Back and forth, back and forth: Charlie Simmons Sr., born in 1913

BACK AND BACK AND FORTH

Charlie Simmons Sr.

Born in 1913

Charlie provided the island’s first mass-transit system, transporting Sea Pines Plantation employees from their homes in Hardeeville, Ridgeland and Bluffton to their

For more than half a century, Charlie Simmons Sr. used everything from wind to diesel to transport everything from live turkeys to caskets back and forth between Hilton Head Island and Savannah, Georgia. He was but a barefoot boy when he started working on a sailboat with his guardian, hauling butter beans and watermelons from island gardens to the Savannah City Market; hauling shoes and rice from Savannah’s stores to the island; hauling old people and babies, chickens and suitcases back and forth, back and forth.

   Depending in the 1920s on the whims of the Lowcountry’s coastal breezes to move cargo and passengers, Charlie cultivated patience, a virtue that held up under other trying circumstances over the years. About the wind that powered his early freight service, he said, “If it don’t move, you don’t move, and you just have to wait.”

   Charlie had his share of breakdowns, accidents and storms to contend with during his many years of water travel, and thus, along with patience, he also cultivated the virtue of perseverance. He could tinker with an engine enough to correct minor trouble and could handle whatever else came his way, whether flat tires or leaky vessels or cranky passengers. He said simply: “You had to do it. You had things that had to be moved. If someone depend on you for something, you have to do it.”

   In 1927, to modernize and speed up his operation, Charlie bought a thirty-foot boat with a fifteen-horsepower engine. Three times a week, when he pulled into Savannah’s River Street, Lola would be loaded with cans of oysters; sacks of clams; and bags of okra, tomatoes and corn. “I could take anything then,” he said. “That was a powerful engine, this big,” he said, showing with his nimble hands how the inboard engine in Lola filled a space bigger than a steamer trunk.

   Soon, nevertheless, Lola was too small to meet a growing demand, and Charlie bought Edgar a bigger boat for carrying more buckets, baskets, bags and baggage back and forth, back and forth. The great-grandson of slaves had become a significant player in the region’s commerce.

ALLIGATOR

Charlie’s last freight boat was a seaworthy ferry that moved daily between the public dock on Jenkins Island and the public dock on Buckingham in the 1940s and early 1950s, keeping up the tradition and keeping islanders connected to the mainland.

   In order to provide alvmost door-to-door service for his customers, Charlie had trucks on both sides of the Skull and Mackays Creeks. He would pick up islanders’ shopping lists, fill their orders by going to as many Savannah businesses as necessary and then deliver the goods. For handling cardboard boxes filled with loose rice and coffee, tied with a string and labeled with the names of his customers, he charged 25 cents. Charlie would have to load and unload the groceries and dry goods at least four times between his pick-ups at Alexander’s Wholesale Grocery and Kress dime store in Savannah and the houses on Hilton Head. Fortunately, having learned patience and perseverance long before, he was undaunted by the tedium and the cumbersome nature of the assignments he took on.

   After becoming the man to call on for conveyance of people and cargo, Charlie branched out to serve the needs of the U.S. Coast Guard, the State of South Carolina and the County of Beaufort. He bought a forty-ton barge and contracted to transport the dump trucks, bulldozers, cranes, shovels, asphalt and maintenance crews back and forth between Buckingham and Jenkins Island and between Buckingham and Daufuskie Island. There were more than a dozen public boat landings on Hilton Head then, many miles of sandy roads and many miles of drainage ditches, all of which required regular upkeep, which required regular movement of machinery. When the sheriff, auditor, school superintendent or political candidates wanted to visit one of the islands, they also called on Charlie and Alligator or on Charlie and his barge.

STURDY WHARVES

The public docks he used back then were not fragile crabbing piers but hefty wharves built to support whatever kind of heavy equipment might have to be transported. They had ramps for loading and unloading at all stages of the tide. In rain and shine, heat and cold, mugginess and high winds, the docks were essential depots for those who lived on islands—scenes of hustle and bustle at times of arrivals and departures.

   Charlie hauled supplies for the Northerners who owned Honey Horn Plantation and the south end of the island, and who hunted during the season—Roy Rainey in the late 1920s, Landon Thorne and Alfred Loomis in the 1930s and 1940s. In the fall and winter of 1940–1941, he hauled the lumber and bricks, the tools and nails to the island to rebuild the plantation schoolhouses and other structures that the 1940 hurricane had demolished. Starting in 1950, he hauled supplies and equipment for the timber businessmen who became the island’s first modern developers. He added saws and sawmill parts, gallon after gallon of fuel and timber buyers to the list of items and passengers he transported regularly.

   Charlie hauled material for the island’s first building supply business, Espy Lumber; material for the first oceanfront hotel (William Hilton Inn). For about a dozen years, along with his son, Charles Simmons Jr., Charlie provided the island’s first mass-transit system, transporting Sea Pines Plantation employees from their homes in Hardeeville, Ridgeland and Bluffton to their jobs.

   Charlie could read the message from a black cloud on the horizon and often delayed a trip until what he called “a weather” would “blow over.” Recalling one wild squall that caught him by surprise and attacked his barge loaded with county road equipment as it crossed Calibogue Sound, he felt the keen responsibility of any good ship’s captain—to get the freight and passengers entrusted to him safely to shore. They did make it, and Charlie shared the credit. “We just have to trust the Lord for that one,” he said.

   Hilton Head Island’s bridges, opening for the first time in 1956, and the proliferation of commercial development took their toll on Charlie’s operation. By the early 1980s, most of the goods and services for which islanders once depended on from Savannah were available right on the island.

   But Charlie, a wiry, energetic man, couldn’t stop working. Still in his seventies, he said he simply could not consider getting up in the morning without going somewhere to transport something or somebody. He continued into the 1980s to make a run to Savannah five days a week—every day but Wednesday and Sunday—and he got back every afternoon to open his store and gas station on the north side of U.S. Route 278 on the edge of the Jarvis Creek marsh. Even into the late 1990s, in the fall, he would sell turnip greens at that station, laying them on top of the gasoline pumps to attract passing motorists.