I first met Jim Dotson in the fall of 1990.  If the phrase “larger than life” ever applied to anyone, Jim was a candidate: a bear of a man, he had served as a Marine in Korea before attending Clemson on the G.I. Bill and playing on the football team (this was the pre-platoon days, so Jim played both offensive and defensive line for sixty minutes each fall Saturday).  He had prodigious appetites in both food and whiskey, and was prone to tell the most outlandish tall tales – including one that he related to me about his family – or so I thought at the time.  But damned if I didn’t do a little research, and, well… here we go.

 

In early 1942 the War Department found itself thrust into a two front global conflict, and had to rapidly ramp up manpower, materiel, and training bases.  To that last end, the Department contracted with the city of Savannah, Georgia to take over Chatham Airfield as a heavy bomber training base (the Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force is located nearby for that very reason).  The Department then started buying up land west of the airfield to construct an additional runway.  That’s where they ran into a problem.

 

The Dotson family had moved into the area west of Savannah not long after General Oglethorpe had founded the Colony of Georgia, back when the region was known as Cherokee Hills.  As pioneer families were wont to do at the time, they had a family cemetery on their land.

 

When the Department began negotiations to buy the Dotson acreage, that became a sticking point.  Over the generations, around a hundred different kinfolk had been buried in the cemetery, and the Dotsons were unwilling to have so many graves plowed over just so the Army Air Force could have more room for some kids to learn how to take off and land in B-17s.

Eventually they came to an agreement.  The Department carefully exhumed the remains from each grave and moved them to a newly-purchased extended family plot in Bonaventure Cemetery, where prominent Savannah families have been put to rest for centuries (the cemetery was also the home of “Bird Girl,” made famous from the cover of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil).

 

But the family was adamant that the patriarch of the clan and his wife, Richard and Catherine Dotson, were not to be disturbed.  The government tried several different tactics to cajole, bribe, or threaten the family with Eminent Domain, but the Dotsons got Savannah Stubborn and stuck to their guns.  So the War Department reinforced the graves and built their airfield extension around them, and agreed to that they (or whoever ran the airfield after the war was over) would care for the graves in perpetuity.

To this day, the graves are part of Runway 10 / 28, the 9,350 foot runway that services what is now Savannah / Hilton Head International Airport.

Jim Dotson passed away in 2016, but I’ll never forget him, nor the “you’ve got to be kidding me” story that turned out to be true.