Remembering the Way it Was at Hilton Head, Bluffton and Daufuskie

By Fran Heyward Marscher

Discover the history of an era lost to generations in this collection of personal stories by author and Hilton Head resident Fran Heyward Marscher.

In the hundred years separating the Civil War and the 1950s, the Lowcountry was a world unto itself. The big plantations were gone, and for those remaining life had to be wrenched from the soil and the creeks. But for some, these isolated barrier islands offered heaven on earth: virgin maritime forest, pristine saltwater, sand roads and plentiful wild game. This fascinating collection of stories speaks to us of life in a simpler time, of raising hogs, guineas and children on abandoned plantations; growing sweet potatoes, okra and sugar cane; trapping mink and picking oysters; pulling 12-pound flounder and 79-pound drum from the creeks; making feasts of Loggerhead turtle eggs, crab and conch meat; picking musk; and taking the steamer to Savannah to see the "big city" lights. Our narrators were born between 1881 and 1941, and, though their stories overlap and intertwine, each has a unique perspective on life in the Lowcountry. Author Fran Heyward Marscher, a Hilton Head journalist, grew up hearing these precious memories and sought out the storytellers when she realized that the way of life they described was in danger of dying out with each generation. Our narrators were born between 1881 and 1941, and, though their stories overlap and intertwine, each has a unique perspective on life in the Lowcountry. Author Fran Heyward Marscher, a Hilton Head journalist, grew up hearing these precious memories and sought out the storytellers when she realized that the way of life they described was in danger of dying out with each generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781625844491

Fran Heyward Marscher

Hilton Head resident Fran Marscher spent ten years as a reporter and editor at the Island Packet, Hilton Head's daily newspaper. Now a freelance journalist, Marscher writes for regional magazines and the Christian Science Monitor. With her husband, Bill, she is co-author of two books about South Carolina Sea Islands.

Book preview

1941

PREFACE

These oral histories almost slipped away. Most of the Lowcountry folk who lived here in the early twentieth century have passed on. When I was a child growing up in their midst, I had no idea of the stories they could have told me if I had asked.

Fortunately, Terry Plumb, editor of The Island Packet, Hilton Head Island’s daily newspaper when I conducted most of the interviews as a reporter in the 1980s, encouraged—nay, drove—me to find out how these men and women really lived.

Fortunately, the late Daniel Hasell Heyward Jr., my father, a lifelong resident of the area, knew most of the people in this book and introduced me to many of them.

Fortunately, once the characters of Remembering the Way it Was realized that I was both curious and respectful, they opened up.

Fortunately, Bill Marscher, my husband, saw these profiles as valuable context for the next generations of Lowcountry folk—both the bin yeahs (natives) and the cum yeahs (settlers). He encouraged—nay, drove—me to organize them into this book. He then put his technical skills and his patience to work cleaning up the old photographs.

I very much appreciate permission from The Island Packet for the use of storytellers’ pictures.

My hope now is that readers will come to like these storytellers, resourceful souls who bloomed where they were planted.

Fran Heyward Marscher

Bluffton, South Carolina

Section of the South Carolina Lowcountry where the storytellers lived. Map from the South Carolina Land Improvement Co. 1877

INTRODUCTION

The names and stories here are as real as the live oaks that dominate the region’s landscape. A few of the storytellers are still living, but most have died since being interviewed. They did you and me the favor of probing and sharing their recollections about their families and friends, and about life as far back as they could remember.

Did they recall everything accurately? Did they tell their stories truthfully? Can we verify what they said? Whatever is represented as a significant historical fact has been checked. Whatever else readers will find are scenes that came into the clearing as the storytellers traveled their memory trails—impressions that lasted half a century or more. Their individual tales overlap and intertwine, and in some cases, the tales come close to contradicting one another. Trying to unravel every mingled thread, to clarify all potential confusion, to nail down every detail would have killed this project. My impression is that if these folk did not tell the God’s truth about how it really was, they at least told it the way they remembered it.

Most of the characters were born in the Lowcountry. Most spent their lives close to where they were born. Those who were born elsewhere either contributed measurably to the cultural mix while they lived here or observed the Lowcountry through unique eyes. What an opera might be produced if one could put these Lowcountry characters on stage to interact with one another and entertain an audience. Men and women, black and white would compose the cast. Hovering in the corners would be the ghosts of the children they once were. The music would range from simple recitative, in which a single character laments a grief or shouts a joy; to memorable arias; to complex duets, trios and choruses about squalls on the sound, fires under the washpots, dances in the society halls, weddings, baptisms and all-day preaching.

For props, the Lowcountry players would need a bateau (flat-bottom rowboat) and a steamboat, an ox and a thoroughbred horse, a handmade fiddle and a grand piano. They would need a patch of okra, Atlantic blue crabs and a wood-burning stove. The scenery would include salt marsh, courtrooms and dining rooms, a few big houses with finely carved mantelpieces and a lot of small cabins with blue paint on the door to protect against bad luck.

Taken together, these characters, all intimately knowledgeable about the texture and the quirks of the Lowcountry in the first half of the twentieth century, present a panorama that will never be seen again. For them, this place has been home. They had the extraordinarily good fortune of knowing it the way it was.

PERSPECTIVE ON THE BIRTH YEARS 1881–1898

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the southernmost corner of South Carolina known as the Lowcountry was a world to itself, a remote area of mosquito habitat. The big, profitable plantations were long gone. The telegraphs and the railroads had not yet come. There was no industry.

A catastrophic hurricane in 1893 drowned two thousand or more and left seventy thousand destitute for almost a year. Afterward, for decades, families continued to wrench their livelihoods out of the soil and the creeks. Even the brightest and most ambitious found limited opportunities and few choices about how they would live.

It is true that from some points of view, the Lowcountry was heaven on earth. The people who lived there, black and white, helped one another and trusted one another; the children grew up in extended families and among familiar, caring neighbors. But that isolation was stifling as well as nurturing. Just as a small pond grows stagnant without the recharge of fresh water, the communities recycled knowledge and superstitions until they were almost worn out. Rarely did travelers visit Bluffton, Pritchardville or Okatie, or Hilton Head Island or Daufuskie Island. Rarely did Lowcountry folk go anywhere else, not even to Beaufort, the county seat. News arrived by steamboat, and only long after the news was cold. Columbia, the state capital, seemed as far away as London, England.

A few Northerners came in and out during hunting season, providing wage-paying jobs to a few along with a modest interchange of ideas. For the most part, though, Lowcountry residents were preoccupied trying to keep bread on the table and to stay in God’s favor insofar as possible.

The first six Lowcountry storytellers, all born between 1881 and 1898, represent the four thousand or so folk who lived in the scattered small settlements in the southern section of Beaufort County at that time. The county’s population was only thirty-five thousand, with blacks outnumbering whites ten to one.

AT AGE ONE HUNDRED, LIVELY AS A DANCER

Georgianna Barnwell

Born in 1881

Medical service everywhere was primitive, especially on that remote island off the South Carolina coast. Georgianna’s small scorched child died of burns.

Georgianna Miller Barnwell personified a slice of local and American history. The straight nose and high cheekbones on her dark face gave a hint of her part-Indian heritage as well as her African ancestry.

At the age of one hundred, at her home on Hilton Head Island’s Squire Pope Road, she moved like a dancer and told stories like an entertainer. Nearly deaf, she relied on her granddaughter-in-law to help communicate. As she reached back into some of the dramas of her Lowcountry life years before, ready emotions flooded over her.

FAMILY LORE FROM SLAVERY

Georgianna’s people sprang, she said, from Charleston during the Civil War. Her mother, who was born on the Okatie Main (the mainland around the Okatie River) told her many times about the Jones family’s furtive rowboat trip from the Okatie down the Colleton, Chechessee and Broad Rivers in the early 1860s. The family was headed to Union-occupied Hilton Head Island, the first free place in the South.

Among the fleeing runaway slaves was a baby who started crying on the trip, would not stop and could not be silenced.

Fearing capture and punishment if the infant’s wailing could be heard on shore, various family members grew frantic. Finally, several in the boat whispered commands to the mother: T’row him overboard, t’row him overboard.

Panic-stricken, the mother muffled his sobs. Telling the story as it was told to her, Georgianna grimaced and demonstrated with her hands and her whole body how the young woman must have clutched her child to her breast.

The rowers pulled their oars in rhythm in the dark waters, slowly moving their living cargo. At last, in breathtaking relief, the family landed on the safe shore of Hilton Head Island.

That was a time in this world, Georgianna said, shaking her gray head.

Out of the Jones family’s escape from slavery in the 1860s evolved the community around Jarvis Creek known for many years as Jonesville. From that family came Katie Jones, who married islander John Miller and gave birth in 1881 to our storyteller Georgianna. John Miller, Georgianna’s Pa, got work as a seaman and in a meat house and a coffee mill in Savannah, Georgia, about twenty-five miles south by water. The family lived in Savannah for a while. Then, after buying thirty-five acres in the Pope community and moving back to Hilton Head, John would commute to jobs as a longshoreman by catching the steamer to Savannah or rowing his boat across Port Royal Sound to the harbor at Port Royal. He would pack a baked sweet potato and a bit of smoked pork for a meal along the way.

At the age of sixteen, Georgianna became the bride of Jerry Barnwell, a young man from Jericho, a community near Port Royal. They began raising horses, hogs, turkeys, chickens, guineas and children on Elliott, an abandoned antebellum cotton plantation on Port Royal Sound in what is now Hilton Head Plantation. Like Georgianna’s father, Jerry commuted to Savannah and Port Royal to load and unload ships for wages.

FIRES WERE DEVASTATING

Tears filled Georgianna’s dark brown eyes when she described the terrifying death of her daughter, Alfreda, at the age of four. Georgianna had built a fire in the yard and gone next door to get a pot to wash clothes when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, flames licking at Alfreda’s little leg. Jerry came running with water, and Georgianna wrapped her own clothes around the child. I bind up her like this, she said, demonstrating how she smothered the blaze. Medical service everywhere was primitive, especially on that remote island off the South Carolina coast. Georgianna’s small, scorched child died of burns.

Far ahead of water mains on Hilton Head, fire also destroyed two of Georgianna’s island homes. A chimney blaze started one, an electrical spark the other. After one such fire, the family lived temporarily in what had been a corn barn.

Tears filled Georgianna’s eyes again when she described the unforgettable atrocity that struck the island in 1923. A white couple ran the largest store on Hilton Head, a place to buy a little coffee and a few nails, a place to tell the news and get the news, a gathering center for blacks and whites near what is now Hilton Head Regional Medical Center. One night, just as the well-respected, well-liked man and woman were closing the store and preparing to go upstairs where they lived, two men murdered them with an ax from the store and burned their property to the ground.

That was a time on this island, Georgianna said, shaking her head.

THE SOCIETY HALLS

Georgianna’s happy memories were as happy as the sad ones were sad. She cackled with joy as easily as she wept for sorrow.

She smiled broadly and patted her knee when she thought about the dances, the societies, held in the halls with live music. She lifted her chin and poked out her chest when she recalled overhearing a comment at a Penn School ceremony on St. Helena Island. They didn’t know I was listening, but I heard them say that whoever raised Thomas raise a good child. Thomas was her son (father of Thomas Barnwell Jr. and, by the twenty-first century, a well-known island businessman and community leader).

Unlike most islanders of long, long ago, Georgianna Miller Barnwell and one other young black woman took their children and others on little excursions to the beach to play in the sand and swim. She remembered fondly that their party of less than a dozen would have the whole twelve-mile strip to themselves.

THE HUNT WAS THE THING

John Huggins

Born in 1891

Hunters, like fishermen, are expected to brag, so John’s boastfulness reflected no character flaw.

After the Civil War, John Huggins’s father came from North Carolina to the Lowcountry to hang boxes on long-leaf pine trees to catch the tar that was later distilled in a furnace into turpentine and resin. Born in 1891, one of eight children, John grew up close to the big pine-tar still in the Pritchardville community in southern Beaufort County. Well into the last half of the twentieth century, John could think back on those days, take a deep breath and almost smell the memorable scent of pine sap.

Although John started school on Palmetto Bluff, where the family lived for a few years, he claimed he never learned a thing in school. As a child, he helped his father farm. Long after the disastrous 1919 invasion of the boll weevil, he remembered keenly how the pest did its deeds.

That weevil looks like a flying ant, he explained. The cotton boll was supposed to come in behind the bloom. But when the weevil got to the bloom, it punctured it and made it drop off, and it couldn’t make any cotton. We’d pick up the blooms and burn them to try to get rid of the little old devilish bugs. Their best efforts failed. Across the South, cotton production was wiped out. The only reason John’s family didn’t lose anything to the boll weevil was because it didn’t have anything to lose, John said later.

When a young Pritchardville farm boy wanted Saturday night excitement in John’s day, he would walk seven miles to Bluffton. After experiencing whatever excitement he could find there, he would walk the seven miles home. Of course we walked, he said. We had four horses, but they were tired by Saturday night. As a child and then as a young man, John hiked barefoot everywhere. The soles of my feet were so tough I could walk right through a field of sandspurs. When I got to some grass, I’d just brush off and run on, he said with pride.

John left the Lowcountry once—for military service during World War I.

Then for a couple of years in the 1920s, John Huggins was gamekeeper for Roy Rainey, the New York yachtsman and hunter who had bought Honey Horn Plantation and the whole south end of Hilton Head Island in 1927. John and Maude, his wife, thought they were in paradise when they lived close to what is now Harbour Town. They were making $100 a month—good wages in this region in those years—and they had a house to live in. A virgin maritime forest, pristine salt water and plenty of wild game surrounded them. They drove their Model A onto the beach, up and down, day and night, whenever they felt like it. There was nobody to bother you. We loved it, Maude said.

John and Maude took the sandy, two-rutted roads to the north end of the island about twice a week to shop and to order goods and supplies that were brought in by the steamers running between Beaufort and Savannah, Georgia. About once a month, they took a small motorboat to Bluffton to shop. Occasionally they caught a boat to Savannah. Other than that, they seldom saw anybody but one another and their two children, Elsie and Steve.

Orange, tangerine and pecan trees filled their yard. Juicy wild hog meat filled their smokehouse. For a few weeks every winter, John catered to his wealthy boss and his guests who came to stay in the house on Honey Horn Plantation and hunt. Most of the time, though, all John had to do was keep the poachers off the property. He hunted and fished, living the high life, making money off the land in more ways than one.

For instance, one day while John was out hunting, a man came by and Maude sold him $500 worth of ’coon skins. By the time John got home, he had twelve more skins hanging on the horse, ready for the market. That was a good day, wasn’t it?

After Roy Rainey sold the island property in 1930 to Landon Thorne and Alfred Loomis, John and Maude and their children moved back to Pritchardville.

The only thing going on there in 1930 was logging, so that’s what John did—hard, dangerous work, done at the time with an ax and a hand-drawn crosscut saw. Once, in one of those miracles of adrenaline-flow in emergencies, John lifted a small crawler tractor to keep it from falling on one of his workers. Nobody knows how I did it, and I don’t either, but he’d have been a dead man that day if I hadn’t done it. In later years, John could not remember exactly when he purchased the first gasoline-powered saw for his logging operation, but he knows he bought it as soon as such newfangled equipment came to stores in Savannah. It was wonderful, he said.

Gradually, John and Maude bought land around Pritchardville until they owned more than six hundred acres that were good for growing crops, cutting timber and hunting deer and doves. Selling hardwood gave the family a financial cushion. Once their son, Steve, started truck farming, there was plenty of fresh vegetables for the table, plus cash from the roadside vegetable stand. Just as they had lived the high life on the south end of Hilton Head in the 1920s,