Written by Palmetto Bluff
Jun 22, 2023
Lynda: I’m from Concord, Massachusetts. My first week of work in Boston after graduating from college, I met Bill with some friends at a bar called Clarks. That was forty-one years ago. We got married very young and moved a lot. We have moved ten times!
Bill: I also moved a lot as a kid. My dad worked for IBM—I’ve Been Moved, as we called it. When I got out of college, I went to work for Proctor and Gamble, which we nicknamed Pack Up and Go.
Lynda: Three girls and a boy. And eight grandchildren.
Bill: When they all come to visit, we need to rent another house!
Lynda: We had never really spent any time in the Lowcountry. We have a condo in Florida and a summer house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, so we were looking for a place where we could spend fall and spring. We had several criteria: we wanted to find a place with lots of activities, including golf, but also a vibrant community with lots of other activities. Bill also wanted to be by a racetrack. We looked at Amelia Island, Kiawah Island, and Ford Plantation. This was the last property we saw. We were on the drive in from the gate, about halfway to Wilson Village, and I looked at him and he looked at me.
Bill: She looked at me and said, “This is the place.” I was just about to say the exact same thing to her! And we hadn’t even seen a single building yet! It just had this really cool feel to us.
Lynda: On our next visit our son came with us because he and Bill were racing in Savannah. He loved it and confirmed our feelings about Palmetto Bluff, so we bought an existing house on Greenleaf. That was December of 2011. [Realtor] Brian Byrne knew Bill had a passion for cars and that he was thinking of building a storage facility off property. He told us about this lot at Headwaters when it came on the market, and it was perfect for a house and a barn.
Bill: When I bought my first BMW, a friend of mine told me about a track event where I could take my car and learn how to really drive it and understand car control. When my son was about to get his license, we talked about getting more serious about driving. We ended up buying a race car, which we still have. We started doing driving schools and progressed quickly to getting our race licenses. When he graduated from college, he went to work for Hendrick Motorsports in North Carolina and spent five years building Jimmie Johnson’s, Jeff Gordon’s, and Dale Earnhardt Junior’s race cars. Four years ago, we started our own race team, Jr III Racing. I am a Junior and he is the third. We run a vintage racing program where our son and I, along with several other customers, race their vintage cars at tracks around the country. Two and a half years ago, we expanded into pro racing in IMSA [International Motor Sports Association], who run the premier road racing series in the US, including the Daytona twenty-four-hour race.
Bill: We built a barn on our property that looks like the stables at Longfield, except we have lots of horsepower rather than horses on the inside! The post and beams came from a company in upstate New York, and they trucked them down to Palmetto Bluff, and we had an old-school barn raising. In addition to storage for our cars, there is a workshop with a car lift.
Bill: This property sits on a peninsula and is surrounded by the May River and marshes. When we first bought the property, Jay Walea [Palmetto Bluff Conservancy] came out to meet with us. He told us that it was one of his favorite places at Palmetto Bluff. The lot had a buildable footprint of roughly two and a half acres, and we built as close as we could to the marsh and the river. The house sits on the end of the peninsula, so we get to watch sunrises in the kitchen and sunsets in the gathering room.
Bill: One of the things we like most about Palmetto Bluff is that we have made many new friends over the past few years, but there are always new interesting people to meet.
Lynda: It’s so magical here. Moving down from New York and its hectic pace, this was a nice change to a slower, more relaxed pace. There are so many different things to do here, whether it’s sports, music, the arts, or food. It’s hard to decide what to do each week because there are so many interesting options to choose from!
