Hilton Head can fight overdevelopment with gift from the ghost of Miss Earline | Opinion
Arthur Frazier warned that it would come to this.
But I doubt that even he ever imagined Hilton Head Island would so desperately need the ghost of his cow Miss Earline to bring about justice.
Frazier lived on Jonesville Road, which has been in the news a lot lately due to its over-development.
The latest outrage is a developer suing a 93-year-old island native after clearcutting property all around her Jonesville Road homestead so they can jack in another 147 homes.
They accuse her of encroaching on their property.
For most of Frazier’s 89 years, Jonesville Road was a dirt road, and his cows, goats, chickens and hogs didn’t bother a soul.
“I like privacy and I knew when they put that pavement in, everybody was coming,” Frazier said in 1997, when a long slog to pave Jonesville Road and put in water lines and fire hydrants came to fruition.
It was seen as a rare and overdue victory for native islanders who wanted some basic services out of the “limited service” Town of Hilton Head Island.
Three former mayors joined the mayor and community leaders at a jubilant ground-breaking ceremony. The Rev. Ben Williams prayed that this dream-come-true would lead to upgrades on other roads off the island’s crowded thoroughfares.
Even then – when the rutted, 1.3-mile road was so dusty in the summer you couldn’t breathe and so wet in the winter you couldn’t stay out of the ditch – it was a place for new subdivisions, not old livestock.
Except for Miss Earline.
Life on Hilton Head
Arthur Frazier was a Mount Rushmore figure among natives of the rural island he was born on in 1914.
He was a longshoreman, ferryman, farmer, store owner, service station owner, historian, and preacher.
His parents, Daniel L. “Lemon” Frazier and Katie Miller Frazier, didn’t send him across the water to high school. His father, a farmer, fisherman and carpenter who built Arthur’s boat and his home at 85 Jonesville Road and his Amoco station on U.S. 278, said Arthur didn’t need the schooling because he knew how to survive. His brother went off to school and became a school principal in Maryland.
Arthur Frazier led a full but challenging life.
He attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He called it “so-called” freedom, and helped establish the island’s NAACP chapter.
His son was murdered and was buried in his side yard. Later, his wife, Earline Campbell Frazier, who taught school on the island for more than 30 years, was laid to rest there as well.
Frazier lost a leg in a car wreck but never lost his faith. He took up preaching in the Frazier’s Temple Holiness Church, where cars used to go up on racks, and where children going to the old school that used to be next door bought “soda water” and candy at “Fraidge Store.”
When the prospect of a bridge to the island came up in the mid 1950s, Frazier was all for it.
He saw it as opportunity, but soon enough wondered as we do today if opportunity had run amok.
Do we want to be Little Atlanta?
Frazier stood at a public meeting during the debate on whether to incorporate the island and asked about the livestock of Jonesville Road.
“I told them I never saw a cow in a city,” he told me.
But even into the year 2000, Frazier clung onto an old cow that he kept in his side yard, a rope tied to her horns.
When the Hilton Head Island High School All Sports Booster Club needed a cow for a special fundraiser that year, leaders were stunned to find a cow on the island. The old cow Frazier affectionately named Miss Earline did her duty in something called Cow Patty Bingo.
People paid $20 for a square yard marked off on the football field, where Miss Earline was left to roam AFTER a Friday night game. As the promotion said, “The person holding the ticket for the yard where the cow drops her ‘patty’ will win.”
Someone won a cool $5,000.
Three years later, Arthur Frazier would himself be buried in his side yard.
He was too jovial and sophisticated to say such a thing, but isn’t it time we warn those cramming the Lowcountry like Little Atlanta, clear-cutting our trees and suing our 93-year-old widows that the ghost of Miss Earline is going to drop in on them?
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.
