Long-lost footage captures everlasting magic of Sullivan’s Island, family memories
Some 70 years ago, on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, Allan Cheshire tried to capture time.
He looked back at the Blake House, a white two-story summer cottage on Sullivan’s Island where his family would vacation for generations to come. Then, he pointed his camera at moments that matter.
There is his wife, Molly, in a daffodil-yellow swimsuit teaching their son, Bubber, how to swim.
There is his oldest daughter, Ann, looking up at him from her spot in the sand.
There is his youngest daughter, Mary, flying a blue kite by herself along the shore as the ocean waves rise and fall like nature’s metronome.
On rolls of 8 mm film, he documented the seasons of his life, especially the summers on Sullivan’s Island.
“You’ll like this when you get older,” his three kids remember him saying.
“One day,” he promised, “your children will want to see this.”
His son, Bubber Cheshire, takes a sharp inhale on the phone as he thinks about his daddy’s promise.
“He was right,” the 70-year-old said in a voice just above a whisper.
Bubber Cheshire apologizes for emotions that rush in as sudden as storm surge when he recalls moments captured by his father decades ago and now the video created by his son just months ago.
“It’s just amazing,” he said. “It’s just amazing that we’ve got this, and my children have it and my grandchildren will have it, and my great-children. And Brad — my son — he made it better.”
A timeless discovery
When the Cheshire children discovered the rolls of film tucked away in a cardboard box on the first floor of their father’s Belton, S.C., home, there was little debate about who should have it.
“Give it to Brad. He will know what to do,” Ann Wood said, with agreement from both her brother and sister in 2014 in the months after both of their parents had died.
When Bubber’s son, Brad Cheshire, opened the box, he found it full of 8 mm films shot by his grandfather from 1950 until 1987. Pulling them out, slowly and with care, he counted 84 reels of Kodak film.
Some were labeled with descriptions and years scrawled in pencil. Others were not. A few succumbed to the elements, their contents forever lost.
Six years after he first opened that box, in early 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic set in, Brad Cheshire turned his attention back to those family films. As the co-owner of Artifice Films, a boutique cinematography studio in Greenville, S.C., he feared the delicate reels might not survive if he did not get them digitized.
He sent them straight to Kodak.
When he got the first batch back in May, he saw just how much footage could be traced to the Charleston area, especially the Blake House on Sullivan’s Island.
There was the old Cooper River Bridge sometime between 1954 and 1958 with its anxiously narrow lanes. There was the entrance to Sullivan’s Island’s main street back in the early ‘70s when the gas station was a Texaco. Now it’s a Refuel station.
And there was his favorite shot: His grandmother holding his father’s hand as they waded out into the Atlantic to look at the cargo ships.
Though years had passed since his grandfather captured these moments, Brad Cheshire realized not much has changed on the quiet barrier island. Rocks his father sat on as a kid are still there off Station 11, just past Fort Moultrie.
Families still play games on the beach. Children still stomp and splash in the shallows created at low tide.
“It just hit me that my kids are swimming in the same water my grandparents played in. They’re playing in the same sand my dad and aunts played in. They’re making their own memories in the same place my grandfather made memories decades before,” Brad Cheshire wrote in a January Facebook post about the family footage.
As he watched the footage from his grandfather, he realized the precious gift he had.
“I get to tell the story that my grandfather passed down,” he said.
Linking past and present
It took the better part of 2020 for Brad Cheshire to put together the 4-minute, 38-second video that weaves together scenes his grandfather captured on 8 mm film with present-day moments captured on a Cannon C200.
After Kodak digitized all 84 reels of film, Brad Cheshire spent months sorting through his grandfather’s footage. He identified places, people and moments he now planned to replicate shot for shot. Then, he checked the calendar.
The Cheshire family and four other families share ownership of the Blake House, which was built on Middle Street in 1867. They split time at the house year-round.
Brad Cheshire, who lives more than 200 miles away from the coast in Moore, S.C., made multiple trips to Charleston to get everything he needed.
He called his aunts, his cousins and his father to find out when they would be back at the beach. However, he told them nothing of his plan.
“All I told them was that I wanted to get some footage of them. That’s it,” he said.
They had no idea he was getting them to retrace the steps of their lives and recreate moments captured long ago.
Some shots came together naturally.
When his aunts Mary Boiter and Ann Wood walked up the back porch and turned to look back at him, they both reached for their hair just as they had done as teenagers when their father took the same shot.
Other moments, however, served as a reminder of how cruel time can be.
When Brad Cheshire’s father stood in the water and looked out at a passing cargo ship, his mother was no longer there to hold his hand.
Brad Cheshire first revealed the finished video to his family at Christmas. Then, in January, he shared it with the world.
One of his aunts sobbed when she saw the film, unable to speak when she called to tell him she loved it. His father, Bubber Cheshire, would take his time.
It was only later, when he could be alone with the memories, that he allowed himself to feel.
“I cried then,” he confessed, “and I still do.”
Surrounded by memories
In the days and months since he posted the video to his personal Facebook page, Brad Cheshire has read every one of the nearly 300 comments on the tribute titled, “70 Years on Sullivan’s.”
He only wishes his grandfather could see what they created.
“All my life I had painted my grandfather as a builder, but I realized when I was editing this that, in a way, we were kind of doing this together. And to be able to have that kind of experience years after he’s been gone, it’s just hard to put into words,” he said.
The video, which was initially meant as a family project, has since become a visual love letter to Sullivan’s Island and a testament to what endures. It also became a reminder of brighter days ahead after a year of the coronavirus pandemic left people feeling isolated.
Candy Suggs Smith, who now lives in Aiken, S.C., shared the video on her Facebook page. The first time she watched it, she cried.
“I know they aren’t my memories or my family,” she said, “but the places (where) the footage is shot hold memories for me.”
Smith grew up on Sullivan’s Island on I’On Avenue and remembers sneaking up onto the sun deck with her daddy to drink coffee and watch the sunrise. As a child, the island’s lighthouse was her night light. Each time its beam swept through her bedroom, it chased away the boogeyman.
“It’s my place of solace,” she said.
Bubber Cheshire knows the feeling.
Each time he goes to the Blake House, he drops all his problems. When he drives over the Ben Sawyer Bridge and pulls up to the Blake House with its white fence and green sign, he exhales and breathes in the salt-flecked ocean air.
He can sit in a rocking chair on the porch, or he can return to the same rocks where he sat as a little boy and watch the ships go by.
“I have all the memories of my childhood, the memories of my parents,” he said of the Blake House and the video that honors this special place. “And I know they’ll always be there with me, forever.”
