These brothers had tales to tell: Gaillard Stoney Heyward, born in 1910; Daniel Hasell Heyward Jr., born in 1915

THESE BROTHERS HAD TALES TO TELL

Gaillard Stoney Heyward

Born in 1910

Daniel Hasell Heyward Jr.

Born in 1915

They reminisced about the mules and horses, the “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers,” the preachers and reprobates who used to live in Bluffton or used to come through on some mission or

Two lifelong Southerners wondered aloud almost daily what their lives would have been like if the (Civil) “War” had not changed everything about their family’s way of life. For them, in the 1980s, “the way it was” was a hot topic. Under a hickory tree that turned golden in the fall, close to the wisteria that bloomed lavender in the spring, always close to live oaks and Spanish oaks, they lamented and laughed together, reminiscing, telling stories about old Bluffton and long-ago ancestors to whoever would listen.

   Gaillard Stoney Heyward and Daniel Hasell Heyward Jr. were born in Bluffton in 1910 and 1915 respectively, the first and third sons of Daniel Hasell and May Mulligan Heyward. Growing up on what they called “front street”—now Calhoun—in the house their father built—now a law office—they had the run of the village.

   With two oyster factories, a cotton gin, a turpentine still and eight stores, Bluffton was a little center of commerce and industry for southern Beaufort County. On Saturdays, the farm families from Okatie, Pritchardville and Pinckney Colony would ride their horse-drawn buggies into town and tie them to hitching posts on “front street.” They could buy everything from oxen yokes to shoes and eggs.

   Twice weekly, two steamboats hauled freight, passengers and ice from Savannah, Georgia. As the ships approached Bluffton, they would blow their horns near “Halsey” (Palmetto Bluff) and then dock at the wharf at the end of Calhoun. Except when teachers kept Bluffton’s children at their desks, the youngsters ran to meet the boat.

   “Bluffton was a lively place. You’d see people in the street and on their porches all the time,” Hasell said.

   “It was nothing like now, when everybody’s shut up in the house,” Gaillard said.

   With their father serving as mayor for twenty-seven years, Gaillard and Hasell saw justice rendered from their front porch. Mayor Dan basically created what rules there were, interpreted them and enforced them. He saw his role as a common-sense peacekeeper. In making his decisions, he listened to testimony and announced out loud what he believed and didn’t believe. He would tell victims and suspects alike what to do about disputes and expect them to do it. “Go home, and don’t come back out ’till you get sober. Then stay sober,” he would say. The defendants could have called for jury trials, but they rarely did.

   Convinced that Harry Cram had discharged a firearm in town in violation of the law, the mayor told him to pay a fine of $12.50. Cram protested, contending he had done the same thing before and never been arrested or penalized.

   “You did it before?” the mayor asked. “Well, then, your fine on this conviction is $25.”

   After the Houlihan Bridge across the Savannah River shortened travel time to Savannah in 1925, Bluffton’s business district and its accompanying excitement took a downturn. Farmers and fishermen no longer needed the merchants of Bluffton and needed the steamers less and less. Men could haul their produce and seafood straight to the Savannah City Market and shop in that city as well. By the time the Great Depression hit the rest of the country in the early 1930s, it had already zapped Bluffton. For several years, the schoolteachers and the postmaster held the only wage-paying jobs in the area.

   The woods were hunted clean of deer and ’coon for meat, and the rivers and creeks were fished daily for flounder, croaker, whiting, shrimp, crabs and oysters. A few people trapped mink for the hides. A few foraged for the sweet-scented wild “deer tongue” plants to be sold to producers of perfumes and tobaccos. Except for a few Northerners who came in the winter to hunt, hardly anybody had enough cash to count.

   The two Heyward brothers who loved storytelling later in life had plenty of raw material from their childhood years. Sometimes they were historians. Other times they were stand-up comics. They told about mules and horses, dogs and ’coons, “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers,” the preachers and reprobates who used to live in Bluffton or used to come through on some mission or another.

FENCE POSTS AS FIREWOOD

“I sold Grit [newspaper]. When I’d take it to Dr. Edward Walker, he’d give me a dime for it instead of a nickel, and give me mint candy and gingersnap cookies,” Gaillard said. “If we cut enough wood, Daddy would ‘carry’ us to the fair in Savannah.

   “When he told us to get wood, we knew we’d better get it from somewhere. Nobody cared if we cut a tree.”

   He added thoughtfully: “Sometimes, we might get somebody’s fence posts instead.” Then he laughed and said, “Of course, we’d leave every other post so the fence wouldn’t fall down.”

   “Bluffton used to be a big-time place for young people. We had a dance pavilion over the water at the Palmetto beach fishing camp and later a pavilion at the end of ‘front street.’” Gaillard smiled broadly when he remembered going out on a date driving a green Chevrolet roadster, a convertible with a rumble seat; dressing up in white pants, a white shirt, a tie and a dark coat, topped off with a straw hat. They danced the fox trot and the waltz to a seven-piece orchestra. When they could afford it, they went to the Tybee Island pavilion, where the “big bands” performed—Guy Lombardo, Blue Steele, Benny Goodman and the Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy.

   Bluffton also was an especially “big-time place” for swimmers and rowers. Gaillard said he and his buddies once dived into the May River at Bluffton and swam with the outgoing tide to All Joy, at least a couple of miles. “We thought nothing of it.”

   During the Depression, Dan, Gaillard and Hasell’s father, got a temporary government job dipping cattle to protect them against worm infections. To get from Bluffton to the cows on Hilton Head Island, a distance by water of about eight miles, Dan rowed a bateau. He took Gaillard with him to help, always going with the ebb tide and returning with the flood.

   Gaillard had no regrets for having lived in Bluffton all of his life. At the age of nineteen, he spent a year seeing the Atlantic Ocean and European ports while working on a ship out of Mobile, Alabama. Life as a sailor lost its appeal during that time, though, and once he got back home, with only a dime in his pocket, he vowed to stay in Bluffton thereafter. He married Lucille Griffin and raised four children in a house with a double fireplace and a glass-enclosed front porch on the edge of Heyward Cove—the house he had visited as a child to sell Grit and to get mint candy and gingersnaps.

   Gaillard made a living as an electrician in the Savannah shipyard and as a game warden (wildlife officer), then spent much of his later years talking with Blufftonians about the old days when they came to get their mail from the Bluffton Post Office, where his wife was postmistress for twenty years.

SOUND CARRIED OVER THE WATERS

Hasell’s poignant memories included the silent times in old Bluffton that were broken by familiar sounds from the region. “It used to be so quiet sometimes we could hear the breakers in the surf at Hilton Head,” he said, cocking his ear as if listening. “We could hear the trains on the tracks at Pritchardville, the guns on Parris Island, the tugs blowing their whistles for the ships in the Savannah River.

   “If we wanted to go anywhere, we walked. Right after World War I, a plane crash landed in a field at Buckingham. We’d never seen a plane on the ground, so we walked to Buckingham to see it. I wanted to see it again the next day, so I walked back, but they had moved it by then,” he said.

   Hasell remembered “drummers,” traveling salesmen who carried black suitcases full of samples up and down the streets, trying to “drum up” business from the residents of the small town.

   For him, Halloween created important memories. Depression-era Bluffton children would surely have been labeled “deprived and underprivileged” if there had been any social workers to analyze their situation. But they made their fun. So how did they celebrate?

   “By taking the hinges off all the gates in town,” Hasell laughed. “By dragging the school bells down the street. By throwing oyster shells onto the tops of people’s houses.”

   Hasell got a job with the State Highway Department in 1938, worked in the Savannah shipyard and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he went to work in the Beaufort County Department of Roads and Bridges. In 1947, he began barging county equipment from Buckingham to Jenkins Island to re-work Hilton Head Island’s road network. Except for a single highway, paved from Jenkins Island to the lighthouse at Palmetto Dunes, the island’s roads were rutted, sandy trails with rattle-trap bridges across marshes and swamps. Without a crane, Hasell’s crew of between three and six men wrestled culverts and fill dirt into place and graded the roads for the first time. That year, he said, using palmetto logs from what is now Coligny Circle, they also rebuilt the Jenkins Island dock.

   Hasell later did similar construction and maintenance work for Sea Pines Plantation Co. and Palmetto Dunes Resort, working for both in their earliest days of development and eventually retiring from Palmetto Dunes.

   Although Hasell and his wife, Margaret Hair Heyward, took a lot of vacation trips, like his older brother, he had no regrets about living in Bluffton all his life. His two daughters—including the author—also grew up loving Bluffton and stayed in the area through marriages, careers, children and grandchildren.

THE

In 1958, Hasell bought the Heyward House, 1840, from a cousin living by that time in the Virgin Islands. Lovingly, Hasell sanded its floors and repaired its windowsills; planted azaleas under the oaks, the hickory and the magnolia; and kept the yard clean of fallen limbs, leaves and Spanish moss. Until his death, Hasell could point to the exact spot in his living room where his parents spoke their wedding vows, point to the red oak in his front yard that his grandmother used to make tea to fight fever. He liked being around familiar things.

   “The rich people used to come here to hunt in the winter. Other people came here to go in the river in the summer. Those of us who lived here could have it all—all the time. Why should I want to go somewhere else?” he asked, raising his eyebrows as if to say, “Do you think I’m crazy?”

   By the time Hasell died in 1997—in the house he loved, surrounded by people he loved and people who loved him—he had said many a time that he had a “good life.” For his family, Hasell’s unforgettable legacies include the tenor solos he sang in the Bluffton’s Episcopal Church of the Cross.

   Like his brothers, his father and his grandmother, Elizabeth Stoney Heyward or “Nanoo,” Hasell never “got over” the Civil War, although it ended fifty years before he was born. As an elderly man, he would sit for hours gazing at Civil War photographs and drawings of battle scenes, wounded men, burning houses and grizzled Confederate soldiers walking on dirt roads, dazed looks on their faces. By then, the images were more than 130 years old. That didn’t matter to him. “That was a terrible, terrible time in this country,” he said.

EPILOGUE

Descendants of the Heywards who came from Little Eaton, England, to Charleston by way of Barbados in 1692, and of Thomas Heyward Jr., signer of the Declaration of Independence, Gaillard and Hasell could recite details about their ancestors as if chatting casually about neighbors down the street. It was a Southern thing.

   The Bluffton ancestors included George Cuthbert Heyward—a former Confederate Army captain. George moved from his Charleston-area plantations to Bluffton after the Civil War, hoping to make a living cotton-farming. His family moved into what was then the Cole House, now the Heyward House Historic Center. Shot and killed in 1867 while riding to Buckingham Landing, George left a widow and thirteen children, five of them younger than the age of ten.

   One of George’s sons was Robert Chisolm Heyward. He married Elizabeth Stoney of Hilton Head Island. When Robert died—the family now thinks the cause was throat cancer—he left a widow and seven children.

   One of Robert and Elizabeth’s sons was Daniel Heyward, five years old at the time of his father’s death. Dan lived with relatives for a few years until his mother remarried, and Dr. Paul Pritchard became his stepfather. Dan never attended public school but had tutors, as did many other children in those days. Then, doing whatever he could find to do to make a living in Bluffton, Dan worked as fireman in an oyster factory; as a farmer, a carpenter and a dipper of cattle; then as a distributor of flour to the poor during the Great Depression.

   For a while, Dan had the job of policeman for the town of Bluffton. He boarded with the Mulligans, who were renting the Heyward House from a Heyward, and fell in love with a Mulligan daughter, May. In 1905, Dan, twenty-five, and May, fifteen, were married.

   Dan and May reared five children in Bluffton: Gaillard Stoney Heyward, James Edward Heyward, Daniel Hasell Heyward Jr., Joseph Cuthbert Heyward and Ella Elizabeth Heyward (DeGain).