by John McPhee
An aerial view of Sea Pines Plantation reveals the great number of houses there, and how close to one another they really are, whereas an observer on the ground—even in the most densely built areas—feels that he is in a partly cleared woodland with some houses blended into it, nothing more. Fraser accomplished this in a region where people have traditionally liked to proclaim their prominence by piling red bricks into enormous cubes and placing before them rows of white columns. He did it—although he occasionally met strong opposition from buyers, bankers, and even subordinates in his own organization—by writing some forty pages of restrictions to attach to every deed. It was a reverse bill of rights (ironclad), a set of ten times ten commandments—take it or leave. The first restriction in the long list gives a suggestion of the whole: it says that any plan or specification can be disallowed by Fraser for any reason whatever. In the early days, when Fraser was operating more on hope than on money (and in full knowledge that half the bankers in South Carolina thought he would soon go under), he was nonetheless so uncompromising that he was ready without hesitation to reject the house plans even of a textile king. If the king refused to conform, Fraser bought back his land. One giddy homeowner tried to paint his house yellow—a historic moment at Sea Pines Plantation—but Fraser backed him down, blending him into the landscape along with his house.
Fraser is cruising through Sea Pines in an air-conditioned green Dodge. A man who is opening a green mailbox marked “H. F. Scheetz, Jr.” looks up and waves hello. Fraser lowers the window. “Hi, Henry!” he says as he glides by. Up goes the window. “I operate as nonelected mayor, so I have to act as if I were elected,” he explains. “There is democracy of communication here but autocracy of decision-making. Our corporate contracts and deed covenants are the constitution and bylaws of the community. The only way you can have aesthetic control is through the power of ownership. We have more power than a zoning board has. I have centralized the decision-making process, but I’ll listen to anybody.” The marvel is not whom he listens to but who listens to him. The car passes some of the nation’s most authoritative mailboxes—McCormack of Comsat, Hipp of Liberty Life, Taylor of New York State wine, Twining of the Air Force, Simmons of the mattress, Close of Springs Mills. Fraser calls the plantation “a high-quality destination resort,” and it has proved to be the destination of a fairly extensive variety of people—not just the barons of war and commerce but also retirees with wan incomes, golfers of most incomes and all handicaps, tennis players of the wider levels, a few painters, a few writers, and rich widows from the North, who bring their late husbands to Fraser’s graveyard and then build homes for themselves in the plantation. What these people have in common is Fraser. He is Yahweh. He is not merely the mayor and the zoning board, he is the living ark of the deed covenant. He is the artist who has painted them into the corners he has sold them. A few owners have put sums like two hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand dollars into their houses, but most are in the forty- to fifty-thousand-dollar range, and Fraser has also built condominium villas that sold originally for as little as nineteen thousand—a minimum that has since risen to thirty-eight thousand. He has also built a small town, shops and all, with apartments that rent for two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars a month. He figures he can blend fifteen hundred more houses into the trees, and one more golf course.
The chairman of the Continental Mortgage Forum recently introduced Fraser as “one of the two finest developers in the United States,” not mentioning his peer. Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Outdoor Recreation and Natural Beauty. Fraser is also Commissioner of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism for the South Carolina coast. Now forty-one, he has made twenty million dollars in the past ten years, but he, his friends, and his enemies all agree that personal profit is not paramount among his motives. Fraser’s drive seems to have been directed toward accomplishment for its own sake, toward aesthetics for the sake of an aesthetic criterion. Sea Pines has evolved, perhaps, as a kind of monument.
Fraser considers himself a true conservationist, and he will say that he thinks of most so-called conservationists as “preservationists” but that he prefers to call them “druids.” “Ancient druids used to sacrifice human beings under oak trees,” he says. “Modern druids worship trees and sacrifice human beings to those trees. They want to save things they like, all for themselves.” He is aware of the importance of the larger environment. He says he would like to establish a College of the Oceans—“you know, pot, ecology, the whole bag.” He reads the newsletter of the Conservation Foundation. He knows the vital position of salt marshes in marine ecology. “Salt marshes are productive feeding grounds for seafood,” he says. “In the immediate marsh boundaries of Hilton Head Island, in the marsh flood plain, we save seventy-five per cent of the marsh, as a balanced approach between the interests of recreation and the interests of the druids. Man has to use some of the salt marsh if he is going to live near the sea. A few years ago, anybody would have said it was O.K. to build anything in a salt marsh. Now the society has so much money that we can afford to wonder. The druids get emotional and say you are upsetting ecology if you as much as touch the salt marsh, and you have to be polite. But you can’t take the position that production of seafood is the most important issue in America. The druids dismiss me as a quote developer unquote, and that makes me mad.”
There must be a very remarkable druid at Hammond, Inc., in New York, for Hammond has published a large map that seems particularly notable for what can only be a deliberate omission. It happens that the longest undeveloped beach on the Atlantic coast of the United States forms the eastern shoreline of a very large island, no part of which appears on this map—Hammond’s Superior Map of the United States, four feet wide, one inch to seventy miles—although the map shows clearly such islands as Ocracoke, Hatteras, Assateague, Long Beach, and Manhattan, all of which are smaller. The name of the missing island is Cumberland. Virtually uninhabited, it lies off the coast of Georgia. It is the largest and the southernmost of the Georgia sea islands, and on the map the place where Cumberland Island should be is filled with nothing but blue Atlantic, although other sea islands—St. Simons, Sapelo, Ossabaw—stand forth in bold outline to the north. Clearly the work of a druid cartographer.
Cumberland Island, a third larger than Manhattan, has a population of eleven. Its beach is a couple of hundred yards wide and consists of a white sand that is fine and soft to the touch. The beach is just under twenty miles long, and thus, although there are no obstructions whatever, it is impossible to see from one end of it to the other, because the beach itself drops from sight with the curve of the earth. Wild horses, gray and brown, roam the beach, apparently for the sheer pleasure of the salt air. Poachers round them up from time to time and sell them to rodeos for fifteen dollars apiece. Wild pigs seem to like the Cumberland beach, too. The figure of a man is an unusual thing there. New, young dunes rise behind the beach, and behind the dunes are marshes, fresh or tidal. In some of the marshes and in ponds and lakes elsewhere on the island live alligators fourteen feet long. The people of the island will not say specifically where the alligators are. They are fond of their tremendous reptiles. Poachers, commando-fashion, come for them by night, kill them, and take just the hides. Behind the marshes stand the old dunes, high, smooth as talc, sloped precipitously like lines of cresting waves, and covered with pioneer grasses. At the back of the dunes begins a live-oak forest. The canopies of the oaks nearest the beach have been so pruned by the wind that they appear to have been shaped by design in a medieval garden. Among the oaks are slash pines and red cedars—trees also tolerant of salt. Sand-lane roads wind through the forest. Poachers use them in pursuit of white-tailed deer. Hotels in Jacksonville pay thirty-five dollars a deer. Through the woods run thousands of wild pigs. Now and again, a piglet is stopped by a diamondback.
A generally high bluff rims the western shore of the island, and along it are irregular humps—Indian burial mound
s that have never been opened. Watched from the bluff, sunsets gradually spread out over a salt marsh five miles wide. This distance from the mainland in part explains why Cumberland Island remains as it is at this apparently late date in the history of the world. There is no bridge. The salt marsh is the most extensive one south of the Chesapeake. It is dominated by cord grass that rises higher than a man’s head. The higher the tide, the higher the grass in a tidal marsh, and the Georgia coast has seven-foot tides. An acre of that marsh is ten times as fertile as the most fertile acre in Iowa. Roots of the cord grass reach down into the ooze and mine nutrients. When the grass dies and crumbles, it becomes high-protein detritus. Shrimp spend a part of their life cycle in there eating the crumbled grass. In the marsh, too, is a soup of microscopic plants, of phosphorus, nitrogen, calcium. Oysters grow there. Fish feed in the marshes and on marsh foods washed by the tides. If a quarter acre of marsh could be lifted up and shaken in the air, anchovies would fall out, and crabs, menhaden, croakers, butterfish, flounders, tonguefish, squid. Bigger things eat the things that eat the marsh, and thus the marsh is the broad base of a marinefood pyramid that ultimately breaks the surface to feed the appetite of man.
Tidal creeks penetrate Cumberland Island, and along their edges, when the tide is low, hundreds of thousands of oysters are exposed to view. Shrimp, fast-wiggling and translucent, feed between the beds of oysters. No wonder the Indians wanted to be buried on Cumberland Island. The only wonder is that the island now is much as it was when the Indian mounds were built. It has not always been so. There are stands of virgin pine and virgin live oak on Cumberland, but the island as a whole is a reclaimed wilderness. Orange and olive groves stood there once, and plantations of rice, indigo, and cotton. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the sea islands were abandoned. Later, rich Yankees began competing with one another in the acquisition of Georgia islands, and nearly all of Cumberland was bought by a Carnegie—Andrew’s brother Thomas. His family, as it increased, built several enormous houses, and two or three of these are still in fair condition, but the others make Cumberland the world’s foremost island in saltsprayed baronial ruins. The Carnegie heirs are in the third, fourth, and fifth generations, and their number is so large that they went to court not long ago and had the island divided. Conservationists, noting this, and realizing that not all Carnegies could afford to hold land anymore, began to move toward finding a way to keep the island from being developed. They spoke of Cumberland as—in the words of one of Brower’s colleagues in the Sierra Club—“a spot in our eyes, a dream that may not come true.” Then, in October, 1968, three Carnegies—Tom, Andrew, and Henry—sold three thousand acres of Cumberland Island for one and a half million dollars to Charles E. Fraser.
There was an expression that had been in the air there since the days of the rice and indigo plantations, and now it rose again to currency: “The Devil has his tail wrapped around Cumberland Island.”
With “the purchase of lands on Cumberland Island,” as Fraser termed the event, the issue was joined for one of the great land-use battles of recent times. Remaining Carnegie heirs closed ranks against him. All over the coast and, in fact, all over the South—particularly in Atlanta, Augusta, Columbia, and Athens (the University of Georgia)—people began talking intensely about Fraser.
“He walked into the Cloister at Sea Island and he said, ‘I’m the golden boy of the Golden Isles, and I’ve just bought three thousand acres of Cumberland Island.’
“I want to shoot the son of a bitch.”
“He is a visionary young man who has learned that conservation can pay.”
“No. Charlie is a conservationist in the real sense. He wants to harmonize a modern environment with all the endowments of nature.”
“Conservation to Charlie means, in great part, that Charlie should not be bitten by a mosquito.”
“He thinks he’s a home boy with a lot of clout in Georgia, but he’ll find out what he can do with his pink-sock golfers.”
“Charles himself is interested in power. That’s what motivates him. Everybody thinks he will go into politics.”
“He would dearly love to be governor of South Carolina, and he would be fabulous.”
“He doesn’t have the stomach for it. In politics, there’s a lot you can’t control. Where he is, he controls everything.”
“I’m an ecosystems man. It’s not the island alone that interests me. It’s the island, the marsh, and the sea. If the marshes are saved, there would not be much ecological loss with development. If you’re going to have a developer, I’m all for Fraser. Unplanned development would spoil it.”
“I don’t think his declared intentions are always his true intentions.”
“He’s a demon. He has no principles.”
“He is a little man walking empty with a cartoon balloon before his mouth, talking and talking as if to create a Charles Fraser who isn’t there.”
“Fraser says he wants to make these islands available to the people. Horse manure. He means taking it from the old rich and giving it to the new rich. Let’s just be straight. A fifty-thousand-dollar investment ain’t too many of the people.”
“He does things no other developer would. Those concrete bulkheads at Hilton Head cost him three-quarters of a million dollars. He could have had steel for two hundred thousand.”
“Steel bulkheads are an eyesore.”
“Mr. Fraser does preserve environment. The university hopes that most of Cumberland can become a National Seashore, so people can enjoy it. It can’t be all wilderness. We think it should be a mix—people in nature.”
“The guy is tearing off an island just as if it were a postage stamp. He’s behaving like a hunter knocking off buffaloes. We’ll challenge anyone who wants to be the Buffalo Bill of the Georgia coast.”
“He has half-baked, two-bit ideas. He’s thinking very small. I challenge Charlie Baby to come up with something exciting. We are going to come into an age when people want more than a bag of sticks and some white balls.”
“We can’t afford to think in Colonial land-grab terminology anymore. We could set a precedent on Cumberland Island for recreational land use in America. Let’s do something imaginative. Fraser’s plans are not big enough. The golf-course bit should go to the mainland. There could be three planned communities on the mainland, with Cumberland their open space.”
“You come in to the coast slowly. It grows on you. River mouths, marshes, tidal creeks, islands, the continental shelf, and the continental slope are really an integral unit, a single system. We have had integration of the races in the sixties, and we are going to have integration of man and the land in the seventies, or we’ll all be gone in the eighties.”
On a cold but sunlit November day, a small airplane, giving up altitude, flew down the west shore of Cumberland, banked left, crossed the island, and moved out to sea. Sitting side by side behind the pilot were Brower and Fraser. The plane turned, still descending, and went in low over the water and low over the wind-pruned live oaks and down into a clearing, where the ground was so rough that the landing gear thumped like drumfire. A man in khaki trousers and a wild-boarskin shirt waited at the edge of the woods. The aircraft wheeled around at the far end of the clearing and taxied back toward him through waist-high fennel.
Fraser and Brower had met only the evening before, at Hilton Head, and Fraser, in his direct way, had begun their relationship by giving Brower a dry Martini and then telling him what a conservationist is. Fraser said, “I call anyone a druid who prefers trees to people. A conservationist too often is just a preservationist, and a preservationist is a druid. I think of land use in terms of people. At Hilton Head, we have proved that you can take any natural area and make it available to people while at the same time preserving its beauty.” Brower listened and, for the moment, said nothing. He had not expected so young a man. Fraser’s dynamism impressed him, and so did Sea Pines Plantation. Fraser, for his part, was surprised by what he took to be, in Brower, an absence of tho
rns. Expecting an angry Zeus, he found instead someone who appeared to be “unargumentative, quiet, and shy.”
Now, on Cumberland Island, the pilot cut the props, and into the resulting serenity stepped Fraser and Brower. Fraser wore a duck hunter’s jacket and twill trousers that were faced with heavy canvas. Brower had on an old blue sweater, gray trousers, and white basketball shoes. The name of the man in the boarskin shirt was Sam Candler. Hands were shaken all around. Brower said it was “nice to be aboard the island.” The weather was discussed. Amiability was the keynote.
