American author F. Scott Fitzgerald connected his heritage with Francis Scott Key and the American National Anthem. In Columbia, the late John Key Powell held similar connections. One of his sons, Scott Key Powell, manages Harrietta Plantation on the South Santee River. His other son, Elliott Powell, stayed with the family business, FirstSun, which John Key Powell helped to start after he sold his John Hancock general agency back to John Hancock. Elliott Powell is also head of the Gills Creek Watershed, an environmental focus affecting about 140,000 local citizens who live along the stormwater system as it works its way from north Richland County through Columbia to the Congaree River.

Elliott Powell was born in Columbia at Providence Hospital. His mother was a school teacher when she graduated from college, but she stayed with her two sons and her daughter as they grew up in the Lake Katherine neighborhood. Daughter Nina Powell Rice works for the S.C. Institute of Archeology and Anthropology.

Af ter kindergar ten nearby, Powell attended Heathwood Hall School for a short while, and then transferred to Brennan Elementary for grades 1–6. He went to Wildewood Academy, now St. John Neumann, through the ninth grade. For the 10th grade, he was at Dreher, and for grades 11 and 12, he was at Spring Valley, where Powell played varsity basketball as a forward.

For summer income while he was in high school, Powell worked on Burwell Manning’s farm about where the former Green Diamond development was proposed.

In the summer after high school graduation, Powell went to Europe with his Spanish teacher, three girls, and three other guys. They bought two inexpensive cars at the beginning of the trip, drove all over Europe, and sold the two cars in a break–even deal just before boarding to come home. Towards the end of the trip in Monte Carlo, Powell picked up a fast $500 at a casino, which financed a stylish return to S.C.

Powell enrolled at the College of Charleston. In his junior year, he heard from his brother who was a bartender at a five–star property in Prescott, Ariz. Powell left for Prescott and a lucrative job waiting tables in the expensive restaurant. He soon found a position in construction, and he determined Prescott needed a building supply business to keep the contractors from going to Phoenix. The building supply business turned profitable in its first year, and Powell returned to S.C. while his brother sold the business to Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton’s Secretary of the Interior and former governor of Arizona.

Back in S.C., Powell held off school to rack up more business experience. He worked for Spartanburg’s Commercial Communications, a telephone systems firm, and then he shifted to Leon Goodall’s Continental Insurance on Devine Street, now part of Aflac after last week’s $100 million deal.

Af ter Cont inental , Powel l was tapped by Cornerstone Resources, a financial planning firm connected with Penn Mutual. He took an office in the SCN Building at the corner of Washington and Main, where he was vice president for administration and marketing support.

Powell got with First- Sun through his father Key after Key and Ed Sebastian huddled on the idea of employee leasing. Powell has been with FirstSun for 24 years, and for all of that time with some of his clients such as Rose–Talbert Paints and the Cantey family, the people who sold the outdoor advertising hardware to Lamar. The firm is also known as a PEO, a professional employment organization, which is licensed by the state. FirstSun was the state’s first, but there are now 70 such PEOs in S.C.

But there is only one stormwater system in S.C. like the Gills Creek Watershed, which starts near Sandhills and runs through Arthurtown to the Congaree River. Powell got involved through his home property on Lake Katherine, where he could see the problems with silt and pollution. As he and his wife Betsy (the former Elizabeth Heath Champion of Spartanburg) raised their three boys ( John Key, senior at A.C. Flora; Parker Champion, sophomore at A.C. Flora; and Austin Elliott, sixth grade at Crayton), the threats from the lake were all too apparent.

More than two years ago, Powell was asked to chair the Gills Creek Watershed for six months, and he’s still at it. He took a different tack and redesigned the bi–laws to incorporate six districts besides S.C. DHEC and the federal government, including Ft. Jackson, in the 501(c)3. He pulled in dialogs with the people trying to do something similar with the Reedy River in Greenville and Sugar Creek in Charlotte. He’s even succeeded in getting the private development community on board by altering the language of the setback buffer zones to talk specifically about each individual condition instead of a blanket 100’ setback, say, which can be seen as a public taking of private property.

With the private developers in line among all the other players in the Gills Creek Watershed, Powell reports Richland County passed an ordinance citing all 22 items in consensus, but Columbia is yet to pass such an ordinance. Even so, it appears Powell and his group have stopped the bleeding with the guidance of a B.P. Barber–authored management plan projecting results through 2018. Next up is dredging and removal of 10,000 cubic yards of silt from Little Lake Katherine and 30,000 cubic yards from Lake Katherine.

Since the county is already in tow, the city needs to tie in. With that in mind, there’s a gathering and a fund raiser this Sunday, October 11, at 3 pm in back of the First Citizens Bank building on the northeast corner of the intersection of Trenholm Road and Forest Drive. Noted Columbia lawyer and environmentalist Yancey McLeod will lead a USC bus tour of sections of the Gills Creek Watershed. The tour is $20 per person, but further contributions are also encouraged. After McLeod’s guided tour, a wine–and–cheese reception follows on the shores of Forest Lake at the 5225 Lakeshore Drive home of Carol Kososki, where you will be invited to stroll through the house and its museum quality collections and the yard’s lakefront, home of hummingbird and butterfly gardens.

For more information, go to GillsCreekWatershed. com