thank for that delicacy.”
The Hurricane
Back in his office, Rutledge pulls several threadbare newspaper clippings out of the drawers in his sturdy metal desk and carefully unfolds them for me to see: photos of him on the front page with former South Carolina Gov. Carroll Campbell, and another of him standing near his dock with huge fishing boats lying in the streets behind him like bath toys.
“I’m a low-key mayor, but Hugo sort of brought the world to McClellanville,” he says, his normally taciturn voice hushing even lower than usual.
If one thing defines Rutledge’s improbably long career as mayor, it’s most likely his leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the Category 4 monster that decimated the Carolina coasts, damaging more than 200,000 homes and causing $8 billion in damage. It was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history at the time, and McClellanville was ground zero, with the eye passing directly over and leveling everything in its wake.
“It completely wiped the town out,” he tells me, adding that he and his wife were lucky because they had a two-story house.
“The wind was starting to die down — like the storm was almost over — when the water came,” he says.
Water spouted up through the air conditioner vents in the floor like fountains, and their two dogs started scratching on the back door.
“When we opened the door, they were standing in water up to their necks,” he recounts. “Before it was over, the water got a couple inches from the ceiling of the first floor. That was a long night.”
I ask him what he saw the next morning.
“Devastation,” he says, still incredulous at the memory even decades later. “The whole town. Boats in the streets, houses destroyed. It came across like a tidal wave. Trees were all just stripped bare. The oak trees held up pretty well, but the pines all fell.”
As mayor, Rutledge sprang into action, working with Federal Emergency Management Agency and Charleston County representatives to get the town cleaned up and back on its feet.
In his letter recommending Rutledge for the Order of the Palmetto, Hill details how Rutledge became a favorite spokesman, constantly sought out by members of all branches of the news media.
“He had a family to take care of and a damaged home and business to repair,” Hill writes. “He did all of that while leading his community through a nightmare event. He offered to help anyone who called on him, and there were many.”
State Sen. Stephen Goldfinch put it more succinctly in his nomination letter: “His leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo is the stuff of state legend.”
Typically, Rutledge downplays his role: “I was only the conduit,” he tells me.
But his efforts were so extraordinary that when a new town hall was built to replace the one destroyed, residents voted to name it after him. Today, all town business is conducted in the Rutledge B. Leland III Municipal Services Building.
A Clemson Town
As we drive the tranquil streets once ravaged by Hugo, I can’t help but notice Clemson flags flapping on boat masts and hanging over seemingly every other doorstep.
“Oh yes, those are all alumni. This is a Clemson town,” Rutledge says proudly.
We meander through town past its iconic restaurant, T.W. Graham and Co., formerly a general store owned by Kathy’s grandfather, and land at The Village Museum, a tidy former schoolhouse packed to the brim with McClellanville artifacts, from scale replicas of fishing boats and lighthouses to historic pottery and hand tools. Inside, we find Hill, the author of the letter that brought me here, puttering away in one of the back rooms.
Rutledge and Hill shake hands and immediately start ribbing each other: “You brought your paparazzi with you, I see.” “This is your doing, Bud!”
Like Rutledge, Hill sports expressive white eyebrows and an easy smile. When I ask him to share some thoughts about Rutledge, the mayor darts out of the room so he can’t hear Hill’s answers — a move he’s pulled on me several times during the day.
“He’s like that. He’s a shy man, but he’s brilliant,” says Hill. “Do you know he has never spent a dime on an election? Not one poster, not one bumper sticker, not a sign — nothing. And he’s never been paid anything.”
Hill says Rutledge has given 50 years of service to their small community simply because he was needed and wanted to help.
“I don’t know of another politician who can say that — in this state or anywhere else.”
Rutledge tiptoes back into the room when Hill and I finish talking, and I ask him how many times he’s been re-elected.
“The terms are for two years, so I guess I’ve run about 25 times,” he chuckles.
As an octogenarian, he has no plans to retire from running his business either.
“I’m there at 5:30 every morning,” Rutledge says. “I never thought about still doing this when I’m 80, but I’m not going to quit. I’m bored to death when I don’t have anything to do, so I’m just going to keep on going as long as I can.”
Rutledge drives me past a footbridge on the way back to the docks. He donated the land for it to be built so kids going to the town’s small charter school have a safer path home. It strikes me that he has been such a good steward of this town because he is just like it: modest, quiet, resilient, dependable. Quintessential South Carolina.
We drive back to the docks as the afternoon sun sends light blinking through the oak trees, and I ask him how he’d like to be remembered.
“Oh, boy. How do you answer a question like that?” he says, pausing to think about it. “Just as a good citizen. I’ve tried to be that. I love this town. It’s a good town, and it’s got good people. It’s about that simple.”
While the framework of college athletics has considerably changed in the last half-century, for Robinson, the former athletic director, the blueprint for building strong athletic programs remains the same — whether it’s 1975 or 2024.
“Hire good coaches and give them the resources to be successful,” he says. “That’s the key.”
In a February 1981 article in The Tiger, sports editor Cobb Oxford ’81 argued that the women’s basketball team had been underrated all season, and he encouraged fans to watch them host the ACC Tournament in Littlejohn that weekend: “I hope you will get out to see it,” he wrote. “You do not know what you are missing.”
More than 40 years later, the enthusiasm behind Oxford’s words still holds true — but now, fans don’t need to be convinced. And with continued support from the University and the Tiger faithful, the best days for women’s athletics at Clemson are on the horizon.
JOINING FORCES
When power disruptions happen due to weather events, small towns often must wait longer than their more urban neighbors to see power restored. Efforts are underway to fund a solar-powered microgrid near McClellanville, which also would serve the towns of Awendaw and Cordesville; the two communities are located near the Sewee Wildlife Refuge and Francis Marion National Forest, respectively.
Energy resilience and research to further e-grid improvements, particularly in South Carolina, remain a focus of Clemson University and several of its state partners. Early efforts underway could one day make McClellanville home to a Clemson-led solar farm project designed to improve energy equity, grow economic development, and improve environmental protections for some of South Carolina’s most vulnerable coastal communities.
Using integrated battery solutions, the proposed microgrid would improve power reliability and energy resiliency for the region during outages, providing a local, alternate source of electric capacity and service at critical times.
Ken Scar is a senior writer in the Division of Marketing and Communications.
