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Family Pearls of Wisdom Bowens Island’s Robert Barber has put love and labor into the iconic eatery By Robin Gibson • Photography Erin Turner Sarah May Chaplin Barber Bowen, the matriarch behind the iconic Southern eatery, Bowens Island Restaurant, is the reason for this month’s “Skirt Men” feature—Robert Barber. He is her paternal grandson without whom her legacy and famed restaurant might have disappeared. But he fulfilled his promise to keep it alive before turning the reins over to two other strong women: his daughter and his granddaughter, both with the first name Sarah. Can you describe for people who don’t know about Bowens Island what and where it is? Bowens Island is a 14-acre island with a causeway to it about two miles before you get to Folly Beach. We have a Charleston mailing address and off one side of the island we see the back of Folly Beach and off the other we see James Island. The restaurant serves seafood and is known for its local oysters. What is your relationship to it? I grew up in it. My paternal grandmother, May Bowen, bought the island and built a road to it. She had a restaurant on Folly Beach, and, when my dad came back from World War II, he took that over and went to The Citadel as a veteran student. She moved to a one-bedroom house on Bowens and built a little concrete building on the ground and started a fish camp. She had a dock, and, initially, she wanted out of the restaurant business but ended up with fishermen—she had lights on it so you could fish all night—and they would bring in what they caught and she cooked it. So she started anew with another restaurant named after the island, which is named for her second husband, my step-grandfather—and granddaddy to me—Jimmy Bowen. So they called it Bowens Island. Many view your grandmother as a pioneer and a visionary. Do you see her that way? What do you think she thought about what she set out to do? I don’t think she thought it was a big deal because that’s how she was. Comparing her to other people, I wouldn’t say she was eccentric—but different. Most people would have put a few thousand dollars into a pretty, little house in a new subdivision after World War II. Instead, she bought this island and paid to put a causeway out to it. They lived modestly in a wooden one-bedroom house with a different perspective of the world. She enjoyed people but was kind of grumpy and short with them. And she was a businesswoman before many women got into business, and, certainly, before they started their own.
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skirt . | december 2019
