Livin’ by the rhythm of the tide: Alma Platt Hudson, born in 1911

BY THE RHYTHM OF THE TIDE

Alma Platt Hudson

Born in 1911

She took a 30-cents-per-hour job packing shrimp for L.P. Maggioni and Co.’s on Jenkins

For a woman who grew up amid cornfields on an inland farm, Alma Platt Hudson reminisced a lot during her seventh decade about salt water, seafood and tide. In her mind and in her fingers she carried the skill of pulling the bait just before the fish snatched it off the hook, a technique tough to learn but essential for those who would catch the wily sheepshead.

   “I’ve lost many a fiddler to a sheepshead, but I caught on, and I could catch them. There used to be beautiful fishing around here. Mose [her husband of 48 years] loved it from his childhood, and I loved it, too. It’s just relaxing to be out on the water. The waves never come in the second time the same way,” she said.

   Alma was born near Denmark, South Carolina, in 1911, the second of seven children. Her father made cash by raising cucumbers, cantaloupes and watermelons in the summer, and cotton and corn in the fall. Alma’s job in the family, starting when she was nine, was to make the biscuits for the family three times a day—mixing and kneading them out of store-bought flour, homemade hog lard and milk from the cows in the barn.

   From biscuit making, she moved as a teenager into shrimp-packing, taking a 30-cents-per-hour job to work for her “Uncle Johnny” in the L.P. Maggioni and Co.’s packing shed on Jenkins Island. Maggioni had a string of seafood and vegetable canneries in remote areas of the coast from St. Augustine, Florida, to Lady’s Island near Beaufort.

   It was in Maggioni’s factory on Jenkins Island that Alma met Mose Hudson, a young man who weighed shrimp, a fellow who had been born on Hilton Head Island, one of a family of eleven children. Mose grew up in the creeks of Beaufort County, with only a short stint out of the Lowcountry—to work for Maggioni in St. Augustine.

   It took only from June to October of 1930 for Alma Platt and Mose Hudson to notice one another over the piles of prawn in the factory, fall in love and get married. Wed in Bamberg on October 5, 1930, they spent one night in Beaufort and returned to Hilton Head Island the next day on the steamboat

DEPRESSION IN FULL SWING

They boarded in a room in the home of Maggioni’s bookkeeper. Alma’s shrimp factory days were over. She was a happy bride on her way toward forty-eight years of living with Mose “for better or worse.” It was a phrase she took seriously. Then, with the Depression in full swing, Mose’s salary dropped from $20 a week to $16, to $12 and to $9. By early 1932, Alma was pregnant.

   Islanders at the time had few choices about how to make a living. They could gather or process seafood and hope for good weather, good catches and good prices. They might plant butter beans, corn and okra, which then needed to be hauled to Savannah, Georgia. Or, they could contribute in some way to the running of Honey Horn Plantation, where Northern hunters who came to the island to shoot quail, doves and duck had to have ready horses. Mose and Alma’s four children were born while they were living and working there.

   In 1941, when the country was about to be drawn into World War II, Marines were being trained in a beachfront camp in the area that is now Palmetto Dunes. Briefly, Alma and Mose ran a tavern near the camp, living in the same building with it. They found they did not like the tavern keeper’s lifestyle. “It was a mistake, and us with four children.” So when the opportunity arose for Mose to start running a store on Jenkins Island and renting all of Jenkins Island from the Maggioni Co. to pasture beef cows, they took it.

   Without a high school on Hilton Head, Mose and Alma were unsettled for a few years, trying to get their older children educated. They moved to the mainland in the early 1940s and then back to the island again. For a while, the two younger children attended a one-room school across U.S. Route 278 from the entrance to Honey Horn Plantation, and the two older ones boarded in Bluffton.

LANDING AT

To end the ordeal of boarding their children away from home, on October 15, 1950, they moved into a new frame house on the mainland, their livelihood by that time coming from the cows Mose raised on rented pasture near Buckingham Landing.

   That was the year the original Hilton Head Co. began timbering on the property it had bought, the year it began to build links between the island and the mainland. Mose and Alma had several roles as those early links developed.

   In 1953, when the state’s nine-car ferry started moving vehicles, goods and people between Buckingham and Hilton Head Island, Mose became the ferry captain, sharing the shifts with others. The ferry ran steadily seven days a week from daylight until dark. Mose walked about one hundred yards between his home and the pier where the ferry tied up on the mainland side.

   The James F. Byrnes Crossing, a causeway and low-level bridge across Mackays Creek and a drawbridge across Skull Creek, opened in May 1956. Mose shut down the ferry and became the bridge’s operator and toll-taker.

   The scarcity of vehicular traffic across the bridge and boat traffic through Skull Creek in those days allowed Mose time to dangle bait on a hook from the pilings under the operator’s booth. Never in a hurry, and known up and down the waterways for his patience at the end of a fishing rod, he hooked plenty of drum and sheepshead under the bridge. Alma dropped in to keep him company occasionally, taking the night watch on the bridge from time to time. Her constant task in the arrangement was to count and store the toll money—$2.50, later lowered to $1.25, round trip, for cars. She said she “handled every dime” collected on the drawbridge for a few years, keeping the funds in a safe in their home and doing the book work the state required.

   Mose also served as a director of the Palmetto Electric Cooperative from 1952 to 1974, helping to make the decisions that electrified Hilton Head Island through its major early development.

   After Mose retired from toll-taking and drawbridge-tending in 1971, he and Alma fished together more often, earning a reputation for knowing where and how to catch trout, sheepshead, drum, bass and everything else in local waters. They gardened together year-round, too, growing everything from squash to roses.

   After Mose died in 1978, Alma’s fishing days became only a memory. With the help of her children (Al, Lynn, Ann and Ethel) and her fifteen grandchildren, she tended the house and yard at Buckingham and lived alone for twenty more years in the home she and Mose built in 1950. And in the afternoon, she would sometimes sit and look at old snapshots, thinking back on what she called “beautiful times in these waters.”

   “I know I’m one of a kind. Everybody wouldn’t be happy with my kind of life. I like things to be quiet and like to keep away from crowds, so I don’t have advice for other people,” she said.

   “Goodness knows how many fish we’ve caught…drum, trout, bass, everything. It was a blessed life.”

   Among the memories that drifted around her head were these: Her older daughter, Ann, caught a twelve-pound flounder from the Jenkins Island dock when she was sixteen years old. Mose caught a seventy-nine-pound drum under the old Skull Creek drawbridge in 1962. She held the boat “many a day” with an oar while Mose cast a shrimp net. She often cleaned conch and made conch stew that she remembered as “delicious.”

   The family that bought the Buckingham house Mose and Alma built moved it about 150 feet, turned it ninety degrees to face Big Oak Street and raised it about 8 feet. A sturdy cottage with a charm all its own, it endured as a home for others in the twenty-first century.