Surfside Town Council approved two historical markers at spots where many people are buried in one Surfside cemetery.

Tuesday night was a long time coming for some people, like historian Cad Holmes, who have paid their respects to ancestors in that cemetery for years. 

“For this to happen, it’s a real historical thing for us, and for the council, and the citizens of Surfside, and Mr. Mayor,” he said. “They made it all happen.”

The markers will represent twenty to twenty-five of his enslaved ancestors buried in a cemetery near 6th and 7th Avenue South.

He says that’s not all it will represent.

“They had I think about seven hundred slaves at Woodstock, right here in Surfside. We can go back to the late 1700s, when the plantation was here, so ain’t no telling how many people are buried there,” said Holmes.

Holmes says the state approved the project and these two markers will cost less than $5,000.

However, some homeowners think the markers should go near the town’s other monuments.

“I don’t think it should go at anybody’s home,” said one Surfside resident against the markers. “There’s a place for those markers, and not, y’all think about it, would y’all want that at y’all’s house?”

One resident in support of the markers, Sherry Singleton, read a quote from an architect to Town Council to sum up her thoughts.

“We need these places in our lives that challenge us to reconcile our history. By this being a real site, I think we need to challenge ourselves so that we see these sites for what they are, he said. It’s not an easy thing to talk about slavery, to talk about dead bodies, to talk about how the food chain changes in the Charleston Harbor because the bodies were thrown over the docks,” Singleton said.

Other items approved at Tuesday’s Surfside Town Council meeting include transferring elections to Horry County, and a second reading on the increase on oceanfront parking in Surfside from $1.75 to $2.00, per hour.

A public hearing was made on the topic of the increase on parking, but no one chose to speak during the hearing.