The vandals trespassed on private property.
Members of three Sons of Confederate Veterans camps gathered at the edge of Holly Hill on Saturday to erect a sign and three flags: American, South Carolinian and Confederate.
By Thursday, the display was covered with red graffiti.
“I expected it,” said Ronald “Irvin” Shuler of Providence, a SCV member who donated the one-acre property outside the town limits for the display.
The plans for the display have been controversial since they were first announced.
Holly Hill Town Council asked the SCV in April not to erect the display. A public hearing a few days later also brought out opponents to the display.
“I’m very disappointed the flag went up,” Holly Hill Mayor William Johnson said.
“The community asked the group not to do it,” he said.
SCV S.C. Division Commander Jamie Graham of Conway said he and other descendants of Confederate veterans erected the flags along U.S. Highway 176 “to honor our forefathers as fathers” just one day before Father’s Day.
Shuler said when talks first began about the project, the plan was to erect one large Confederate flag, not the three flags currently at the site.
He said the purpose of displaying the Confederate flag is “always to honor our ancestors who stood up for what they believed in in the 1860s. That’s it.”
Shuler said he personally believes that a better location for a Confederate flag display is “on an interstate highway.”
“In a small location like this, who’s going to see it? The same people are going to see it,” he said.
Graham said he’s “hoping to get the full truth out there” about the Confederate flag and the SCV.
He said the SCV is a “historical honor society,” not a secessionist group.
He said the presence of the U.S. flag, the South Carolina flag and the Confederate flag on the edge of Holly Hill honors the group’s Confederate ancestors and the display is “also a recruiting tool.”
Graham said, “My Confederate ancestors were not slave owners. They did not fight as Confederate soldiers for the institution of slavery.” He said they volunteered for service because the government was using their farmland as staging areas for troops, which they saw as government overreach.