 Thank you all so much for coming out today. My name is Betsy Newman, and I'm a little out of breath because I'm nervous to see all of y'all here. I am a member of the Hyatt Park community and a past president of the Hyatt Park Kenan Terrace Neighborhood Association. And I know it feels like winter today, but today is actually the first day of spring. So yay, a great day to be in the park. Well, I'd like to start off by welcoming some of our distinguished guests, Mrs. Victoria Dozier, the wife of John Dozier, the new president of Columbia College, and Mr. Henry Simons, assistant city manager of the city of Columbia. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So to start us off, our councilwoman, Ms. Tina Herbert, is going to make a few remarks. First of all, I do want to thank, we just had this little discussion, Betsy Newman and who all helped you, to finish the project. That is one thing that is important to us. We get, a lot of times, you know how we get pulled in different directions, but I want to commend you all for starting and getting all the way to the finish line. Hyatt Park was renovated or began its renovations in 2022. And the number of people who are coming to the park has increased and increased. This kiosk is a way to share the history of our community with the people who come to Hyatt Park. What I have learned over the years is that our history traditionally explains our present. We need to know what happened before and it kind of explains to us what is happening now. Many city and state leaders have emerged from this community, the Eau Claire community, including I.D. Quincy Newman, the first African American to serve in the South Carolina state legislature since Reconstruction, Luther Batiste, who along with E.W. Cromarty, became one of the first two African Americans elected to Columbia City Council, and also Benjamin Mack, who served as the state field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina and many others. The Eau Claire community is arguably one of the most diverse communities in the city and deserves to be celebrated, and I am appreciative of what we're going to do today. I don't want to give all the names, but the folks that we're going to highlight today with this kiosk. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for attending. Well, first of all, I just want to thank the City of Columbia Richland County Conservation Commission, our current staff here at Hyatt Park, Betsy Newman for leading this effort, Richland Library for helping us draft the history of the park, and Ellen Fishburne Triplet who helped us design this kiosk. I want to thank you all for leading this effort and for providing funding and support to get this project done. This kiosk is a testament to a community that has people that care, and so you see that in people like Betsy and Ellen and our other community members who help do these kinds of things. This kiosk will be a physical reminder that our community believes in the power of history. When we were at Lincoln Park the other day for a dedication of a history marker that the City of Columbia helped put up with the State Archives, Dr. Bobby Donaldson was there and was talking to us about the importance of, you know, our responsibility for remembering the past and understanding the past, and as Tina just said, that helps us contextualize our present now. Our community here in Eau Claire, also as Tina was saying, is diverse, it's really tracked the progress of America from segregation to integration and white flight, it helps us explain what this community is now and having a kiosk like that is going to help us understand our present. So I'm thankful that we have this kiosk and that will, you know, have this for future generations to understand where we were and where we're going and, you know, to help you understand what a special place Eau Claire is. Thank you all for coming. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be able to be here today and be able to speak with you all and the manager of the Walker Local and Family History Center at Richland Library. And in our space, we take a lot of care to preserve local history. And it's not easy to complete a task like this kiosk. It's hard to actually get the story right. Our resources are sometimes biased, so we have to examine everything really closely in order to retell our history. We try and collect as much as we can visually as well. We have a great photograph collection at the library, and a lot of times the photographs can tell us even more about our past than the written text that we have. But it's really important to assemble everything, to analyze it, to have a critical eye when you're looking back and to be able to tell a full and true history of our local communities. That also takes support from you people who are curious, who want to know the past, because that helps us justify our existence as a library, our collections, and in keeping all of our materials for you, you need to come and use it and explore what we have. But I also love that we have a kiosk like this in the public, because not everybody will come to the library and necessarily learn from a history book, but they can learn just as much if not more out here in the public space where they are. And I love that history can be encountered in nature like this. It's beautiful. You can also get multiple generations together examining this kiosk at the same time, starting conversations, and that's just how history comes alive right there where people meet outdoors in their own communities, learning about their own past, asking questions, being curious, visiting the library maybe to learn more. And so I'm really honored to have been able to be a helper in this project in some way, and I appreciate you all being here today and examining it with us together outdoors on this chilly spring day. So thank you very much. Thanks Margaret. You and the local history center were a huge help in putting this together both in advising me on the veracity of the history and also pointing me toward the wonderful photographs. And if you haven't been to the Walker Center in the main library, please go visit it. It's a very special place. So as Margaret pointed out, local history matters. And in fact, I got the idea for this kiosk in a place where I was a local for 20 years, New York City. I was there a few years ago and I was walking in Central Park and I saw a kiosk like this that commemorates Seneca Village. Seneca Village was an African American community that was eradicated when they established Central Park and the kiosk brings us to that spot. And so I was struck by the power of reading and looking at pictures of the history of a place where I was, the power of place. So I thought it would be a great idea to document our community's history here in the park where anybody walking by could engage with it. When Columbia was founded, where we're all sitting right now was just woods and farms. Developers connected the area to the city with trolleys, then segregated those cars and as Ty mentioned, established a park not far from here, Lincoln Park, for the use of African Americans. Hyatt Park featured a casino, a bowling alley, a theater, and even a zoo. And the developer, Frederick Hyatt, called his new development Eau Claire for all the beautiful streams that ran through the community. During World War I, this was a campground for soldiers that predated and kind of led to the formation of Fort Jackson. During the 1960s, many black citizens who were displaced from downtown by urban renewal established new neighborhoods here in Eau Claire and beyond. There's a lot more. I'm not going to go through the whole history. But I hope you'll take a few minutes to read about it today and then any other time that you're wandering through the park. So our community has not been displaced. It is thriving and growing. And I hope that a better understanding of its history will add to its vitality. The neighborhood that began as a segregated suburb of Columbia is now, as Councilwoman Herbert mentioned, arguably the most diverse in the city. I brought the idea of celebrating our history with a kiosk to our neighborhood association and the City of Columbia Department of Parks and Recreation. And everyone supported the idea of my writing a proposal to the Richland County Conservation Commission. Now, some of you may be familiar with an NPR program called My Unsung Hero. So I would just like to say that the Conservation Commission is my unsung hero. You all do so much across the county fund so many interesting and important projects and I don't think you get the recognition you deserve. So I wanted to mention that our pollinator garden, which is right there across Jackson Avenue, was also funded by a grant from the Conservation Commission. I want to especially thank John McKenzie for his help in getting me through the process of the grant and holding my hand while I filled out all those forms and reports. Thank you, John, and John Grego. I also want to thank the Department of Parks and Recreation for their support and for the beautiful renovation of our park, including the day lighting of the stream. I don't know how many of you remember when this was just sort of a lawn with cement things poking up out of it, and now it's a beautiful stream that leads to a pond that has just yesterday I saw tadpoles jumping up out of that pond. So it's brought us back to nature. Also the Civil Rights mural on the Jackson Avenue facing side of the Leroy Moss Recreation Center. Now we are hopefully on the brink of receiving city funds for a new playground and a fence around the park. Randy Davis, where are you? Randy, I want to especially thank Randy, who has always listened to our community, hasn't always been able to do everything we want, but has always been available to listen and be a friend to our community and our neighborhood association. Thank you. I also want to thank Sabrina Odom, my friend, and the director of the North Columbia Business Association, and the Friday Chat Group, who guided me through the process of telling this story. And Ms. Janie Nelson, Ms. Gail Baker, prominent members of the Friday Chat, let's hear it for the Friday Chat, a great group. I also wanted to thank our young people who are featured on the kiosk, Calvin Williams, and Sammy Munson, and Mimi Draft, who wasn't able to be here today. But thanks to you for sharing your thoughts about the future. And that's how we wrapped up the kiosk is with these young people and their thoughts about the future. Finally, my great thanks to Ellen Fishburne, my collaborator and the designer of the kiosk. As most of you know, I work on documentary films, and so I know that telling a story is a visual, and it requires visuals and text. And that's where Ellen and I have worked together, both on the pollinator garden sides and now on the kiosk. And I like to refer to Ellen as ours, because she contributes so much to our community. And she's always available when we need her artistic skills. So thank you, Ellen.