She cut the ribbon for Hilton Head’s first bridge

When her parents built the first house in North Forest Beach on Hilton Head Island, Kay Sconyers thought she was being barged to hell.

She was a teenager, now sentenced to spend all of her summers on an island with absolutely nothing on it. Her friends were all back home in Savannah and, in 1951, there were more cows than people on Hilton Head’s beaches.

The population was mostly Gullah, living off the land and sea in a place with no bridge, telephones, hospital, hotel or supermarket. The paved road petered out in the area that today is Palmetto Dunes, and it practically took a machete to get down to the ocean where Bill and Catherine Sconyers built a breezy house they called “Pioneer” on Dune Lane.

Now, Kay Sconyers Moore of Macon, Ga., has published a book that pulls back that thick foliage to give a rare glimpse into a world that seems long ago and far away.

“Before the Bridge: A Memoir of Hilton Head Island” is not a history book or a stab at fine literature. It’s a collection of tales that help document a rare era in a special place.

Kay was one of the two girls who cut the ribbon for the first bridge to Hilton Head in 1956.

And she and Verna Graves would do the same honors when its fixed-span replacement, named for Verna’s father, J. Wilton Graves, was dedicated in 1982.

Between those milestones came a lot of nights on the sleeping porch, listening to the ocean pound the sand. They danced on a little platform about the size of a dining room table that her folks placed on the beach. There was a gazebo on the beach at Folly Field. Kids by hook or crook, by land or sea, found a way to Bailey’s pavilion hanging over the river for weekend dances in Okatie.

Adults socialized at The Arcade, a touristy, cinder-block place near Coligny Circle, then still made of sand.

When Katie and Mac McKelveen opened the Roadside Rest restaurant, across from today’s Red Roof Inn, they served whatever the locals like Clarence Ford grew in their garden.

But everyone sat still at 4 o’clock — including Kay, who by then was married with a baby — because “Miz Mack” had a television as clear as a blizzard, and everyone dropped in to see “The Edge of Night.”

Tomato farms in what is now Hilton Head Plantation filled so many kitchen tables that Kay’s mother went to her grave never wanting to see a tomato again.

People helped each other, and it wasn’t always pretty. Kay’s father was severely burned by hot pitch when he and a neighbor were fixing a roof.

It was a bartering and borrowing society with the doors never locked. But primarily, it was a place where everyone knew each other, and many saw blank slates for the dreams of a lifetime.

Kay shares personal vignettes of a time lost forever, and the people who made it memorable. To her credit, she does not overlook the natives like Henry Driessen and Charlie Simmons Sr., who she says did so much to make Hilton Head what it has become.

She pieced the book together over a period of 20 years after her late husband, D.D. Moore, encouraged her to write down the tales that gush from her mouth as easily as they flowed from her mother, a Lowcountry Heyward.

Kay grew to love the island she originally thought was God-forsaken. It became home.

“People don’t know these stories,” she told me. “Everything in the world is on Hilton Head now. Today, islanders don’t know each other like we did. It’s too big. Too busy. That was an era that has gone. It was more than an era, it was a way of life.”

This story was originally published September 13, 2016 at 2:11 PM with the headline "She cut the ribbon for Hilton Head’s first bridge."