Hilton Head run of 80 years comes to an end for the island’s most unlikely leader

It’s the end of an era for Hilton Head Island.

Thomas D. Peeples, 68, has closed the doors at the home-building company he opened in 1978 and is retiring, some 500 homes later.

But the era runs much longer than that. It’s even older than the days Peeples worked as a “human fork lift” on Hilton Head construction sites as a teenager.

His father, the late Tommie Peeples of Ridgeland, began working on Hilton Head in the 1940s, selling goods door to door long before there was a bridge to the island.

He was called “Rawleigh Boy” by his Gullah customers due to his small, 5-foot-6 frame and the line of Rawleigh products he sold: spices from Sumatra; vanilla from Madagascar; coffee beans from the Andes; and all sorts of penetrating rubs, ointments, salves and balms.

The Model A Ford he kept at Benny Hudson’s house also was stocked with pots, pans, hair products, clothing, candy, cookies, coffee pots and dishes.

Thomas C. Barnwell Jr. tells a story that illustrates what a different world it was when the Peeples era began.

Tommie Peeples would give islanders boxes of candy that they could sell, then pay him back.

Barnwell, a native-born entrepreneur, says Tommie Peeples came to a door where the lady of the house knew she was in trouble because the box of candy had been eaten, not sold.

“Tell him I ain’t here,” she told her daughter.

The child answered the door and said, “Mama told me to tell you she ain’t here.”

She then pointed under the bed and said, “There she is.”

“So they made a deal,” Barnwell said. “She had some shrimp and okra on the stove, so Mr. Peeples took a seat and decided he’d sit right there and wait until it was done.”

That close relationship with the island would one day help make Tom Peeples its most powerful resident.

Hilton Head Wars

Hilton Head residents were in a flat-out war the night Tom Peeples stepped to a microphone at a large meeting in the oceanfront hotel then known as the Hyatt.

People were sounding off about the Traffic Safety Amendment. Petitioners got that measure on the ballot to stop island growth in its tracks. It would have banned all building permits if motorists had to sit through two red lights at any intersection island-wide.

Peeples, who was born and reared in Ridgeland in neighboring Jasper County and by then had his business rolling, recalls saying something like this:

“This is crazy. What about those of us trying to make a living and raise a family here? You’re just not taking into account those of us who grew up here. You’ve been here two years, and you’re telling us, basically, to hell with you.”

He was stunned by the applause.

The amendment failed miserably at the polls, and Peeples started paying close attention to town government. Against most advice, including wife Mary Ann’s, he ran to fill a partial term on Town Council in 1989, and won. He was re-elected twice, then in 1995 was elected mayor, serving until he stepped down 15 years later in 2010.

He is the only person ever to be re-elected mayor on Hilton Head, and the only native of the Lowcountry to become mayor since the island incorporated in 1983.

His knack for seeing projects through, like a home built from scratch, and his way of listening to opponents to reach consensus (the Packet complained about all the 7-0 votes) led to an age of accomplishment.

A 5-year capital improvements plan was instituted, producing some $150 million worth of upgrades in drainage, secondary roads, public parks, public pathways and fire stations.

The town did a Ward One Master Plan, a Parks and Open Space Master Plan, and Peeples broke a long-running logjam to start sanitary sewer service to unserved island areas.

After first opposing it, Peeples cast his weight behind Tax Increment Financing Districts that led to more than $100 million in island projects, saying it was a sure way to keep money in the community rather than sending it all to Beaufort.

He cites the town’s land-acquisition program, which began before his time, as his greatest source of pride, with the Honey Horn tract at the top of the list. A pavilion there is named for wife Mary Ann Peeples due to the money she helped raise when the site became home to the Coastal Discovery Museum.

Peeples was the face of the successful referendum votes to fund the land program. And he went against the home builders who helped elect him by supporting a 0.25% real estate transfer fee that has successfully underwritten public land buys.

But, on paper, Tom and Mary Ann Peeples should never have had a chance to lead an island known as a haven for well-heeled Northern fat cats.

Bush hogs on Hilton Head

Mary Ann and her long-time boyfriend had decided to see other people only a few hours before Tom called her.

Their first date was to a convenience-type store in Ridgeland.

“We got two Pepsi-Colas and a bag of Doritos,” he said. “We sat in the car across the street.”

Fifteen days later they were engaged. When they married, he was 20 and she was 17. Both sets of parents had to sign off on it, due to their ages. Her mother made her promise not to have a baby until she was 21. Josh was born a few months after the promise was kept.

Tom Peeples thought he’d be a teacher and a coach. The family didn’t have money for him to go to college, but he started out at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, and intended to go on to the Columbia campus.

Mary Ann worked as a waitress at the Siesta motor lodge on U.S. 17 in Ridgeland.

He worked construction on Hilton Head, where his father had built a simple cinderblock duplex on Mallard Road before the bridge opened to the island in 1956. They called it the “Blue Heron” because it was “painted god-awful blue.”

Peeples worked with Paul Holmes, a landscaper who ran the volunteer Rescue Squad. He worked on a survey crew for Sea Pines, surveying Hilton Head Plantation.

He took a carpentry job under hall of fame builder Joe Harden, and was making more right off the bat than he would have after four years of college. Still, he planned to go to Columbia the next January.

“January never came,” he said.

His wife worked in landscaping for the Hilton Head Co., driving a bush hog tractor and a dump truck.

At one point, she worked in a crew under her husband, “digging ditches and sidewalks all around.

“That was the only time we were not partners,” she said.

The couple moved to the island permanently in 1973 and later would help build facilities at Barker Field as Josh got old enough to carry on a Peeples family tradition: playing football.

Their background is unlike anything any other Hilton Head mayor has ever known.

Retirement

Tom and Mary Ann Peeples say they are not moving from their custom home in Hilton Head Plantation, the only one they’ve ever built to suit themselves.

Son Josh is a vintner in California, but the family with deep Lowcountry roots is still all over this area.

They haven’t gotten over the day in the 1970s that Peeples’ father, Tommie, was murdered in a case never solved.

He was taking his lunch break in his usual spot outside Hardeeville. It was the first of the month, and he had some $500 cash that he used to cash Social Security checks for the people on his door-to-door sales route.

He was shot from long range.

“He still had his lunch on his lap,” Mary Ann said.

They cite a long list of longtime employees for making Tom Peeples Builder a successful business.

They say they’ll learn retirement as they go.

Besides the home on the island, they have a get-away cottage on a small island in Jasper County. They recently got two goats for Cooter Island — Daisy and Moe (for “I’m not going to have to mow no mo”).

And they’ve built a home in the North Carolina mountain community of Tuckasegee.

Peeples still rises at 4 a.m. every day.

And they both still have strong opinions about Hilton Head.

“The town’s appearance is everything.”

“We don’t have a sign ordinance anymore. I mean, really, do we need a gaudy electric sign telling us to drive safely?”

They fear the island has lost its sense of community, something they say they worked hard to foster by “going to everything.” They even hosted all the state’s mayors in their island home when Peeples served as president of the Municipal Association of South Carolina.

The old mayor has this advice for today’s town leaders: Don’t give any of the land the people bought to widen U.S. 278 on the north end.

“If we have to just give our land to the highway department for free, that’s not right,” Tom Peeples said. “They should buy it, and we use the money to buy more land.”

Even at the end of a remarkable era, some things never change.

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