A sport from New York: Henry Sergeant “Harry” Cram, born in 1907

A SPORT FROM

Henry Sergeant “Harry” Cram

Born in 1907

On a dare, he and a lady friend did, indeed, ride their horses all the way from Foot Point to Savannah and into the ballroom of the DeSoto Hotel, establishing their reputations as the daredevils of the

Henry Sergeant “Harry” Cram spent a childhood without formal schooling but with a ready ticket to cruise ships crossing the Atlantic. He began shooting wild game at the age of ten, playing polo full time at the age of sixteen. In his growing-up years, he traveled with his lawyer father to shoot grouse in Scotland in early fall, shoot ducks on Long Island, New York, in late fall, shoot quail on Hilton Head Island in mid-winter and fish out of Palm Beach, Florida, in spring.

   To Lowcountry natives, he was a figure out of an adventure novel, a character shaped by experiences most of his neighbors hardly even dreamed about. For more than sixty years, the community knew Harry as a genial host, a skilled raconteur and a deadly shot. In 1976, he startled two threatening intruders at his home on Devil’s Elbow Island in the May River, killing them instantly by shots to the head with the .38-caliber pistol he kept at his bedside.

   “I had no choice,” he said of the incident, which led to a trial for murder, in which the judge directed a verdict of not guilty.

SHOOTING GROUSE

In 1981, looking back at a lifetime of mostly recreation, Harry could not decide which sport was his favorite, but when he talked about hunting, he could not resist telling about grouse shooting on his father’s forty-thousand-acre estate called Dunheath Castle in Scotland.

   “We had a bagpiper,” he said, remembering. “I never liked the pipes much inside but outside on the moors, they were very festive. It’s beautiful there, too, there among the purple heather. And the grouse are among the most splendid birds of all.”

   For more than half a century, Harry kept a game book that recorded a “splendid bag” his father got one day on Dunheath—sixty-eight grouse, plus other birds. Harry shot four rare black grouse one day himself. Whenever opportunity arose for a grouse story, or a story to illustrate his youthful flings, he told about his difficulties in getting his trophy, his mounted black grouse, back into the United States from Scotland.

   “I found out that federal law prohibited the importation of all kinds of feathers, and that included my grouse that had been to the taxidermist. So I gave the trophy to a yacht club in France until I learned that, if I had been going to give it to a university, the law would not apply. I arranged with an Emory University official to ‘give’ the trophy temporarily to Emory—with the understanding that Emory would later give it back to me. But when I got a letter from Emory thanking me for my generous donation, I had to scurry around and make contact with the man I knew there,” he said, laughing at himself.

   “I guess I was paid back for my deviousness. The case [the bird] was in broke, and the feathers eventually got moldy, and the whole thing had to be thrown away,” he said.

A YACHT AND A COW ON A BARGE

Harry’s foray into the Lowcountry occurred soon after his birth in New York in 1907. When hunting season began, his father followed his pattern of finding wildernesses to hunt in, and he brought the family that winter to Honey Horn Plantation on Hilton Head Island. Whether they made this trip by train or yacht we don’t know. Harry’s mother was not nearly so keen on the sporting outings as was his father. She preferred opera to the barking of dogs, preferred London, Paris and New York to remote Hilton Head and Bluffton. Harry said his father made a number of concessions to his mother to keep her satisfied while he pursued the hunting and fishing he loved. Among the concessions was the milk cow that traveled on a barge towed behind the family yacht.

   “It was the funniest thing ever to the people on the shore who would see it,” Harry said. “We had a man back there to milk the cow. My mother insisted that even if we had to be hauled all over the place, she was going to have fresh milk for the children.”

   Around the turn of the century, Harry’s father began buying property for his own hunting preserve around Bluffton, eventually purchasing almost eighty-five hundred acres, including Morefield (now a part of Moss Creek), Foot Point (now a part of Colleton River), Oak Forest and Hunting Island (later Ulmer property on the May River) and “Camp” on Victoria Bluff. The Crams would rent the Martin house on May River in order to spend the winter hunting in the area.

   Harry became the envy of all the Bluffton children. “They were jealous of me because I wasn’t made to go to school. My father had whistled through school himself, and I guess he thought I’d pick up an education through bits and pieces. We were off shooting all the time. Daddy did teach me to shoot—at the age of nine.”

   The family hired tutors to teach Harry, his brother and his sister from time to time, but if the tutors were poor shots or poor sports, his father would not put up with them through a whole school term. One tutor fell off a horse onto an oyster-shell road at the entrance to Oak Forest, breaking his leg, and that was the end of school for the Cram children for that year, Harry said, laughing.

   When Harry was sixteen, he moved into the Meadow Brook Club on Long Island, at that time the seat of polo in America. From there he continued to travel widely in the United States, France and England, playing polo with the well-to-do on two continents.

FOOT

In 1929, Harry built a house on Foot Point and began living there, calling it his “first real home.” It was there that his reputation developed for extended parties, where the guests rode hard, drank hard and played tricks on one another.

   The most famous story from Harry’s boisterous years is true. On a dare, he and a lady friend did, indeed, ride their horses all the way from Foot Point to Savannah, Georgia, and into the ballroom of the DeSoto Hotel, establishing their reputations as the daredevils of the Lowcountry. Harry said they took care to remove the horses’ shoes before going in, however, being far too thoughtful to ruin the ballroom floor.

   Another tale, almost as famous in the region, also comes with a ring of truth. During the 1930s, horse racing on Palmer Stretch (now traffic-heavy Burnt Church Road) was a community-wide Thanksgiving event. After one race, Harry Cram and Roy Rainey, the flamboyant New York yachtsman who was a part-time Hilton Head Islander, got into an argument about who had won. They decided to settle their dispute by simply running the race again.

   “In the second race, Roy fell and broke his leg, and it took the doctor several days to get over to Foot Point to set it for him,” Harry said. “To help entertain Roy until the doctor arrived, we put a ’coon in the room with him.” Harry paused and grinned after admitting that. “I’m not sure how well he was entertained, but we were trying. He was a guest, you see.”

HUNTING WITH

Harry loved having guests to hunt and drink liquor and swap stories at Foot Point. Along with the rich and the famous, he invited the congenial folk, especially the skilled hunters, from the area. Most of Bluffton’s old-timers could whip out a Harry Cram story for any occasion. Among the alleged famous visitors was a congenial grouse hunter Harry had met in Scotland—Harold MacMillan, prime minister of Great Britain.

   To counteract the notion that Harry and his friends did nothing but play on Foot Point, Harry often pointed out that he also raised cattle there for fifty years, from three hundred to five hundred head at a time. He also raised a family there. He had four children: Jackie, by his first wife, Edith, who died; Hank, by his third wife, Eloise, who died; and Peter and Clare, by Lucy, whom he married in 1950. He and his second wife divorced during his World War II service in the U.S. Coast Guard.

   After more than forty years on Foot Point, Harry saw change coming to the “neighborhood” of the U.S. Route 278 corridor just off Hilton Head. He sold some of his property there for industrial development (that did not materialize) and put some of it in trust for his children. He then bought what was called Potato Island in the May River and built a new home on it in 1974. A lover of tradition and history, he renamed it “Devil’s Elbow Island,” after the Devil’s Elbow Barony, the twelve thousand acres granted to Sir John Colleton during colonial days.

   In 1975, after decades of being the perfect host who always took a drink, or two or more, with a guest, Harry decided to go on the wagon, although he continued his membership in fourteen social clubs—including the Knickerbocker in New York, Buck’s Club in London and The Wildfowler’s Association of Great Britain and Iceland—and continued to enjoy an active social life. At about the same time, he also became fitness-conscious, taking up judo, tennis and yoga.

   In part because of his family’s wealth—based, he said, on “studious management of property over the years”—Harry always lived differently from most of his Bluffton neighbors. When the natives were planting cotton and working in sawmills to make a living, Harry was playing polo and shooting birds. He never worried about money.

   But with the same fervor as those born in the South Carolina Lowcountry, he came to love the region, its people and its culture as well as its woods filled with game. And the Lowcountry came to love Harry—a friendly man with a knack for making the people around him feel good. After about two decades on Devil’s Elbow, he and Lucy moved into a new house at Foot Point—close to the house he had built in 1929, on the Lowcountry property he called his “first real home.”