Pinckney Island Plantation, “heaven”: June Smith, born in 1920

PINCKNEY

June Smith

Born in 1922

In Bill and June, the ambassador found a couple delighted to move to Pinckney Island, a management team that could plan a hunt, run a boat, repair a piece of machinery, keep books, shop for supplies for a hunting lodge, raise baby quail and turkeys, plan menus and oversee food preparation for a growing number of

Late afternoons in early summer, just as the sun drops out of the western sky, ibises, egrets and herons swarm squawking into Ibis Pond in the Pinckney Island Wildlife Refuge. All day, these wading birds have been pecking in the pluff mud and the salt creek water, hauling small fish and other tidbits to the chicks in their nests. By nightfall, they are all weary, their youngsters’ appetites temporarily satisfied and the raucous activity of the day settles into silence.

   It is then that the owls, the raccoons and the bobcat, Pinckney’s nocturnal wildlife, do their hunting and browsing. Nothing these predators like better than an egg or a young bird stolen out of the trees that make up the rookery in Ibis Pond. The ibises, egrets and herons never let their guard down.

   Wood storks have their roosting places, too, as do anhingas, in the freshwater ponds on the island. Deer stroll quietly or bound softly over the fields and through the woods. Mink scurry in the soft, wet places around the edge of the island, in and out of burrows and marsh. The mourning dove coos there in the courting season.

   And although Pinckney Island’s thousands of visitors a year rarely even hear quail call “bobwhite, bobwhite” anymore, some quail almost certainly still make their home in the thick underbrush. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was quail most of all that attracted hunters who could have afforded to hunt almost anywhere in the world.

ROOMS AND A

June Smith helped make Pinckney a favorite hunting preserve, a place that attracted the rich and famous to see what nature had wrought on the South Carolina coast. A North Carolina native and a former member of the Civil Air Patrol, June married Bill Smith, a Lowcountry native, just as World War II was ending. When Bill got a job dismantling the Marine Corps barracks on property that is now Palmetto Dunes Resort, they moved to Hilton Head Island. They had, in June’s words, “four rooms and a path” (to the outdoor privy) without electricity or a telephone.

   The community was friendly, and living conditions were simple. Three islanders—Ben Jones, Charlie Simmons Sr. and Arthur Frazier—offered the only regular freight and passenger service on and off Hilton Head Island. When June found her household larder low or noticed that a family member needed something, she would break a branch off a myrtle bush and lay it across the road for one of them to see as a signal. Whoever saw it first would stop to get her order before leaving on the next trip to Savannah, Georgia.

   It is true that nothing much happens in small towns and on remote islands, nothing much except births and deaths, marriages and babies, illnesses and occasional quarrels, and June knew about and was involved in a lot of what happened in that place and that time.

   Through “Uncle Ben’s” store and his magistrate’s office near the site of the present intersection of Squire Pope Road and William Hilton Parkway, island news landed steadily. “Uncle Ben” was Bill’s uncle, J.B. Hudson Sr., father of Bennie Hudson, founder of Hudson’s seafood restaurant a couple of decades later (meet Bennie Hudson, page 179). Bill was constable, and June worked for the state Bureau of Vital Statistics. Bill’s uncle, in addition to having a store and running the court, was in the seafood business. Bill’s aunt and great-aunt were called on frequently to care for the sick. In one way or another, practically everything that happened to anybody on the island came as news quickly to the Hudsons or the Smiths.

   As constable, Bill had the task of protecting against one of the region’s most despicable of crimes—stealing select oysters or damaging the beds by nighttime poaching. He “rode the leases,” as they said at the time, patrolling in a small bateau with a small outboard motor. After the health department developed standards of sanitation for oyster factories, Bill made a living for a while converting the shucking sheds and other primitive facilities on the edges of the creeks into appropriate buildings.

   After what construction work there was petered out on Hilton Head, Bill and June lived in Hardeeville for a year, with Bill working in a service station and June working in a restaurant. It was not the kind of life they wanted. Fortunately, their earlier Hilton Head experience had prepared them for their next venture.

   In the Hardeeville restaurant one day, June struck up a conversation with a retired general who happened to be working as part-time manager of Pinckney Island Plantation, property since 1937 of James Bruce, former ambassador to Argentina. Ambassador Bruce needed a new manager, one who could care for the land properly and run the place skillfully so that when his guests came from all over the country, they could relax, enjoy the scenery and the hospitality as well as bag some game. He hoped to find someone to live on the island year-round, he said.

VARIED SKILLS REQUIRED

In Bill and June, the ambassador found a couple delighted to move to Pinckney Island, a management team that could plan a hunt, run a boat, repair a piece of machinery, keep books, shop for supplies for a hunting lodge, raise baby quail and turkeys, plan menus and oversee food preparation for a growing number of guests.

   The guest list grew more demanding after the ambassador added three partners—General Robert E. Wood, James Barker and Colonel Edward Starr—to his plantation company. Thanksgiving week became “Partners Week,” when four couples would come to Pinckney from their homes in the North, expecting to find the Lowcountry property looking fit, their boats and vehicles operating, their bed linens ready and adequate and varied food in the pantry. Then, at the beginning of hunting season, they would work out a schedule for the rest of the season, each owner planning a guest list along with his own pleasurable weeks of shooting.

   Among the many well-known visitors was Allen Dulles, at the time head of the Central Intelligence Agency. “We planned a picnic down on White Point,” June said. “Bill and I spent about four hours down there getting everything ready. It was an oyster roast with all the trimmings. We took a big pine table out of the club house and the chairs and the ironstone dinner plates.” There on the sandy point overlooking Port Royal Sound, they and the hosts encouraged Mr. Dulles to think about the dinner and the scenery there whenever his job seemed overwhelming.

   June recalled a special kind of Lowcountry bliss on Pinckney Island in those days: “It was heaven. In the summer, there wouldn’t be much going on, and it was peaceful. Alice [their toddler] and I would plunder the river shore for hours. After rains, we’d check the fields and find arrowheads and pieces of Indian pottery. In the fall and winter, there’d be dozens of interesting people coming and going,” she said.

   June’s children—Charles “Bubba” (for many years the Bluffton magistrate), Alice and Randy—grew up comfortable with the wild turkeys and deer, farm equipment, ready shotguns and rifles, famous guests and regular boat trips of a working island plantation. The darling of the owners and of her daddy, Alice began hunting rabbits at the age of five and had become a crack shot by the age of nine. Even in the Lowcountry, where practically everybody hunted, being able to hunt on Pinckney Island was special.

   In 1972, Bill Smith died unexpectedly. In 1975, the Barkers and the Starrs donated the properties of Pinckney, Big Harry, Little Harry, Corn and Buzzard Islands, plus several small hummocks to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Those 4,035 acres, about 67 percent salt marsh and open water, are now the Pinckney Island Wildlife Refuge, one of seven refuges in the 28,000-acre Savannah Coastal Refuges Complex.

   Pinckney’s history includes eras dominated at one time by temporary Indian villages, at another time by the indigo and cotton plantations of South Carolina’s prominent Pinckney family, later by settlements of freed slaves. It includes the catastrophe of the 1893 hurricane, which drowned two thousand or more residents of the South Carolina Sea Islands. The story of Pinckney must also be the story of private, elegant hunting parties. Today, walking visitors are welcome, and they may take binoculars, cameras and granola bars. They may take their curiosity about the wildlife, about the ghosts of the men and women, and about the quail, duck, dove, bobcat and deer that once lived there. Except on rare, specially designated days, visitors may not take their firearms. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only a few are still around who remember when hunting was the big thing there, almost daily through the fall and winter.

   (June Smith’s husband Bill was brother of Lynn Livingston “Buck” Smith Jr., whose story is on page 141.)