It was one of the last pieces of real South Carolina left on Hilton Head

Oh, no. They’re changing the Coligny True Value Hardware store.

It’s been there for 47 years. To me, it was one of the last pieces of real South Carolina left on Hilton Head Island.

I’d go in there right often, not looking for a socket screw, but for my sanity. It was a treasured piece of reality — campy, cluttered and genuine — in my world-class world of painted grass and interval ownership.

Lowcountry history is divided into two eras: Before people paid actual money for pine straw, and after people bought pine straw. BPS and APS.

Coligny Hardware was anchored like a crab trap in the BPS epoch.

And that was the beauty of the place, now closed temporarily for remodeling.

The owners promise that the remodeling is a good thing. Lord knows, they’re right.

But it did not bother me that a couple of the plungers may have been on the shelf since the grand-opening gala.

For me, it was a place to escape all the people shaking letters to the editor in the air critiquing the way things get done, or don’t get done, “down here.” Coligny Hardware was as refreshing as hearing a Southern accent. It was like picking up the phone and calling Becky Trask or Weezie Gibson or Nelle Smith, just to heah huh tawk.

It was cheaper than a psychiatrist, as we struggled behind the bulldozers to find the right yin for our yang as a resort in the Lowcountry.

It was a place where we could come in out of the rarefied air of poshnosity to gulp in the dust and pet the dogs. I liked to do last-minute Santa Clausing there, taking home a little brown bag stuffed with a blown-glass alligator, or a bicycle license tag with my daughter-in-law’s beautiful but hard-to-find name on it: April.

It was a link to the likes of the late and lamented Roadside Rest, the meat-and-three that opened on U.S. 278 in 1954, where owner Katie McKelveen, who we all knew as Miz Mac, shelled butter beans at the family table by the felt wall hanging of the Last Supper. It was a place where construction workers ate. Their pickups outside may have had an alligator thrashing in the bed, or a bumper sticker that said: “Dealer: Instant Sex. Got A Minute?”

We may not have appreciated it at the time, but these places — like the Fillin’ Station and LT’s on Lady’s Island, Scott’s Mercantile in Bluffton or Harold’s Country Club in Yemassee — have kept us from suicidal thoughts. Like driving around a traffic circle backward if one more person tells us boiled peanuts are bad for us.

Here’s to Coligny Hardware’s next 47 years being as true as the first 47.

This story was originally published March 2, 2017 at 12:29 PM with the headline "It was one of the last pieces of real South Carolina left on Hilton Head."