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Those bridges are a relatively recent development. The one connecting the sea islands in northern Beaufort County to Beaufort was built in 1927, native residents said.
A two-lane swing bridge -- replaced in the 1980s by the four-lane structure that exists today -- connected Hilton Head to the mainland beginning in 1956.
Emory Campbell, 68, a native Hilton Head islander whose family has made the island home for generations, remembers the forced independence of living on a sea island before the bridges.
"Your life was very isolated," Campbell said. "We take it for granted now, but it was a big deal growing up on an island. You had to make do with what you had. It was not a convenient life. You had to rise early every day and work until late in the field. You had know the rivers and learn how to navigate the waterways."
Like other families on the sea islands at the time, Campell's family farmed.
"People lived off the land and sea and the surplus was sold" in order to buy items the family didn't produce -- clothes, shoes and canned goods, he said.
Campbell recalled one trip he made to Savannah to help sell those surplus goods. He was 6 years old, and it was his first time leaving Hilton Head. He didn't make his second trip until he was a teenager, he said.
He also recalled seeing Bluffton for the first time.
"Bluffton was so much more developed than Hilton Head in those days that when we got there, we thought we were in Savannah," said Campbell, whose family now runs Gullah cultural tours on Hilton Head.
Campbell said he attended a neighborhood grade school near Spanish Wells. The bridge to Bluffton had been built by the time he entered high school. He said a school bus took him daily to Michael C. Riley High School, a segregated school in Bluffton.
WITNESSING PROGRESS
The bridge, however, was not built in time for native Hilton Head islander Perry White to attend high school in Bluffton.
The 76-year-old, fifth-generation Hilton Head resident entered high school about eight years before the bridge was built.
White said he's fortunate his family placed a high value on education because attending high school in those days was not mandatory for black South Carolinians.
He said his parents paid for him to go to high school at the Penn School, a private school on St. Helena for black students. Traveling there meant taking a ferry -- a commute that could not practically be made daily in those days, he said.
So White, like many other Penn students, stayed in dormitories on the campus.
"It was like college now," he said. "We went there in the fall, came home for Christmas. Then we went back there until summer break."
After graduating with his 17-member class in 1952, White joined the Air Force.
He married a Georgia woman, had four children and was stationed overseas until retiring 20 years later. He returned to Hilton Head with his family in 1973, as development on the island was gearing up.
"We saw the progress here over the years," he said. "If not for the progress, we would not have come back here. ... We would've went some place with better schools and better job opportunities."
A SIMPLE, JOYFUL LIFE
Robert Middleton, an 80-year-old native St. Helena resident, attended Penn School through the 11th grade and now serves as a volunteer there, he said.
Though the bridge connecting the sea islands to Beaufort was built two years before he was born, Middleton said his family and neighbors didn't travel there often.
"You didn't go to Beaufort unless you had to," he said. "If you had a job. ... Or once a year to shop for clothes for school."
Like Campbell and White, he recalls how his family hunted and raised the food they ate -- sweet potatoes, rice, corn, watermelon and sugarcane -- and how they shared the surplus with neighbors.
"We were very independent," Middleton said. "Everybody had a little farm for themselves, their own fishing boat."
Life was simple and joyful, he said.
"My parents used to say if you have food on the table, a roof over your head and clothes on your back, then you've got everything," he said.
WHAT WE'VE LOST
Rosalyn Browne, director of history and culture at the Penn Center, which occupies the site of the former Penn School, also is a native St. Helena resident.
She said her father was born on the island in 1916 -- 11 years before the bridge connecting the sea islands to Beaufort was built.
Her father's boyhood job was to deliver newspapers, she said. When the papers were available, he'd travel by horse to the shoreline, where he met a boat carrying them from the mainland, Browne said.
Though the island was more modern when she was growing up, Browne said she noticed many changes -- both in the population and the environment -- after returningfollowing college and a career teaching in Massachusetts.
Hunting Island beach, where Browne said she spent her summers as a teenager, used to extend miles into the ocean, she said.
"Erosion has reclaimed the land," she said. "It pained me to see the land and soil washed away. With coastal development, we lost a lot of the natural landscape. ...It's not as pristine. The lifestyle is becoming a little more urban."
When Browne's father and Middleton were growing up on the island, there wasn't a pressing need to travel frequently to the mainland. Now that commute is part of daily life for many residents.
"There's a steady flow of traffic now," she said. "We now have a rush hour."
SEA ISLAND PRIMER
There are about 2,000 sea islands along South Carolina's coast, according to Larry Rowland, a local historian and professor at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. About 900 are in Beaufort County, Rowland said. About a third of those are inhabited, he said.
Sea islands, which dot the southern coastline from north of Charleston to near Jacksonville, Fla., are areas of the coast that have been separated from the mainland by tides, Rowland said.
The fact that they had been isolated, completely surrounded by salt water before bridges were built, "has everything to do with their culture," Rowland said.
The islands traditionally had been "self-sufficient and fairly easy to live in," he said. "There were a lot of ways for people to survive. If they had a bad season in corn, they could go catch fish."
Local historian Steve Wise said that even after bridges connected many of the islands to the mainland in the early part of the last century, change did not come rapidly to the independent dots of land.
The bridges "did not have a huge immediate impact," he said. It wasn't until people began developing the islands that local culture changed dramatically, he said.
