‘When Bluffton was Bluffton’ and the hogs of Calhoun Street didn’t care

Hank Cram sent me a photo titled “When Bluffton Was Bluffton.”

Hank knows old Bluffton like today’s residents of our booming hamlet know the aisles of Walmart.

He was reared in the square-mile version of the village that endeared itself to one of its grandest eccentrics, his late father, Harry Cram.

Hank’s photo from the early 1980s shows a huge sow resting in the front yard of the Bluffton Telephone Co. office at the corner of Calhoun and Bridge streets.

It appears to be roped to a nearby tree.

But the rope looks long enough for the hog to walk to Pritchardville if it wanted to. I suspect it was afraid to try to sneak past Scott’s Meats, so it lay low in town, plopped down by an unusual object we old-timers know as a pay phone.

“I think that the last time I saw Wally Butler, at least before he went to Australia to evade being arrested, he was making a call from that phone,” Hank said.

“The funny thing is that he was trying to call me, and I just happened to drive by.”

That’s when Bluffton was Bluffton.

And, then as now, it was all on full display on Calhoun Street.

“Somewhere I have a photo of geese wandering through the gas station opposite (the resting hog), sorta, Nathaniel Brown’s house,” Hank said.

That was the gas station that became Nancy Golson’s Eggs N’ Tricities emporium of the unusual, before it moved down to 5 Lawton St.

And at another corner was the old pickup truck that had a tree growing through its bed.

And at another corner was a lovely Lowcountry home, which is still there, but in today’s version of Bluffton, the azaleas and camellias have been mowed down.

The tree truck is long gone, and big doings are planned for the old gas station site.

‘A GULLAH PSALM’

I suppose that’s all well and good.

We can’t be sealed for all time into the Calhoun Street of Luke Peeples’ day like goldfish circling in a tiny bowl, now can we?

But if you want to relish those days, and don’t have Hank Cram’s photos to cheer you up, buy a copy of the book about Luke Peeples that two of his nieces gave to the world in 2014: “A Gullah Psalm: The Musical Life and Work of Luke Peeples.”

Luke Peeples had perfect pitch and was a pianist and composer good enough for Broadway, but he chose to stay home, on Calhoun Street. In his latter days, when a tree fell on the house, he simply moved to a different room.

Through Luke’s gifted eyes and ears, his nieces tell of life in a village where a man’s fishing companion was an elderly dolphin, a dwarf skipped and flipped down Calhoun Street with children in her wake, Episcopal monks settled on an island in the May River, and crowds gathered at the post office whenever there was big news.

Luke also documented Gullah traditions that include acts of redemption, baptism, seeking, shouting, dancing, fishing — and living — when Bluffton was Bluffton.

JOHN STUART MILL

I ran into this quotation on Facebook the other day, and if you can’t believe what you see on Facebook, what can you believe?

“The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

That is attributed to John Stuart Mill, a 19th century English philosopher, political economist and member of Parliament.

Somehow, he knew what we would experience in the Lowcountry.

If a hog resting at a busy intersection is good for the soul, the flood tide of cookie-cutter America can suck out that soul and spit it into the riptide of improvements.

We don’t have hogs on ropes anymore, but we do have some other words of wisdom from John Stuart Mill.

Some of them belong on the walls our town and county council chambers in booming Beaufort and Jasper counties.

“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than attempting to satisfy them.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.