♪ opening music ♪ ♪ Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Welcome to Palmett Scene.

What happens when underground culverts are released and restored in the natural environment?

Or when historic structures need repair, where do you turn to find artisans skilled as in the olden days?

We'll find out in this edition of Palmetto Scene.

But first, loud, fast or classic, car clubs have always had a special bond with one another.

The Mopar and Corvette Car Clubs while different all share their love for displaying their amazingly unique cars.

♪ upbeat music ♪ I'm President of Changing Lanez so far.

We call it Socar, short for South Carolina.

So we just mix it in again.

So Changing Lanez, Socar National Car Club.

This is our meeting.

We do a meeting every Sunday, or mostly every Sunday.

The only time we probably wouldn't is if we have a super busy week.

And you know, give everybody a break on Sunday.

But majority of the time it's mainly on a Sunday.

It's American made.

It's a whole lot of muscle, especially if you know what to do with it, how to fix it up, dress it up.

We keep it real safe out here because we have a lot of other things and other people that look up to us.

So we have to keep a standard held.

People really love the cars coming by and honking the horns, whether it be their birthday, whether it be anniversary, anything they really love us to come by, especially the smaller kids, you know.

They consider that, to them, they consider that a little miniature car show because, you know, it's always about giving back and getting out there making them excited.

It's priceless to see a kid just excited for no reason.

♪ So pretty much today, you know, and just like anything else, we're always doing community service.

Every year, there's always a group that's asking about us doing prom escorts.

So today we're doing prom escort.

Young ladies, they go to L.R.

so we gone escort them.

First, they doing their photoshoot, then we gone go pick up another escort as well.

And we go take them to their prom, at The Medallion Center, the L.R.

prom, We asked them to come out because, you know, it's it's different.

It's, you know, different styles of cars, you know, different types.

Very interesting.

They don't a lot of great things for the community.

They just don't, you know, flash their cars around and things like that.

I started Changing Lanez, South Carolina Chapter.

Big Greg is a national president.

And Little Greg is a national vice president.

Came up with an idea, once they heard that I was going to be stationed in South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, to start the chapter.

I love doing this because the mission statement is to mentor to the youth, give back to the community.

We continue to do that year after year after year.

We go and feed the homeless from time to time.

We do a lot of parades and things like that.

Different car washes different, different type of events that help out not just the car club itself, not just the organization that we're trying to help but everybody in the community as well.

Here we have Aretha, better known as Oreo.

This is my 2021 Dodge Challenger RT Shaker.

The significance of it is that it has the specialized scoop with the whole cutout in the hood.

How you can tell something's a shaker because the hole, it pretty much says it.

< laughs > < engine roar > My name is Jason Dores.

I'm the vice president of competition for Coastal Carolina Corvette Club, and I'm also the founder of Vettes For Vets.

They change every generation and it's just you know, pure American Muscle.

I'm a big fan of, kind of always been a Chevy guy though.

And Corvettes just, just that power, man and the camaraderie with Corvette owners.

It's nice.

This is Vettes Doing Charleston.

It's one of our two shows we do every year.

This is an all Corvette show.

We moved it to Daniel Island this year.

You are supporting a group that, you know fight for our country and we want to give a little bit back.

So every year we do a free home restoration for a veteran that's struggling a little bit.

We have names submitted to us and we choose one that, that really deserve to catch a break that year.

And we surprise them on Veterans Day, knock on their door and let them know they're gonna get a brand new roof.

We're gonna redo the inside of their house and landscape your yard for free.

It's a beautiful place beautiful day today and beautiful day to have a car show.

I was a cobra crew chief in Vietnam and when I come back in this country here, I met a lot of vets that were starting to get into Corvettes, but at the time, I wasn't interested in it.

And now, a lot of disabled vets when they get in, when they buy a Corvette it kind of gets their mind off of things and helps them to do things you know on a daily basis.

This is a 2013 ZR1.

It's Night Race Blue with Pearl Silver striping and 60th anniversary factory striping.

They only made 54 of the Night Race Blues.

And this particular one here is a one of one.

It was made for a guy named Harvey Glutt.

And the factory in the museum did some special things to it.

638 horsepower and 604 pounds of torque.

And it's a very dangerous car if you don't know what you're doing.

Two time war veteran,Vietnam and Desert Storm.

This is my 70th birthday.

And I wanted to go all out, put my touch on it.

And this color is Black Rose.

It's a 2017.

And I've customized my whole hood.

I put all factory mods on it you can possibly put on it.

It's just finished nice.

It's a finished product, I got a lot of carbon fiber on the inside as well.

They have a lot of beautiful cars out here today.

And I really enjoy being out here.

Being among the people you know, meeting new people, new friends.

Some I've met from the previous show I've been in.

They remembered me, I remember them.

So, it's point on.

It's nice.

<Beryl Dakers> Concerned with the lack of skilled artisans to repair the historic structures of America, one private college works hard to fill that gap.

The American College of Building Art is a private learning institution located in Charleston, with an emphasis on training highly skilled craftsmen to restore historical landmarks.

♪ Preservation is part of protecting our heritage.

The generations before us did a good job.

It was very sustainable what they did.

They only had natural materials at hand.

And I think teaching those old principles and techniques is not only good for preservation, it also does a lot to what we build today.

After Hurricane Hugo went through and destroyed a lot of Charleston, they didn't have the artisans in America to fix them.

They had to import a lot of people.

So Mayor Riley and Nancy Hawk, John Paul Huguley, and others decided to put a school together that would train artisans.

They took an American model of preservation.

They then studied a French model.

It's a 10 year program to train their artisans.

They truncated to 10 years to four with the sort of that preservation program together for the academics and they built a college.

It's a one of a kind in a way in this country.

In Europe, you might find more schools like this, but specifically as it relates to my trade, we have all these aging old buildings, and they're falling into disrepair and there aren't people to fix them.

There's just a ton of work out there for stone carvers and stonemasons.

In that regard, there's also a lot of work in new construction.

So this school is very important for many reasons, but in particular, to stick train people to keep those old buildings intact in good shape.

<Lt.

Broadwater,III> They start in the old fashioned method, especially back in the shops, they learn the hand tools before they get to the power tools.

<Joseph Kincannon> We're still using mallets and chisels and hammers, though we'll use saws and pneumatic tools and that sort of thing, but you're doing creative work 'cause your art work goes on a building instead of into a gallery.

I originally thought that I would be going into chemistry, and I've kind of switched majors a bit, but I've always known that I had like this artists mind.

I'm always thinking about things and wanting to work with my hands.

So it kind of seemed like the natural progression to come here and do stone carving.

I have a prior degree in architectural design.

And I worked as a designer for four to five years up in the Chicago area and I just didn't like being behind a desk at a computer for nine to 10 hours a day.

I needed to work with my hands.

My grandfather was a contractor, my dad was a carpenter for him, and I didn't know there was a school like this when I was graduating high school, so I thought architecture would be a good fit between what I knew and what I wanted to do.

And when I discovered the school here, and my thought was, I wish I had known about this 10 years ago.

So I applied, got accepted and moved down here.

And I've been learning the art of woodworking and wood craft.

<Lt.

Broadwater,III> There are any number of trade schools that teach pieces and parts of this.

There are no other schools that actually teach the academics that support the artisan skills, which produces what I like to call an educated artisan.

And that's the difference.

You not only know the science of it, you know, the art of it.

<Cameron Hawkins> At any other school, you'd be taking probably a world history class.

Here,it's architectural history.

It's,it's geared towards what we do.

<Markus Damwerth> So people do not only learn what they do, and how they do it, they also learn why they do it in a certain way, based on architecture, design, history, culture, modern techniques, like using machinery.

<Lt.

Broadwater,III> You learn that the art of what's appropriate for the time period that you're studying, or that you're reproducing.

You learn the materials that are appropriate for that.

And there's a bit of art and a bit of science in there.

But you also learn the scientific aspects of it, by learning how to put these buildings together in classical manner.

That gives us buildings that last, you know, for hundreds of years, as opposed to 25 or 50 years from which is what most of the building that we do in this country now, which is a terrible thing for the environment.

<Markus Damwerth> When I came to Charleston, for the first time, I had a look at the city and I've done a lot of preservation work in Germany, but I've never seen a city where you have so many different buildings over a long time period, which have not been destroyed by war.

And that makes it unique.

And it's like one big laboratory for us.

<Steven Fancsali> There's definitely a lot of preservation work going on.

But there's also a lot of new construction going on too.

And while it's important to learn all the preservation and how to work with old material, the fact is with wood, we can't necessarily get that old growth wood anymore, a lot of its protected, and it's extremely expensive.

So we also have to learn how to work with the newer material, especially in newer construction.

So Charleston is just a great city for that because you've got that mixture of old and new.

<Markus Damwerth> So if you go to the old Powder Magazine in Charleston, downtown, I guess it's the oldest public building.

Steve Fancsali did the new gift shop for that building.

And the challenge was to build a gift shop meant for today's use in an old building.

So they not only had to decide and make proposals to the client, what the design could look like, they have to look at the buildings, okay, it has to match this style and this architecture, but it has to serve today's use.

<Lt.

Broadwater,III> The young men and women here with a little bit of education, a little bit of discipline, they can master anything.

They built a replica of the gates at the Miles Brewton House this year that will be used by the Gibbs as part of their display.

Timber Frame projects all over.

Some plaster work in some of the historic houses here.

One of the largest one for graduates is building on East Bay Street that is owned, I believe Mr. Ravenel.

It got into the redoing that building.

It was basically eaten up by termites and wonders it were standing and they basically rebuilt that whole building without taking that building down.

I think that was a phenomenal.

It overlooks the harbor.

It's one of the probably late 18th early 19th century buildings down on East Bay.

I'm amazed at what goes on in the school all the time by these young men and women.

<Steven Fancsali> So last summer, I was fortunate enough to get an internship with George Washington's Mount Vernon up in Virginia.

They asked me to come back.

So I'm going to be moving to Virginia a week after graduation.

And I'm going to be a preservation carpenter at Mount Vernon.

At least for the next year.

<Lt.

Broadwater,III> We've worked on Lincoln's cottage in Washington, DC, we've worked on Lincoln Cathedral in the United Kingdom for a number of years.

And I could go on and on.

But these important buildings were actually affecting the lifespan and the continued use of these buildings for many, many years.

That's what I like to see.

I like to see the result.

I like to see young men and women graduate from this school.

And then I like to see the skills that we send them out into the world to do.

♪ <Beryl Dakers> As cities grow, they often cover up streams and creeks that once ran freely, banishing them to underground culverts.

But what happens when a city daylights its streams, releasing them to become part of a more natural landscape?

Several parks in the city of Columbia now have restored streams, and it hasn't taken long for nature to return and thrive.

< outdoor nature sounds > Daylighting A stream is bringing a stream that was placed in the pipe and buried underground back up to the surface and restoring its channel.

The way our cities have been designed is, water never touches the ground, from the time it hits your roof,flows down your drain pipe to pipe all the way from there straight into a river.

So all along that way is picking up pollutants and concentrating them and delivering them straight to our you know, our waters that are just upstream from our drinking water systems.

< birds chirping > Before you could follow the stream by seeing a series of manholes that line the park on an old abandoned road, a parking lot that wasn't really used.

We removed all that.

And now we have this, this stream corridor that meanders through the park.

<Warren Hankinson> This stream in particular, it's about two thirds of a mile The Smith Branch.

And Smith Branch is a larger stream that empties out into the Broad River right above the Canal, which is where Columbia gets its water from.

So it's important that we, you know restore areas like this, in order to protect the water quality.

<Todd Martin> The lush vegetation that we have helps absorb a lot of the nutrients and pollutants that come from roads and parking lots that enter the stream.

So you have a much cleaner water that exits the stream itself.

It brings wildlife to the park and gives them habitat.

And you know the people it's for the people in the park.

And really this plan was all community driven.

The community had a passion.

It was their idea to daylight the stream, and we work with them to implement that vision.

<Mimi Draft> It's just nice not to have to leave your community to go outside.

For the longest time I would go all the way down to Finlay Park if I wanted to do something outside, but I've been coming here with my dogs.

Fresh air and nature are really good about helping people get a better, better routine going on.

It's unfortunate that the 29203 area has a lot of diabetic issues.

Some of that being because we were in a food desert with no access to healthy foods.

The Bi-Lo is now an autoparts store next to a dialysis center.

So yeah, I think green spaces are really important to making sure people have access to at least a little bit of peace and quiet.

A little bit of fitness in their life.

< waterfall splashing sound > This section above us was restored in the early aughts.

And if you look you'll notice that the creek meanders.

It has some bends.

If you go up to the street, you will see a stone wall where this creek does come out of pipe and gets to touch the ground.

As we look around here you can see on the insides of these bands like right here you've got a lot of sediment.

So when the water hits the curb and slows down, it drops all that sediment.

And if we sit here long enough, we'll see a couple of fingerling fishes.

This creek has pretty bad water quality and we're hopeful that it keeps improving.

But it's always encouraging when you start to see fish and frogs using the water.

This area you can really see the expanse of of how water can go up over the creek bank and into the floodplain to expand that slows down the velocity it stops that erosion and when the water is in this area, it allows the water to filter through all these plants.

And that has really helped for the rest of the park.

The lawn there is now super friendly for festivals and picnics and regardless of whether it rained two days ago you'll have dry feet and dry blankets.

< drum sound > And so the neighborhood really appreciates the change here and we've still got more room for the water to flow into.

This is a real "you are here" point.

The creek enters a culvert right there and these waters will not see daylight again until they emerge in Maxcy Gregg Park.

Neat thing is that Maxcy Gregg is also considering and in the planning stages for another stream restoration project.

So for the length of this whole creek before it hits the Congaree one more piece of it will see restoration.

The thought that because we've lost so much habitat that if we move from a culture of maintaining grass lawns and start to just let some of that go a little bit more wild and bring in native plants and native shrubs, we'll see that payoff.

We can offset some of the large loss with many small actions, you know.

And certainly we doing that in our parks.

I'm doing it in my house and we encourage everyone else to have a shot at it.

This creek is just one Creek of many within the Smith Branch watershed.

Generations ago, they put in the pipes in the ground and just treated it like plumbing just to get the floodwaters out.

Several years ago, the city of Columbia began a Smith Branch watershed planning process, looking at all the different creeks and finding opportunities for restoring different portions of the creek.

The park has been transformed so that it actually offers more flood storage, because instead of just the pipes, we also have this natural floodplain with natural floodplain vegetation, so it actually stores more water.

Even though this park can still flood, it holds more flood water, which reduces flooding downstream.

The creek drains about a square mile of very urban land and urban runoff is notoriously polluted.

However, the slowing of the water and the vegetation serve to filter the pollution from the water.

But wetlands are kind of the natural landscapes' kidneys.

Plants use the extra nutrients or can even break down the heavy metals that would be harmful for humans.

So they help improve water quality in that way.

So this project, and the other aspects of the watershed, Hyatt Park and other places, all of these work together to clean up the pollution,reduced sedimentation.

And so by the time the water reaches the river, it, it's flowing into the river and a much cleaner state than it did before all these projects.

This is a big floodplain wetland area, and this allows us to transition the water flowing from the daylighted stream back into the natural creek corridor down, downstream of the road.

So the water spreads out, allows us to manage it, and this has a tremendous water quality benefit.

< birds chirping > We've tried to move in the direction the landscape wants to be with more water, more floods, more carbon, warmer temperatures.

So we've created wetlands where there were wetlands long ago or where we think there would be wetlands into the future, if left alone.

This is creating a new urban place that includes a native landscape and opportunities for living and working in restaurants and in the ballpark.

So rare for a project like this to come to fruition and it's only because of all these partners rallying behind one central idea, local government regulators, private developers and investors.

And that's really kind of made this such a special place.

<Beryl Dakers> Now join us as we return to a unique place in the upstate that focuses on the needs of the planet.

Mushroom Mountain near Easley is devoted to developing innovative fungal solutions for pest control, world hunger and disease through the power of the mushroom.

We do just about everything you can think of with mushrooms around here, think of it like Disneyland for fungi.

< groovy music > I started Mushroom Mountain in 1996.

And then Olga and I met about 15 years ago, and we had an idea to start a mushroom farm in South Carolina.

So we moved here from Florida and started a mushroom farm at our house.

And then we ran out of space.

And now we picked up this piece of property 17 acres with buildings.

And we have 300 different species of mushrooms in our laboratory now and what we do is learn how to grow mushrooms, teach mushroom cultivation, mushroom identification, and also all the cool things that people can do with mushrooms for food for the environment, even building materials.

Typically, the average day around here is laboratory work in the morning when everyone's clean, and then pasteurizing sawdust and grain to actually produce mushrooms,to shipping.

So we have a full time shipping department and we ship five days a week year round the spawn so people can grow their own.

People can plant at their house or a small commercial farm.

We also make extracts, which is a medicinal food supplement.

And we do mushroom extractions in the lab.

It's like a concentrate that someone can add to their coffee or their tea and get all the wonderful medicinal benefits.

I worked in a hospital for a really long time in a laboratory and I was in a room all day with no light.

No one knows.

No one even knew we were there.

And it just felt like,umm, very sad and depressing and like I wasn't really doing anything for the world.

So I quit that job.

It just feels more rewarding to do something that has no negative attributes for the world.

You know, everything I'm doing here is good for the earth.

<Tradd Cotter> We are finding things out about fungi that no one else has really discovered yet.

For instance, you know these fungi are out here in the woods and we find ants with mushrooms.

going out of their brains.

I mean, it's insane.

We found some growing on German cockroaches, there's a fungus that grows on mosquitoes.

And these are fungi that grow locally here.

So we can clone them, amplify them and develop products that can help us reduce or eliminate pesticides.

And that's huge.

We need to eat food that's not sprayed with pesticides.

And we need to figure out that, hey, these fungi can help.

This place is so odd.

It's not just a mushroom farm.

It's, it is a, an idea factory, < Things like that.

So mushrooms create heat > We do a lot of tours here.

And the, when someone comes here for the first time, they have no idea what they're in for.

They just think they're coming to see mushrooms growing at a farm.

And by the time they get to the end of the tour, and they see all these different applications that people can, that we as a society can use mushrooms for.

I mean, they're just walking away with their minds open.

They're gonna learn about the life cycles of fungi, how we grow mushrooms, the laboratory to how we compost, how we make building materials.

How can we use mushrooms to make the world a better place?

And people are very open and receptive to this because they've never been exposed to this.

Mushrooms and fungi is the second largest kingdom on the planet.

There's insects and there's fungus.

There's millions of species of fungi out there, and we have no idea what they do.

It doesn't surprise me if tomorrow there's another big discovery because there's just so much.

I'm expecting to see a lot of jaws on the ground.

And that's why I'm so passionate about it is because I see an awakening.

I see the spark of hope and people's eyes when they are going through this tour.

And it's complete, like a transformation.

The last time we were here, he was advanced in what he was doing and he's even getting more educational and doing more important things for the environment, which is super important, because we definitely need all the help we can get.

This last room where he showed the progression of the mushrooms from yesterday where there was none and today they are getting bigger.

And I thought that was pretty informative.

<Tradd Cotter> The lab space is the heart of the farm.

You know, it's not just designed to make spawn for us to grow mushrooms.

It is a fully functional microbiology lab.

And you could take one little mushroom from the woods and just create millions of them in there.

We can go in there and we can do trials with bacteria.

And we could figure out applications for what can these mushrooms be used for in industry or agriculture, you know.

For instance, I had a fungus on a petri plate and I cut it and it turned out to be a good substitute for rubber.

You know, things like that.

Things that are biodegradable, that we need.

There's almost nothing we can't do with fungi.

Albert Einstein said, if we look deep, deep into nature, we'll find the solutions for everything.

I started using Lion's Mane just sort of as a supplement on the side or as a tincture.

I saw a lot of noticeable differences with my memory overall or just my focus and clarity like just from a brain health standpoint.

And then over the last month, I ran out and I could notice, like sort of some of like my memory components starting to slip a little bit as well.

So I got back on it recently.

So I just wanted to come out and learn a little bit more about like, Cordyceps and some of the other components because I've noticed firsthand like what some of these things can do for you.

<Tradd Cotter> A mushroom can be opportunistic, it can be territorial, another day it can be symbiotic and mutualistic.

Mushrooms create heat, carbon dioxide, and they sweat.

And I tell people what else does that?

I was like me.

And mushrooms, they'd like to mind resources until they're gone.

And then they take over a whole new territory and start all over again.

It sounds like human civilization.

It sounds like people.

So I try not to dwell on the negative aspects of what fungi might do and more of the positive things and if we don't work together mushrooms and and humans, then we might, we might have some issues.

So we have to put them to work and by helping them they're going to help us.

<Beryl Dakers> That's amazing.

For more stories about our state and more details on the stories you've just seen, do visit our website at PalmettoScene.org And of course don't forget to follow us on social media, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at SCETV hashtag Palmetto Scene.

For all of us here at ETV and Palmetto Scene, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Stay well, and thanks for watching.

♪