A young man and a boat: Edmond Hudson, born in 1905

A YOUNG MAN AND A BOAT

Edmond Hudson

Born in 1905

During World War I, with the buildup of troops on Parris Island, the boat traffic between Savannah and Beaufort got heavier and

With a sixteen-foot bateau and a pair of eight-foot oars, Edmond Hudson began, at the age of nine, transporting passengers and freight between the islands and the mainland in the Lowcountry. Born on the May River’s Barataria Island in 1905, he built up strength, stamina and calluses rowing to and from Buckingham Landing on the mainland to the steamships traveling between Savannah, Georgia, and Beaufort.

   “There was no other way for the people on these islands to get to things,” he explained. “The county paid my father $10 a month to provide the service, and we charged fares. For example, we got 25 cents to take somebody from Buckingham to Last End [pronounced Las’ Een by Gullahs and others] Point [the southern tip of Pinckney Island], 25 cents to Ferry Point on Jenkins Island and 50 cents to the Jenkins Island factory,” he said. “Daddy gave me that money, and after I was nine years old, he never had to buy me another pair of shoes.”

   In addition to brawn, young Edmond had to use skill to handle a rowboat in gusting winds and strong tidal currents. Hooking onto the steamers for loading and unloading demanded specific know-how. Pilot Boy and steamers between seventy-five and one hundred feet long, as Edmond remembers them—could not stop when they came through Skull Creek, where Edmond met them in the bateau. Without power and therefore without steerage, they could have been blown aground. They slowed down, latched onto Edmond’s small boat and pulled it along the side, while travelers, bags of potatoes, one-hundred-pound sacks of rice and cages of farm animals were moved back and forth between the two vessels.

   “I had to know what I was doing,” Edmond said from the porch of his retirement home near Bluffton in 1981. “If it was rough, we’d go up and down while all that was going on. If I wasn’t careful, the bow would go down and not come back up, and the boat would go under.”

CHICKENS IN THE RIVER

“It happened to me twice. One time I had a load of chickens and turkeys, and when the boat sank, there were chickens and turkeys flapping all over the river,” he said. “A fellow living on Pinckney Island rowed out and helped me, or I’d have lost every one of them.”

   Edmond laughed several decades later at things that happened to him on the water, and he remembered one time when there wasn’t much laughing until daybreak.

   “I had to take Valley [Williams] Mason to Jenkins Island on Sundays and bring her back to the mainland on Fridays. She taught school on Hilton Head but lived in Bluffton. So one Sunday afternoon, me and Valley had to leave Buckingham in a fog. It was pretty thick when we left, and it just steeled in on us when we got out into the creek. It got so thick I couldn’t see a God’s thing,” Edmond said, motioning with his hands as if trying to cut through the fog.

   “I just kept rowing, figuring I’d hit land somewhere, and we’d be able find our way from wherever we were. I rowed for about three hours without hitting any land. For all I knew, I could have been heading out Calibogue Sound [into the ocean]. So we dropped anchor and spent the night out there in the boat in the middle of that fog. The sun was about to come up when I heard geese cackling,” he said. “I knew those were my mama’s geese, and we weren’t two hundred yards from our house on Buckingham.

   “I must have been pulling harder on one oar than the other. I’d been rowing in circles. After we found out where we were, we joked about it, but I didn’t get Valley to her class until about 11 o’clock Monday morning.”

   During World War I, with the buildup of troops on Parris Island, the boat traffic between Savannah and Beaufort got heavier and heavier. Three steamers were added to the Commander, The Hillegard and The the latter a twin-engine boat capable of carrying fifteen hundred passengers. Edmond had plenty of work.

WATER TRAFFIC DECREASES

But in the late 1920s, the proliferation of trucks and cars, the construction of bridges and improvements in roads led to the decreasing use of the waterways for transportation. Edmond, helped and coached by his father at first, had provided the ferry service for a dozen years before his father gave him a suit of clothes and told him he was on his own at the age of twenty-one. The year was 1926.

   The village of Bluffton—“the town” for “country” folk like Edmond’s family, the “town” that Edmond remembered as a child and then as a young man—was a bustling community with several general stores on the main street, a downtown of a lot of noise and activity—and brawling in the 1920s. “It was outlaw country,” he said. “People came to town on Saturdays with guns strapped to their sides. They’d hitch up to the hitching posts—some right by the old ‘Jew store’ [the old Planters Mercantile building] and others by Mr. Jesse Peeples’s store [now “The Store”]. Bluffton was just like you see in old Western pictures, with the drinkin’ and shootin’ and everything.”

CONSTRUCTION WORK AND RETIREMENT

Twenty-one years old and on his own, Edmond had a “big time in Bluffton” before moving to northern Beaufort County to make a living. He ran a motorboat ferry service between Beaufort and Lady’s Island before the Lady’s Island bridge was finished in 1927. He married a Lowcountry girl—Miriam Goethe, who was born in 1910 just outside of Bluffton. They farmed on Brickyard Plantation on Lady’s Island for nine years and then were in the construction business in northern Beaufort County for almost forty years before returning to the old Goethe homeplace just outside Bluffton in about 1974.

   Once they settled into the Goethe compound, Edmond and Miriam set about to work the soil, just as they had worked other resources all their lives. Out of Edmund’s 1981 summer garden, Miriam picked and froze forty-five quarts of butter beans; canned thirty quarts of green beans, forty-five quarts of tomatoes plus twenty quarts of peas; plus pickles.

   When they sat on the porch that year, in semiretirement, Edmond compared the challenges of running his own construction business with those of rowing his own bateau. “There are a lot more headaches when you’ve got a bunch of people working for you,” he said, “a lot more headaches. When it’s just you and that boat, all you’ve got to worry about is the wind.”