EUTAWVILLE — She had turned 8 years old just five days before Friday, Sept. 22, 1989 — a date that would become forever etched in the minds of South Carolinians. But for Constance Connor Maharrey of Eutawville, now 27, nothing seemed unusual about the day before Hurricane Hugo made landfall.

A student at Holly Hill Academy at the time, Maharrey remembers school officials calling for an early dismissal on Thursday, Sept. 21, because of an approaching “bad thunderstorm” — or so she was told.

She doesn’t remember anyone saying anything about a hurricane and didn’t think any more about it. All she knew was that folks were discussing the imminent “bad thunderstorm” and that was it — nothing more, nothing less.

“We were going to spend the night at the farm and that was fun,” Maharrey said. “At least we thought it was going to be fun.”

That night she, along with her parents and her brother, spent the night at her grandmother’s farmhouse in rural Eutawville — a safer alternative than remaining at her childhood home in the Cypress Shores community on the banks of Lake Marion, just a few miles away.

Nighttime came and so did the “bad thunderstorm.”

“It was scary,” Maharrey said, recalling the whipping wind, the distinctive sound of crashing trees, the heavy thuds of brick chimneys falling on the slate roof of her grandmother’s house.

And then, the storm quelled, she said, and it was quiet outside. Everything was still.

Maharrey soon learned the eye of the storm was passing over and she was in the midst of Hurricane Hugo.

“It was during that time that it was explained to me that the storm was coming back,” she said, adding that she was scared and began to bite her fingernails.

In the eye of the hurricane, her dad went outside for a few minutes to assess preliminary storm damage in pitch-black darkness, Maharrey said.

“I wanted to go outside, too,” she said, noting that she wasn’t allowed to and became frustrated because “if Dad could go outside, I didn’t know why I couldn’t go.”

A few minutes later, her father returned, saying trees were down but he wasn’t able to determine how many.

Then the storm blew through again, Maharrey said, sounding just as destructive as it did the first go-round.

Hugo’s fury knocked out electricity. The family brought out flashlights and oil lamps to see their way around in the eerie darkness, Maharrey said.

At daybreak, Maharrey and her brother, Frederick, then 5, went outside to assess the storm damage.

Hurricane Hugo had uprooted trees, shattered slate shingles — driving their jagged edges into the ground and made the dirt driveway to the farmhouse impassable.

“You couldn’t get out of there. You were stuck,” Maharrey said.

Throughout that Friday, her dad and others revved up chain saws and cut through downed trees to make the driveway accessible. Later that day, Maharrey said she and her family managed to navigate through crudely cleared roads to visit her home at Cypress Shores.

“I remember seeing trees zigzagged in front of and on the house. We had to climb over them to get to the house,” she said.

In total, 26 pine trees fell on the single-story lake home in the wee hours of Friday morning.

But despite a visit to her all-but-destroyed home, Maharrey said she was comforted to know the family pets had survived: Charlie, a golden retriever, and Whiskers, a gray domestic shorthaired cat.

The stay at her grandmother’s farmhouse extended to nine months. Maharrey and her family were able to return to the lake home on June 1, 1990, after extensive repairs to her childhood home.

Maharrey said she will always remember Hugo’s aftermath, having to go for several days without electricity until her aunt and cousins brought a generator with them from Birmingham, Ala.

“Those generators kept us functioning,” Maharrey said.

As the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo arrives, Maharrey says she’ll never forget the long lines of Eutawville residents at makeshift water and ice distribution centers in the downtown area.

And, she says she’ll always remember the marked absence of birds and squirrels for weeks after Hurricane Hugo and how thankful she was when they returned.

“The question of leaving never crossed anybody’s mind up here,” Maharrey said, even though Hugo “caused more damage than what anybody thought.”

Every now and then a co-worker or acquaintance will downplay the threat of hurricanes to South Carolina’s inland population. That’s when Maharrey shares with them her first-hand knowledge of Hugo — the hurricane that forever changed the landscape of a wide swath of coastal and inland South Carolina.

T&D Correspondent Martha Rose Brown can be reached by e-mail at marfawose@aol.com. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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