‘Little Blue’ on Hunting Island was reminder of the power of the sea and family bonds
Editor’s note: “Little Blue,” the landmark cottage at Hunting Island, was torn down in 2017 after erosion of the beach made it unsafe. This is a condensed version of a longer column by retired writer David Lauderdale. It was originally published on Nov. 28, 2015.
If these walls could swim ...
The last house standing on the southern end of Hunting Island is a quizzical sight, perched alone on pilings surrounded by the swirling sea.
The beach cottage looks intact but it has long since been vacated due to erosion. So have all but two cottages in Hunting Island State Park on the Atlantic Ocean near Beaufort.
The walls of “Little Blue” could tell many stories. Its pilings are driven deep into to the core of Beaufort County’s cultural, economic and environmental history.
The last house standing reflects the stubborn will of the people of Beaufort to go down the river every weekend, rain or shine, in the wind or wilting heat.
It stands like a crab clinging to a net as a reminder of the glory days of a beach village created in the state park, where people came for decades to rejuvenate with nature.
It also is a reminder of the power of the sea, and mankind’s long and losing battle to tame it, especially on the shifting sands of barrier islands. Dozens of Hunting Island cottages have been removed or crushed by the sea.
For the owner of Little Blue, Sara Steinmeyer of Beaufort, its swimming walls tell a simpler story of a woman pulled to the seashore like a spring tide every weekend for 66 years.
“You could leave all your troubles in town when you went to Hunting Island,” she said.
Big Blue
Sara and her three children — Charles, Sally and Sandra — packed up each Friday and headed to Hunting Island. Sara often rented for the weekend a rustic, un-air-conditioned state cabin when the people who booked it for a week bailed out early.
In 1978, she saw an ad in The Beaufort Gazette offering a half-interest in a beach cottage. It was 11 p.m., but she responded. By the morning, others had phoned too, wanting the lease. But Sara had beat them to it, finally getting her own piece of Hunting Island.
The Hunting Island cottages were owned by individuals on land leased from the state. Sara got in when one of two partners from Atlanta wanted to get out of their cottage, and she eventually gained full ownership.
It wasn’t Little Blue. It was a larger house that had been barged over as surplus from the U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, and then added onto over the years.
Her large family enjoyed the place they called Big Blue for more than 20 years, but erosion claimed it in 2000. “The only thing holding it up was termites holding hands,” said Sara’s son, Charles Steinmeyer of Beaufort.
Sara, then in her mid-70s, was determined to rebuild, and she did.
The 600- to 700-square-foot Little Blue was finished in 2003 on 35-foot pilings drilled deep into the ground in anticipation of erosion and storms.
Once again the family had a weekend place where the main meal was served at 11 a.m. and they could play as they wished the rest of the time. Two of Sara’s granddaughters were married there. She played a lot of bridge. The walls were covered with snapshots of good times by four generations. They fished, crabbed, collected shells, swam, ate, walked, dozed, played board games and chatted.
“It’s our life,” Sara said. “All of us just enjoyed Hunting Island so much. If they would allow you to rebuild, why wouldn’t you?”
‘Root souls’
Many families built, or rented, their dreams on the sands of Hunting Island.
Courtney and Elizabeth Siceloff built a cabin the 1960s as a refuge from the tense work of civil rights advocacy when he was director of the Penn Center. They were Quaker pacifists and the cottage was called Quaker Oats.
“My parents were on duty pretty much 24/7 at Penn, and the cottage was a place we could have family time,” said their daughter, Mary Siceloff of Savannah. “Courtney tried several times to buy a cabin, but when the sellers found out who he was, things ‘came up’ and the cabin was sold to someone else. Courtney was stubborn, though, and he finally was given the lease on the last lot along the line, at the far southern tip, facing Fripp Island. It was considered ‘unbuildable.’
“As the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, it turned out to be a very protected lot, and was one of the last ones standing.”
Hunting Island became so precious to the family that Courtney Siceloff’s cremated remains were scattered there when he died.
The Siceloffs sold the cottage to Connie Curry of Atlanta, a civil rights activist and author.
“I had it for almost 40 years until it washed away (in 2011),” Curry said. “It was one of the saddest moments of my life.”
She recalls Martin Luther King Jr. being at the cottage. She said Julian Bond, the civil rights activist, and his new wife, Pam, honeymooned there in 1990. Bob Moses of The Algebra Project used it as a get-away.
Long-time renters of the cottage, psychologist Jerome and Emily Vreeland of Knoxville, Tenn., published a book in 2012 called “Hunting Island: A Love Story in the Midst of Change.”
Jerome Vreeland took thousands of pictures over the years of the tame herds of deer, the flashy painted buntings, the dunes that came and went, the maritime forest, lone beach walkers, the relentless force of erosion, and the sometimes eerie shapes and creases of “root souls” left by the surging sea.
On the cover of his book is a photograph of Little Blue. He calls the cabin The Indomitable Lady.
“This book is for future generations,” he said. “This is for them to know what was there.”