Oyster factory and opera records: Naomi McCreary McCracken, born in 1911

OYSTER FACTORY AND OPERA RECORDS

Naomi McCreary McCracken

Born in 1911

Often, at nights after the day’s work was done, everybody in the neighborhood who could carry a tune, and some who couldn’t but liked to try, gathered together at the Guilfords to sing, dance and clap their

Bluffton pulsed with the rhythms of riverfront commerce when Naomi McCreary McCracken was born there in her grandmother’s eleven-room house in 1911.

   When the whistle blew loud across the May River, the village children scampered to the bluff and the docks to see for themselves what might be coming and going. Steamboats from Savannah, Georgia, docked at the wharf on the end of Calhoun Street, loading and unloading people and cargo, generating the sounds and sights of trade for all of the surrounding rural communities and the nearby islands. Chatter and laughter filled the air. Blocks of ice from the city clunked onto delivery wagons. Burlap-bagged sweet potatoes from the countryside hit the decks of the ship.

   “We were allowed to jump off the boat’s top decks into the water,” Naomi remembered several decades later. “I don’t know why they let us do it. They’d be busy with freight and excursion passengers, and we’d be all over the place.”

   At the end of Bridge Street, on the May River just at Verdier Cove, a multistory, rambling complex housed a steam factory for oysters; an experimental canning facility for shrimp and crabs; and an oyster shell mill, where the shell was ground for use in chicken feed and road building. Blacks and whites, including many Polish immigrants, worked side by side to keep the big seafood processing plant going—picking, shoveling, shucking, packing, hauling. The scents were of the stuff that comes out of the pluff mud of the Lowcountry’s numerous tidal creeks.

   Naomi’s father, “Captain Jack” McCreary, ran the cannery. Her mother, Gertrude Guilford McCreary, who had been playing the organ at the Church of the Cross since she was thirteen, continued to make music and ran the McCreary household with three children. They lived in a little house fronting Verdier Cove, close to the factory. The children squinted their eyes against the glint off the nearby mountains of sun-bleached oyster shells. They came to think of the raucous cries of herring gulls and the regular scraping and swishing sounds of shovelfuls of oysters being loaded onto the docks as background music of a normal life.

   Like the steamers’ wharf, the oyster factory and shell mill served as a public recreation area for children as well as a place of business. “I remember us playing all around the workers and with the bateaux and on the docks,” Naomi said. “We were all over the place there, too. I guess we could have gotten hurt, but I don’t remember anybody telling us to get out of the way. Looking back, I think everybody was really looking out for us children.”

Of all the adults who looked after the children of Naomi’s childhood, none was more influential than Naomi’s grandparents, the Guilfords, especially after Naomi’s mother died in childbirth in 1922, at the age of thirty-two. The Guilfords, who lived on Boundary Street, had almost two dozen grandchildren. Grandfather, who made music a part of his daily life, had taught his three daughters to play the piano, and Naomi’s mother had taught her. Grandfather frequently played opera on his Victrola record player. Often, at nights after the day’s work was done, everybody in the neighborhood who could carry a tune, and some who couldn’t but liked to try, gathered together at the Guilfords to sing, dance and clap their hands. As often as possible, the Guilfords took Naomi and others to Savannah to concerts.

   The Guilfords provided various other services in addition to group singing and exposure to opera and symphonies. The couple provided a boarders’ table known for typical Southern dishes, especially rice, as well as daily family devotions and medical care. Grandmother, called “Doctor Guilford” around town, carried a big black bag when she made house calls to deliver babies or set broken bones, and she dosed patients with senna, licorice tonic and pasted poultices.

   In 1928, a new brick school at the corner of Pritchard and Bridge replaced an old wooden school building on Calhoun, and Naomi McCreary, an eleventh grader, was a part of its first graduating class. That was the year a young man in his second job out of Clemson moved to Bluffton to teach the skills of agriculture to Bluffton boys—Henry Emmett McCracken. Emmett McCracken and Naomi McCreary discovered one another in the small town of Bluffton, and a few months after Naomi graduated, they were married.

   As a schoolgirl, she had sketched during math class and taken a few drawing lessons. As a young woman, she studied art again and worked in a variety of media, always drawing and painting the familiar scenes of the Bluffton landscape: live oaks strewn with moss, cottages with front porches, oyster bateaux, sunsets over the river. After taking a class from an artist and lithographer from Woodstock, New York, who spent several months a year in Bluffton, she traveled to Woodstock one summer to study with him for three months. She called the experience “wonderful,” but said she missed her husband and got so homesick she could not stay away.

   Nevertheless, by the time Naomi was in her eighties, her works of art were hanging in lots of homes and many galleries in the region. She continued to paint, enjoying a sunlit studio that was completed in 1999, when she was eighty-eight years old.

ANTIQUE SHOP

Along with art and music, Naomi came to love antiques. In the beginning of her quest, she and two friends would drive by cornfields, stop at old farmhouses, travel to Daufuskie and negotiate with individuals for the purchase of pieces they liked. Over the years, a modest antique business evolved into a popular shop called Stock Farm Antiques, eventually known far and wide for its eighteenth and nineteenth century English and American furniture and porcelains. The merchandise, Naomi always said, did not include what many called “collectibles” but should be “fine.”

   Occasionally, early in the twenty-first century in Bluffton, in her ninetieth year, Naomi would daydream of days and nights when she was a little girl. On summer evenings, after supper, the grown-ups would sit on the wide porches to talk, and the children would chase fireflies and play “Honey, Honey, Haro.” The game resembled hide-and-seek, except for the added dimensions of darkness and the sounds of children’s voices echoing as they called to one another across the tidal coves.

   (Meet Naomi’s husband, Henry Emmett McCracken, on page 73 and her first cousin, Luke Peeples, on page 69.)