THE GAY FAMILY
History of Shrimping in Beaufort
story and photos by TIM BARNWELL
When John Henry Gay and his wife, Hilda, came to St. Helena Island to build a dock and seafood company in 1948, there was just a small collection of families in rustic homes and an expanse of wooded coastal land. Over the next decades, he built his business into a family enterprise that survives to this day and has been a fixture on St. Helena Island of over sixty years. His son Robert Gay, who still works on shrimp boats from the family dock, describes his father’s early decision.
“Before I was born, my parents had a beautiful house up on Lady’s Island. My father was a chief electrician at Parris Island. He started coming down here in 1945 and ’46, and one day he said to my mom, ‘Honey, I want to move down to St. Helena Island and shrimp for a living.’ In other words, I’m going to give up my government job to live in a house where you can see through the walls. By 1949 he had built the dock, and they moved down here. My mother would sit at the dock, selling shrimp to anyone who came by. She would take the shrimp right out of the box on the back of the boat and wrap them up in newspaper for the buyers.
But that’s how my parents got started, and the business just grew. My dad loved it here on the island so much. Once the kids got old enough to run the shrimping business, he got away from that and started doing landscaping and digging ponds, and he bought and sold lots and houses. He did real well. He didn’t just depend on shrimping. And that’s what he told us, too. “Don’t depend on one thing for a living.” Which I ended up doing, of course!”
Today Robert is co-owner of the dock along with brother, Charles, and sister, Hilda Gay Upton. Their younger brother, William, ran Port Royal Seafood, a wholesale operation, for many years. While Robert shrimps, Charles manages the retail seafood shop at the dock on Sea Island Parkway. He says, “We survive here at Gay Fish Company because of the retail shop. If we didn’t have that, we’d have to quit. The majority of our business is from tourists in the summertime. We run six days a week. And Sunday would probably be our busiest day, but my mother never would let us stay open. Plus, you got to have some time off. Most of us kids are still in the business. So my dad would have been proud to see us now.”
Hilda wears many hats in the family business, being co-owner of the dock, working on the business bookkeeping for the fish company, and overseeing her Shrimp Shack restaurant located across the street. Today, two of her daughters run the day-to-day operation along with several long-time employees. She says, “My daddy also wanted to build a restaurant. He felt like somebody needed to serve fresh shrimp, and no one was around here at the time. The other thing was that my father believed in creating jobs for all of us. He thought we all needed to work, but we did not need to go down the road to do it. There were seven of us kids. So, in the spring of ’78, I thought, likewise, ‘my children need jobs in the summertime when they’re not in school.’ So, the whole reason for starting the Shrimp Shack was to use the products off my husband, Bob Upton’s, shrimp boat, and give the kids jobs. And we ran that until we turned it over to two of our daughters, Julie and Hilda.
With the Shrimp Shack, when I first started—Lord, I didn’t even know what time to open or close! I was kind of new to it all. But my father was so excited over it, and I guess I’m very thankful he was able to enjoy it, at least for the couple of years it was open before he passed away. There were many summer nights that he would sit out on the restaurant porch with some older men friends from Beaufort. They would come down and eat and just enjoy visiting with each other.”
Hilda’s husband, Robert Upton, was a prominent shrimper in the area for most of his life. He relates, “I always loved the water, but I never went out on a shrimp boat when I was growing up. When I got out of high school, I went into the Coast Guard. I was gonna stay in the service, but I got engaged to a young lady I had known most of my life, Hilda Gay. There wasn’t any shore station postings guaranteed in a Quartermaster rate in the Coast Guard then so I would have been on a ship for what could have been 20 years.
Hilda and I talked about it, and she said, ‘You can come work for my Daddy. He always needs a captain for his shrimp boat.’ So I left the Coast guard in 1959 and ran a boat for Mr. Gay for about six years. Then I had an opportunity to buy a boat from a friend of mine in Rockville, and from then on, I went into it for myself.”
The Gay family legacy continues today despite many challenges. Their dock suffered damage from Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Tropical Storm Irma in 2017. Foreign competition and high operating costs have also had their impact all along the coast, and Gay Fish Company has seen the number of boats docking there drop from a high of 21 to a handful today. And while they contemplate the future of the business, they are thankful to have served so many people over the many years since their parents first moved to St. Helena Island.
Tim Barnwell is a photographer and author of seven books. The images and oral history excerpts are from his new book, Tide Runners: Shrimping and Fishing on the Carolinas and Georgia Coast, available at local bookstores and online at www.barnwellphoto.com.
