Legendary Hilton Head waterman Benny Hudson gets new life on Skull Creek
Benny Hudson was checking on a minnow pond when he keeled over dead.
It’s not a fitting end for a 65-year-old man. But that scene on the side of Squire Pope Road in 1997 fit Benny’s life like a pair of white shrimp boots.
Benny knew the pond because he dug it by the causeway, and he drove his golf cart up there to tell people working on the road not to fiddle with it.
It was a useful place for Hilton Head Islanders to get bait.
Bait, and anything else to do with the water, was useful to a Hudson.
His uncle Mose Hudson ran the first and second state ferries to serve the island, beginning in 1952. When the first bridge was completed four years later, Mose was the bridge tender and toll-taker.
When that swing span bridge was knocked out of service by a passing barge in 1974, Benny’s fleet of shrimp boats swung into public service, hauling workers and linens for the hotels to the island.
And when Benny’s 54-year-old son Butch fell dead into his son’s arms 10 years ago, he was running a boat called Miss Maddie in the Gulf of Mexico.
Butch’s sister Terry told me at a memorial service on their Skull Creek dock: “He had saltwater running through his veins, and if you looked close, he probably had a set of gills.”
And a set of wrenches. And rope, corn meal, hot sauce, caulk, motor oil, ice, nets, a two-way radio and a yard full of “junk” that’ll save your bacon someday.
To survive on Hilton Head like Benny and his father and grandfather did, everything had a purpose, and then a new purpose and then a newer purpose.
Now that’s happening to the last piece of Hilton Head that Benny called home.
The place he bought in 1975 will soon be home to a new, bigger seafood restaurant bearing his name.
Marines and shrimp
Benny’s grandfather, James Ransom Hudson, moved to Hilton Head in the 1880s.
He had a grocery store on Squire Pope Road and farmed cotton, corn and sweet potatoes. He raised hogs and cows.
He was the magistrate. And he and Isabelle raised 11 head of children here.
Benny’s father, James Benjamin Hudson Sr., was also the magistrate. And postmaster. And he had a store and a string of oyster houses around the island.
Workers could spend Hudson money in the Hudson store.
As a child, Benny was enamored by the Marines stationed on Hilton Head during World War II. They introduced him to ice cream, and gave him a truck full of bullets.
At 14, Benny was running an oyster house on Jenkins Island for the Maggioni family of Savannah. And he was racing cars on the beach.
He didn’t stay in school long, but never had trouble with numbers. He could build things, fix things, and make money. He had a prodigious garden, and loved to hold court in the yard telling tales about mosquitoes the size of B-52 bombers. And he could move and groove on the dance floor, despite a torso the size of a wash bucket.
Benny ran a fleet of shrimp boats, and opened the island’s first tourist-oriented seafood restaurant in 1968 in what was an oyster house on Skull Creek.
“He never saw anything for what it was, he saw it for what it could be,” said his wife, Barbara Hudson.
‘Loves Hilton Head’
When Benny sold his seafood restaurant in 1975, he and Barbara, and a shrimp boat or two, moved to Key West, Florida.
When the island called them home, they opened a furniture store and wholesale seafood business on Squire Pope Road.
When Benny died, he was putting the finishing touches on his newest venture, a railway in the yard where large boats could be pulled up for repairs. He put it together and it still works to this day.
He started that project after spending 30 days in a coma. He walked with a cane and was blind in one eye.
“I started every damn thing here,” he said. “I can’t work anymore, but I can see that it gets done.”
That’s why he went up the road to see that the minnows were protected.
Barbara and her daughter Tonya have kept a successful retail seafood market on their property. Now they are expanding it, and leasing four acres to the Reilley family for a restaurant their family business is building. It will be called Benny’s Coastal Kitchen.
“Once you get in a situation,” Barbara said about Benny’s passing, “you have to live with the here and now. You either begrudge it or embrace it. I put my brain in gear and connected it to my heart, which loves Hilton Head Island.”
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.
