I can’t remember a summer when I didn’t spend time on Pawley’s Island, SC growing up. Every summer my parents would load my sister, brother and me into whatever station wagon we had at the time and away we would go – from East Tennessee through the North Carolina mountains to a small town in South Carolina, Bishopville, where my mom had grown up and where my siblings and I all learned to drive because there weren’t any stop lights and the town was completely flat. The drive to Bishopville was six hours and we would get there late at night and spend the night with my grandmother. The next morning, we would get up early and head to the beach, driving through a series of small towns similar to Bishopville until we reached Georgetown, the gateway city to the beach. Once we hit Georgetown, we knew the beach wasn’t far and you could smell the saltwater through the rolled down windows of the wagon.
There is no place like Pawley’s Island. Known as the oldest seaside resort along the east coast, it has a wide beach, sand dunes, fishing piers and public boat ramps. What it doesn’t have is much commercialization. For the most part, the island bans commercial or industrial buildings with only a few exceptions.
The town’s namesake George Pawley owned the island during the colonial era, and eventually sold portions of it to other southern planters seeking to escape malaria since the island, with its ever-windy conditions, provided a refuge from summer mosquitoes.The earliest known inhabitants of the Pawleys Island area were Waccamaw and Winyah Native Americans. They called the area “Chicora”, meaning “the land”.
The town government was incorporated in 1985. The water temperature is comfortable from May to October, and there is abundant fishing, crabbing, shrimping, and birdwatching most months of the year. There are a number of local artists, one of whom is my Uncle Mocus, who has been crafting bird feeders and rustic lamps for at least 50 of his 93 years and selling them to tourists and restaurants for about that same amount of time.
I have been lucky enough to have continued this tradition of spending summers on the island well into adulthood, and I am grateful that I can share this experience with my family as well. Every summer, for the first two weeks of July, my siblings and I and our families go back to Pawley’s Island, arriving by car and by plane from locations like Boston, East Tennessee and Kansas City. We each have our own children now and I love watching them all play together and learning to love the beach as I do. We go crabbing at low tide in the creek, floating down the creek at high tide, swimming, fishing and sailing. My brother-in-law refuses to the leave the beach once he has arrived on the island.
If you are looking for a new place to go for vacation and you crave the “arrogantly shabby” laid-back lifestyle, I would be happy to share my island with you. Even when it storms, it is beautiful.
