Hilton Head ‘royalty’: Mary Stone Fraser, wife of Sea Pines founder Charles Fraser, dies

Mary Wyman Stone Fraser, who helped shape modern Hilton Head Island alongside her husband, Sea Pines founder Charles E. Fraser, died Saturday, Oct. 23, at her home in Cedar Mountain, North Carolina, said her daughter, Laura Lawton Fraser. She was 80.

Mary Fraser founded one of South Carolina’s first Montessori schools in 1968 in a Sea Pines building. It is today Sea Pines Montessori Academy.

She was the impetus behind the first playground at Harbour Town in Sea Pines, working off photographs she had taken of a playground in Harlem.

But she was best known for her evangelical Christian witness, which included a near altar call at the funeral of her husband in 2002 beneath the Liberty Oak in Harbour Town.

She married Charles in November 1963 after working six months as his social secretary in the fledgling Sea Pines development. She was with him when he was killed at age 73 in a 2002 boat explosion in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The Frasers had moved to Cedar Mountain outside Brevard, North Carolina, in 2000, but she returned to help the Montessori school and the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing golf tournament celebrate milestones.

Mary Fraser was a lifelong champion of her husband’s work in community development.

She would often say, “One thing about living with Charles is that it was never boring.”

She had been in declining health over the past two years, said Laura Lawton Fraser.

Mary Fraser was reared in Greenville, a daughter of textile magnate Eugene E. Stone III and Allene “Linky” Stone. The Children’s Garden at Linky Stone Park in the heart of Greenville is named for her mother.

She was a graduate of Stephens College in Missouri and was working in Washington, D.C., for the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond when she first visited Hilton Head.

Charles had asked her visiting parents if they could recommend a social secretary for him. That’s how Mary got to the island, but she had no intention of staying on her first visit on a rainy night.

As wife of the energetic founder of a struggling company, she hosted weekly oyster roasts in her home for all guests of the company’s William Hilton Inn.

She told stories of an island so isolated at the time that she mailed clothes to Savannah to be dry-cleaned, and shoes to Greenville for repair.

When her husband was inducted into the South Carolina Golf Hall of Fame, Mary said he saw golf as a way to pull people together. He did not play golf, but founded the Heritage PGA Tour tournament on Hilton Head.

It took everybody in a community of about 3,000 to pull off the golf tournament in 1969, Mary said. While Charles’ brother Joe Fraser was spreading pine straw to cover all the mud in the grand new Harbour Town venue, Charles was organizing an opening parade for his tournament with flags flying, bagpipes screeching and a cannon blasting.

”So, here we go,” Mary recalls. “The flags are raised, the bagpipes begin, the drums are rolling and everybody is there. And the interesting thing is that there basically wasn’t anybody to watch the parade because everybody on the island was in it.”

She also is survived by daughter Wyman Stone Fraser Davis of Atlanta, and six grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete, Laura Lawton Fraser said.