Superintendent of Bull Island Plantation: Delmar Beach, born in 1912

SUPERINTENDENT OF

Delmar Beach

Born in 1912

“A six- or seven-year-old can hoe and pull weeds. A nine-year-old can follow a horse and plow.”

Delmar Beach never traveled far from Savage Island in the May River, where he was born in 1912, but he participated in many an adventure. By the time I interviewed him in 1982, he had been a brick mason, a Navy-certified welder, a heavy equipment operator, a mechanic on everything from a lawn mower to a dragline, a shrimper, a plumber, an electrician, a breeder of cattle and horses, a tender of exotic animals and a Sunday school teacher.

   As a boy, he picked cotton and thrashed rice on a farm near Pritchardville. As a man, he managed, among other operations, the three-thousand-acre Bull Island Plantation during the years of its famous Santa Gertrudis cattle and zebras. He could play guitar and harmonica by ear. He could pick out a tune on a piano. He could sing. He especially liked singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

   In about 1904 Delmar’s grandfather, Archie Beach, and his father, Ira Beach, bought Savage Island for $1,050 to live and farm. In addition to sharing the land with a sharecropper, the Beaches raised traditional coastal South Carolina crops and hauled them to market by rowboat, sailboat and steamer. They also raised sheep and sold lamb meat and wool.

   By 1917, Ira and his wife, Levena, had five children. They bought property near Pritchardville—close to Levena’s family, the Simmonses—where they raised everything they ate except salt, pepper, sugar and coffee. Delmar learned early what it is to work. “A six- or seven-year-old can hoe and pull weeds. A nine-year-old can follow a horse and plow,” he said.

   And there was more going on at the head of Rose Dhu Creek than hoeing and plowing. The Simmons family members were known far and wide for their uncanny ability to track deer and wild turkey. Delmar took his dog and gun, and went with them. They had hounds that would trail deer by day and foxes by night. Sometimes they came across bobcats. They were full of hunting stories, and their larders were kept full of wild game.

   As soon as Delmar was big enough to see over the steering wheel of a truck, he began driving to take oyster “hands” (workers) to the Lowden oyster factory and shell mill in Bluffton and hauling the shell back and forth on the oyster mill site. When he was sixteen, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with an uncle and learn the plumbing trade, an occupation demanding brawn at the time, dependent as it was on cast iron pipe. Although Delmar had never lived in a house with an indoor bathroom, he made the transition from outdoor privies to indoor facilities, including heated running water and commodes that flushed.

JACK OF ALL TRADES

In 1931, Delmar married Mozell Hutson, a pretty girl who had grown up on Rose Hill Plantation. No one ever told Delmar that he could not learn to do whatever he wanted to do. So he kept learning and kept doing different things. When Delmar and Mozell moved back to Bluffton about a year later, he opened a barber shop, then he worked for Belfair Plantation, then he opened a gas station on U.S. Route 17 near Hardeeville and also began hauling logs to a Savannah, Georgia–area box factory. He spent a year in Augusta, Georgia, working as a plumber; then welded on ships for Savannah Machine and Foundry during World War II. In 1945, he bought seven acres on the May River, built a red brick house on the bluff and went into the construction business. By then he and Mozell had a daughter, Jo Anne, and a son, Jimmy.

   One of his first big construction projects was a concrete block oyster factory for the Toomer factory at Buckingham, after the state put in new health regulations. Another was a house on the southern edge of Bull Island for Powell Crosley, a wealthy engineer and entrepreneur who had bought the island in the late 1940s. Powell Crosley and Delmar Beach hit it off.

   In the thriving post–World War II economy, Crosley started selling radios for $35 instead of $20, and built and sold the first refrigerators with shelves in their doors—Shelvadores. The pint-sized Crosley cars of that era were named for him. Crosley owned the Cincinnati Reds baseball team; a place in Canada; a place in Miami, Florida; and a yacht he took to Cuba bone-fishing every February. Delmar was hired as a maintenance man for Bull Island and then was given full authority to run the three-thousand-acre spread.

   Crosley liked to hunt ducks and quail, and to have his friends hunt them. He also loved animals of all kinds. Delmar built duck ponds and planted bird patches on Bull Island. His construction skills, along with what he had learned about hunting from his mother’s family, served him well. He also became a heavy equipment mechanic, having to deal with the clutches and carburetors of draglines and bulldozers in fields in the middle of the island, a long way from service centers.

   “I don’t mean to brag,” he said in his Southern drawl, “but we went for twelve years without having to get a mechanic to Bull Island. I didn’t have to have a mechanic until we had trouble with a ten-speed transmission on a new tractor.”

DONKEYS AND ZEBRAS

When Crosley brought a herd of rambunctious buffalo to Bull Island, Delmar had met his match. Two of the buffalo refused to be contained, despite being surrounded by May River, Bull Creek and the Cooper River marsh. They swam to Savage Island, where they wrecked crops, and to Palmetto Bluff Plantation, where they were also unwelcome and where one of them was killed. Delmar and his son, Jimmy, eventually had to shoot two of the three-thousand-pound bull buffaloes, but not before Bull Island had become home to a herd of about twenty.

   Crosley imported a pair of mouflon (wild sheep with large, curling horns, natives of Sardinia and Corsica) and a pair of aoudad (wild sheep, native to North Africa) to Bull Island. They grazed free and caused little or no trouble, but they didn’t reproduce and died after a few months. Crosley also imported Sardinian donkeys, charming little gray animals, which, unlike Mexican burros, neither kick nor bite. The donkeys not only thrived but multiplied until a subsequent owner had dozens of them hauled across the May River on a barge and given free to whoever would take them. Crosley had Delmar breed a Tennessee walking horse with a marsh tacky, one of the sturdy descendants of the Spaniards’ small horses. The offspring, Delmar said, had an easy gait and a lot of stamina, the best traits of both parents.

   In the 1960s, A.L. Loomis, son of Alfred Loomis, who with Landon Thorne had sold the south end of Hilton Head Island to the first modern-day developers, bought Bull Island from the Crosley heirs. Loomis added zebras to the menagerie there. Although they were photographed for regional media and although Hilton Head Island tour boat guides wowed the tourists with stories about them for many years, the zebras would not be domesticated. They did not flourish in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and the herd quickly dwindled away.

   A foot injury disabled Delmar gradually until he retired from Bull Island in 1972. But he had more he wanted to do. He and his son got into commercial shrimping, first with a fifty-foot trawler named Little which lost a pin from its drive shaft and foundered on a shoal off the north end of Hilton Head. “Three of us had to jump off the boat and swim to shore. The water was rough, and those breakers were pounding it apart. The planking was coming loose. We just did make it,” he said, laughing at himself. Nevertheless, three days later, they bought a sixty-five-foot trawler named Little which caught fire in the engine room and burned up in the mouth of May River.

   “That,” said Delmar, laughing and slapping his thigh, “was the end of my shrimping. I guess I really retired after that.”

   He never did quit playing the harmonica, though, or quit singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

   (Meet Delmar Beach’s uncle, Albert Kisler “Kiss” Beach, on page 21.)