Beaufort County island exploring: Bull Island makes for winter retreat to an American legend
Before his death in 1975, Alfred Lee Loomis held many titles. New York attorney. Philanthropist. Investment banker. Wall Street tycoon. Gentleman scientist. Technology pioneer who helped win World War II thanks to his work in military radar usage.
In the early 1900s, Loomis added a lesser known title to the mix -- Lowcountry landowner -- when he purchased 17,000 acres, or about two-thirds, of Hilton Head Island, along with his business partner and brother-in-law Landon Thorne.
Like other wealthy Northerners of the time who found cache in buying Southern plantations for hunting retreats, Loomis and Thorne set up their own private preserve for horse riding, hunting, fishing and boating on the island. The centerpiece of the property: the old Honey Horn Plantation.
While they sold the land to a group of Georgians around 1950, Loomis’ family still wasn’t ready to be done with the Lowcountry.
In 1962, his son, Alfred Loomis Jr., made the hop across the Calibogue Sound and bought the nearly 2,000-acre Bull Island.
For the next 40 years, Bull Island was the Loomis family’s winter retreat.
“Our family has been in the area for a long, long time and there was no other home like it,” said Alfred Loomis III, who grew up hunting on the island. Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, he is an attorney in New York and still occasionally visits the area.
As the family did when it owned much of Hilton Head Island, they left Bull Island largely untouched when they sold it in 2002 -- so untouched that it still has Civil War-era rice paddies at its center.
The island has also been home to exotic animals.
The owners before the Loomis family, the Crosleys, brought several buffalo and wild sheep to the island. Loomis III’s father also added zebras to the menagerie, garnering much media and tourist attention. But the exotic animals did not flourish in the Lowcountry and soon died.
The Loomis family decided to sell Bull Island in 2002 after Loomis III’s parents died. The couple’s tombstones sit on the island’s north end, overlooking the sound to Hilton Head.
“It’s a beautiful part of the world and natural and just an untouched, wild place,” Loomis III said.
The island’s current owner is Birchwood Acquisition, a holding company created by the Chilton family of Stanford, Conn., who bought Bull Island along with the nearby Skid and Raccoon islands for $12.25 million. The company also owns Colleton County’s White Hall Plantation.
Its president, Richard Chilton, told The Island Packet in 2001 that the family would preserve the island and continue the tradition of using it just for rest, recreation and bird hunting by the family and their guests.
“(The holding company) is all family members. There are no outside shareholders,” he said. “We’re preservationists, not developers.”
Follow reporter Sarah Bowman on Twitter at twitter.com/IPBG_Sarah and on Facebook at facebook.com/IPBGSarah.
This story was originally published July 2, 2015 at 11:29 PM.