stairway to heaven
South Carolina Whirl tour: the spiral staircase at Joseph Manigault House, Charleston. Opposite, beachcombing on Shell Island
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN Its famously photogenic plantation homes are just the first step… South Carolina is also the sunny, surf-laced, all-American beach holiday you’ve always dreamed of, says Ellen Himelfarb Photography: Jen Judge
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South Carolina
‘M Star prize: from top, treasures collected on Shell Island; boardwalk to Edisto Beach. Opposite, one of Edisto Island’s waterside holiday homes
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um, I can hear the ocean!’ Well of course she can. Except for the pelicans overhead, the only sound is of the sea threatening to swallow our flip-flops. Besieged by the tide, we’re picking through heaps of shells on one of the most atmospheric barrier islands in South Carolina. Later, in the quiet of our cottage, I’ll realise that my four-year-old daughter, Camilla, was describing the sigh inside the giant conch shell she’d hoisted to her ear, as big as a second head; for now the find goes into our carrier bag and we carry on beachcombing to the rhythm of the waves pounding Shell Island, as this beauty spot is locally known. It was my mother-in-law — a poet, novelist and staunch South Carolinian — who discovered Shell Island. It belongs to Wilkinson’s Landing, part of a former plantation thick with oak forest hidden by clouds of Spanish moss. She’s the reason why this summer I’m here again, with my daughters, my husband, his brothers — the whole extended family — to root deep for king helmets, baby’s ears and shark’s eyes, filling sacks like bargain-hunters at a car-boot sale. ‘Captain Michael’ Gilmore, who runs these shelling excursions in his shrimping boat, looks on. Squinting in the white sunlight, I ask him if he minds watching guests walk away with his loot. (Well, sort of his — he’s descended from the first Wilkinsons.) He laughs. ‘You think you could make a dent in this?’ And his words are gone with the wind. Two centuries ago, before the Civil War, this acreage produced a coveted ‘sea island’ cotton, more of it than any other plantation in the state, albeit on the backs of slaves. In the aftermath of the conflict, the workers absconded, pests moved in and the grand white Palladian
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South Carolina house — classic antebellum style — was left to wither. The scene is as compelling as an old graveyard, its architecture invaded by overgrowth, its former masters just ghosts. Apathy from big developers round these parts has left beaches as pure as Zanzibar’s and towns as pretty as Southern belles, flashing pearly whites to nobody in particular. And 150 years on, the decline continues, yet I’d argue South Carolina’s coast is all the richer for it. Edisto Beach, our base, is a case in point, although it’s only 45km as the crow flies from tourist-thronged Charleston. With its village of modest beach houses and Baptist churches, it offers up few activities. Days are spent falling asleep under a paperback, or crabbing with fishing lines dangling raw chicken necks bought from the Piggly Wiggly supermarket and tied by my motherin-law. So very little happens that my husband and his brothers boycotted the annual family holiday here — until they had babies and learned that there is nothing better than nothing-to-do. A dozen of these blissful islands crowd the Lowcountry coast: sandy hideaways like Pawleys Island, Folly Island and Litchfield, which have barely changed in a century. You can rent a five-bedroom beachfront cottage for £1,000 a week, and undertake nothing more ambitious than a fish fry. Peek out from the dunes, though, and you catch glimpses of antebellum life that tell a speckled history of the South. After a lazy morning on the beaches at Pawleys Island, we find Litchfield Plantation, a white Colonial manor barely visible from a drive lined with moss-laden oaks. Its humid green expanses are now a network of golf clubs and resorts. In 1740, though, they were harnessed for the production of South Carolina’s bumper rice crop, ‘Carolina gold’. I read aloud to the girls from a local magazine that shared this nugget of lore: the first rice grains were likely smuggled in the hair of African slaves boarding ships bound for the tobacco plantations. If that’s true, it wasn’t long before their masters cottoned on, the plantations ultimately turned out half a million kilos of rice annually, making those masters some of the wealthiest in the colonies. When their slaves died, all too young, some were buried here at Litchfield, in a damp cemetery beside a rice silo. A dozen plantations remain in these parts. Rice Hope operates as a hunting lodge; Hampton as a museum. Jim Robinson, great-great grandfather of Michelle Obama, once slept in a sparse wood cabin at Friendfield, on the Sampit River. Covering all that culture can be a muggy, oppressive affair, so for respite we drive on to Georgetown, where the rice barons made their home and their heirs still do. South Carolina’s third-oldest city is one of those bygone communities where men sport Stetsons and women wear their hair like Jackie O. We park on Prince Street, near the clapboard house of the first black US Congressman, Joseph Rainey. Only fools and tourists walk the streets at noon in summer, and there’s a ghostly silence until we reach Front Street to discover the sorbet-painted shops have back exits to a public dock — the de facto High Street in hot weather. Our kids shout out the names etched on the sides of shrimp boats — ‘Virginia Lynn!’ ‘Miss Nichole!’ — and we wait for someone to turn around. We follow a mob of retirees dressed in pistachio slacks past a sign that reads: ‘Do Not Feed the Alligators’, and enter Kaminski House,
Southern comforts: opposite, clockwise from top left, fried shrimp po’boy is a regular on the menus here; alfresco dining at a Charleston oyster bar; Edisto Beach; interior of the Joseph Manigault House, built in 1903 by a rich ricegrowing family. Right, the city’s Waterfront Park; key lime pie, the regional dessert
BREEZY DOES IT During the sultry South Carolina summer the coolest plantation tours are by boat, starting in Georgetown and cruising the coast around Winyah Bay. You’ll pay from about £19 a head (under 12s £13) with the likes of Rover Tours (rover boattours.com)
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South Carolina Twilight zone: a ‘boneyard’ of dead trees on Edisto Island’s wild, unspoilt shores
APATHY FROM BIG DEVELOPERS HAS LEFT BEACHES HERE AS PURE AS ZANZIBAR’S, THE TOWNS AS PRETTY AS SOUTHERN BELLES
FOOD FOR THOUGHT The Lowcountry heat will have you panting for ice cream, but the traditional treat is the thin Benne wafer, named for the Bantu word for sesame seeds, grown here since the 17th century. Gift shops around Beaufort sell bags for about £2.50
a splendid Colonial pile now open as a museum. There are three on Front Street, each minded by local volunteers who seem more interested in ‘how y’all find your way here’ than in showing off the 300 years worth of antiques inside. The Maritime Museum tracks the rise (and levelling off) of Georgetown’s 19th-century shipping fortunes, and I imagine it will one day recount how a fire last autumn wiped out neighbouring taverns Buzz’s Roost and Limpin’ Jane’s — on our visit, three months prior, we’d waved at the regulars on Limpin’ Jane’s terrace. Where will they neck pints of Sweetgrass American Pale Ale now? The fire was one of those episodes that, tragically, raise the profile of a place, but Georgetown, albeit the social heart of the county, will always be a sleepy city, with folksy ice-cream parlours, an Art Deco cinema and a one-room department store selling rocking chairs. When we arrive for a late lunch at the Rice Paddy, the restaurant is already closed for siesta. Instead we gorge on flounder sandwiches and fried chicken salads overlooking the harbour at the River Room. Residents say the former landlords of Limpin’ Jane’s have started a new business two hours south in Beaufort, a city that recently celebrated its 300th birthday, landing it between Charleston and Georgetown in age. It makes perfect sense. Beaufort (pronounced like a fusion of ‘beauty’ and ‘Frankfurt’) is a denser, grander, livelier Georgetown, built on a system of rivers and dykes that shelter it from the open sea (and sheltered it from destruction in the Civil War). It is a refuge of good manners and buttoned-up retail in a region dominated by beach, bayou and discarded oyster shells. Every summer, when we get the urge to de-sand and don shoes, my mother-in-law leads us in a ritual wherein we arrive at Plum’s restaurant for the lunch rush and fail to get a table, so order takeaway fried-fish sandwiches to eat by the waterfront out back. Then we push the kids on porch swings hanging from ivied arbours on the boardwalk, and visit the folk-art galleries of Bay Street. My mother-in-law is so enchanted with this part of her home state that she shacked up for months at a time in a homely porch-front cottage to pen her fiction trilogy, set on the islands in view of Beaufort’s waterfront. Today St Helena and Lady’s Islands support communities of bungalows and Baptist churches. But 200 years ago their indigo plantations enslaved hundreds kept captive by the Coosaw River, however shallow it appears from the comfort of the boardwalk. You can explore Old Beaufort on walking or bicycle tours, but our kids gravitate toward the horse and buggy idling by the quiet marina. In the afternoon heat, the shaded cart and gentle breeze are a godsend, making our family the ideal audience for our guide, who puts to use her history classes at the University of South Carolina. She points out the sprawling antebellum homes of the indigo barons and rice kings, now occupied by genteel families and officers from the local Marine corps. Trotting past a cigar-store Indian on Bay Street, a palm-lined film set of a boulevard, she starts in on the Forrest Gump legacy. Yes, these pavements, frozen in their past splendour, were perfect stand-ins for small-town Mississippi, and graced every movie spawned by a Pat Conroy book to boot (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini). What it offers is a picture of Southern
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South Carolina wealth that, judging by the For Sale signs we spot on the manicured lawns, is increasingly tenuous. Only Charleston, the gem of the coast, boasts more listed real estate than Beaufort. It could be the provincial Southern sister to Boston, say. But to us, plodding from the coastal suburbs for an afternoon, it’s a jolt of metropolitan life. Even the Urban Outfitters occupies a century-old heritage theatre. Shopping and architecture are accomplished in tandem, as we walk King Street, then explore the manor of Joseph Manigault, a Huguenot merchant who in 1803 commissioned one of the finest spiral staircases in town (no Banana Republic here, thankfully). On a recommendation, we seek out Eli’s Table, a NY deli done Southern style, with po’boys instead of pastrami, and bottomless, icy ginger ale. On our way in we form a Charlestonian bottleneck with a gentleman (‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’ ‘No, after you.’) who turns out to be Eli himself. He lingers by our table and is typically gracious when the girls question the bizarre South Carolinian penchant for orange cheese spread flecked with pimento. We excuse ourselves. The city’s minor-league baseball team, the RiverDogs, are playing at a park just north of downtown, and Jason would give his kingdom to witness the crack of a Louisville Slugger. Our tickets cost less than a fiver, and as we settle into the bleachers we still feel part of an earlier, simpler time. Root-root-rooting for the home team in a crowd of supporters is as Olde American as pecan pie. The added bonus is the supper of alligator sausages and boiled peanuts, washed down with cups of sweet iced tea. That touch is pure South Carolina.
Get Me There Go independent Delta (delta.com) flies from Heathrow to Charleston, via Atlanta or New York, from £695 return. United Airlines (united.com) flies via Chicago, New York or Washington DC from £783. Or try US Airways (usairways.com).
Where to stay In Charleston, Indigo Inn (1 Maiden Lane; 00 1 843 577 5900, indigoinn. com) delivers your 18th-century fix (four-poster bed, mahogany suite) in a former indigo warehouse; doubles from £102, B&B. Vendue Inn (19 Vendue Range; 00 1 843 577 7970, thevendue.com) has canopied beds and a rooftop restaurant; doubles from £118, room only. The Beaufort Inn (809 Port Republic St; 00 1 843 379 4667, beaufortinn.com) occupies a 19th-century McMansion in Beaufort’s historic district; doubles from £85, B&B.
Go packaged What’s the catch? Edisto Island seafood joint
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Go Collette (0800 804 8705, gocollette.com) offers a seven-night ‘Southern Charm’ tour, visiting
map: Scott Jessop
Charleston, Beaufort and a Southern plantation, from £2,099pp, B&B, with flights from Heathrow. Tauck (0800 961834, tauck.co.uk) has a seven-night Charleston & Savannah tour, including a visit to Beaufort, a cruise in Charleston harbour and a plantation tour, from £1,784pp, B&B, including five dinners and three lunches; excludes flights.
Where to eat and drink River Room (801 Front St, Georgetown; 00 1 843 527 4110, riverroomgeorgetown. com); mains about £5. Plums (904 Bay St, Beaufort; 00 1 843 525 1946, plumsrestaurant.com); mains about £5. Eli’s Table (129 Meeting St, Charleston; 00 1 843 405 5115, elistable.com); mains about £6.50.
Further information For beach villas on the South Carolina coast, try VRBO.com (Vacation Rentals By Owner). In Edisto Island, regulars use Atwood (00 1 866 713 5214, atwood vacations.com). And in Litchfield and Pawleys Island, there’s Pawleys Island Realty (00 1 843 237 2000, pawleys islandrealty.com).
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN Its famously photogenic plantation homes are just the first step… South Carolina is also the sunny, surf-laced, all-American beach holiday you’ve always dreamed of, says Ellen Himelfarb Photography: Jen Judge
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AUGUST 2014 SUNDAY TIMES TRAVEL
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South Carolina
‘M Star prize: from top, treasures collected on Shell Island; boardwalk to Edisto Beach. Opposite, one of Edisto Island’s waterside holiday homes
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um, I can hear the ocean!’ Well of course she can. Except for the pelicans overhead, the only sound is of the sea threatening to swallow our flip-flops. Besieged by the tide, we’re picking through heaps of shells on one of the most atmospheric barrier islands in South Carolina. Later, in the quiet of our cottage, I’ll realise that my four-year-old daughter, Camilla, was describing the sigh inside the giant conch shell she’d hoisted to her ear, as big as a second head; for now the find goes into our carrier bag and we carry on beachcombing to the rhythm of the waves pounding Shell Island, as this beauty spot is locally known. It was my mother-in-law — a poet, novelist and staunch South Carolinian — who discovered Shell Island. It belongs to Wilkinson’s Landing, part of a former plantation thick with oak forest hidden by clouds of Spanish moss. She’s the reason why this summer I’m here again, with my daughters, my husband, his brothers — the whole extended family — to root deep for king helmets, baby’s ears and shark’s eyes, filling sacks like bargain-hunters at a car-boot sale. ‘Captain Michael’ Gilmore, who runs these shelling excursions in his shrimping boat, looks on. Squinting in the white sunlight, I ask him if he minds watching guests walk away with his loot. (Well, sort of his — he’s descended from the first Wilkinsons.) He laughs. ‘You think you could make a dent in this?’ And his words are gone with the wind. Two centuries ago, before the Civil War, this acreage produced a coveted ‘sea island’ cotton, more of it than any other plantation in the state, albeit on the backs of slaves. In the aftermath of the conflict, the workers absconded, pests moved in and the grand white Palladian
> AUGUST 2014 SUNDAY TIMES TRAVEL
83
South Carolina house — classic antebellum style — was left to wither. The scene is as compelling as an old graveyard, its architecture invaded by overgrowth, its former masters just ghosts. Apathy from big developers round these parts has left beaches as pure as Zanzibar’s and towns as pretty as Southern belles, flashing pearly whites to nobody in particular. And 150 years on, the decline continues, yet I’d argue South Carolina’s coast is all the richer for it. Edisto Beach, our base, is a case in point, although it’s only 45km as the crow flies from tourist-thronged Charleston. With its village of modest beach houses and Baptist churches, it offers up few activities. Days are spent falling asleep under a paperback, or crabbing with fishing lines dangling raw chicken necks bought from the Piggly Wiggly supermarket and tied by my motherin-law. So very little happens that my husband and his brothers boycotted the annual family holiday here — until they had babies and learned that there is nothing better than nothing-to-do. A dozen of these blissful islands crowd the Lowcountry coast: sandy hideaways like Pawleys Island, Folly Island and Litchfield, which have barely changed in a century. You can rent a five-bedroom beachfront cottage for £1,000 a week, and undertake nothing more ambitious than a fish fry. Peek out from the dunes, though, and you catch glimpses of antebellum life that tell a speckled history of the South. After a lazy morning on the beaches at Pawleys Island, we find Litchfield Plantation, a white Colonial manor barely visible from a drive lined with moss-laden oaks. Its humid green expanses are now a network of golf clubs and resorts. In 1740, though, they were harnessed for the production of South Carolina’s bumper rice crop, ‘Carolina gold’. I read aloud to the girls from a local magazine that shared this nugget of lore: the first rice grains were likely smuggled in the hair of African slaves boarding ships bound for the tobacco plantations. If that’s true, it wasn’t long before their masters cottoned on, the plantations ultimately turned out half a million kilos of rice annually, making those masters some of the wealthiest in the colonies. When their slaves died, all too young, some were buried here at Litchfield, in a damp cemetery beside a rice silo. A dozen plantations remain in these parts. Rice Hope operates as a hunting lodge; Hampton as a museum. Jim Robinson, great-great grandfather of Michelle Obama, once slept in a sparse wood cabin at Friendfield, on the Sampit River. Covering all that culture can be a muggy, oppressive affair, so for respite we drive on to Georgetown, where the rice barons made their home and their heirs still do. South Carolina’s third-oldest city is one of those bygone communities where men sport Stetsons and women wear their hair like Jackie O. We park on Prince Street, near the clapboard house of the first black US Congressman, Joseph Rainey. Only fools and tourists walk the streets at noon in summer, and there’s a ghostly silence until we reach Front Street to discover the sorbet-painted shops have back exits to a public dock — the de facto High Street in hot weather. Our kids shout out the names etched on the sides of shrimp boats — ‘Virginia Lynn!’ ‘Miss Nichole!’ — and we wait for someone to turn around. We follow a mob of retirees dressed in pistachio slacks past a sign that reads: ‘Do Not Feed the Alligators’, and enter Kaminski House,
Southern comforts: opposite, clockwise from top left, fried shrimp po’boy is a regular on the menus here; alfresco dining at a Charleston oyster bar; Edisto Beach; interior of the Joseph Manigault House, built in 1903 by a rich ricegrowing family. Right, the city’s Waterfront Park; key lime pie, the regional dessert
BREEZY DOES IT During the sultry South Carolina summer the coolest plantation tours are by boat, starting in Georgetown and cruising the coast around Winyah Bay. You’ll pay from about £19 a head (under 12s £13) with the likes of Rover Tours (rover boattours.com)
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South Carolina Twilight zone: a ‘boneyard’ of dead trees on Edisto Island’s wild, unspoilt shores
APATHY FROM BIG DEVELOPERS HAS LEFT BEACHES HERE AS PURE AS ZANZIBAR’S, THE TOWNS AS PRETTY AS SOUTHERN BELLES
FOOD FOR THOUGHT The Lowcountry heat will have you panting for ice cream, but the traditional treat is the thin Benne wafer, named for the Bantu word for sesame seeds, grown here since the 17th century. Gift shops around Beaufort sell bags for about £2.50
a splendid Colonial pile now open as a museum. There are three on Front Street, each minded by local volunteers who seem more interested in ‘how y’all find your way here’ than in showing off the 300 years worth of antiques inside. The Maritime Museum tracks the rise (and levelling off) of Georgetown’s 19th-century shipping fortunes, and I imagine it will one day recount how a fire last autumn wiped out neighbouring taverns Buzz’s Roost and Limpin’ Jane’s — on our visit, three months prior, we’d waved at the regulars on Limpin’ Jane’s terrace. Where will they neck pints of Sweetgrass American Pale Ale now? The fire was one of those episodes that, tragically, raise the profile of a place, but Georgetown, albeit the social heart of the county, will always be a sleepy city, with folksy ice-cream parlours, an Art Deco cinema and a one-room department store selling rocking chairs. When we arrive for a late lunch at the Rice Paddy, the restaurant is already closed for siesta. Instead we gorge on flounder sandwiches and fried chicken salads overlooking the harbour at the River Room. Residents say the former landlords of Limpin’ Jane’s have started a new business two hours south in Beaufort, a city that recently celebrated its 300th birthday, landing it between Charleston and Georgetown in age. It makes perfect sense. Beaufort (pronounced like a fusion of ‘beauty’ and ‘Frankfurt’) is a denser, grander, livelier Georgetown, built on a system of rivers and dykes that shelter it from the open sea (and sheltered it from destruction in the Civil War). It is a refuge of good manners and buttoned-up retail in a region dominated by beach, bayou and discarded oyster shells. Every summer, when we get the urge to de-sand and don shoes, my mother-in-law leads us in a ritual wherein we arrive at Plum’s restaurant for the lunch rush and fail to get a table, so order takeaway fried-fish sandwiches to eat by the waterfront out back. Then we push the kids on porch swings hanging from ivied arbours on the boardwalk, and visit the folk-art galleries of Bay Street. My mother-in-law is so enchanted with this part of her home state that she shacked up for months at a time in a homely porch-front cottage to pen her fiction trilogy, set on the islands in view of Beaufort’s waterfront. Today St Helena and Lady’s Islands support communities of bungalows and Baptist churches. But 200 years ago their indigo plantations enslaved hundreds kept captive by the Coosaw River, however shallow it appears from the comfort of the boardwalk. You can explore Old Beaufort on walking or bicycle tours, but our kids gravitate toward the horse and buggy idling by the quiet marina. In the afternoon heat, the shaded cart and gentle breeze are a godsend, making our family the ideal audience for our guide, who puts to use her history classes at the University of South Carolina. She points out the sprawling antebellum homes of the indigo barons and rice kings, now occupied by genteel families and officers from the local Marine corps. Trotting past a cigar-store Indian on Bay Street, a palm-lined film set of a boulevard, she starts in on the Forrest Gump legacy. Yes, these pavements, frozen in their past splendour, were perfect stand-ins for small-town Mississippi, and graced every movie spawned by a Pat Conroy book to boot (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini). What it offers is a picture of Southern
>
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AUGUST 2014 SUNDAY TIMES TRAVEL
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South Carolina wealth that, judging by the For Sale signs we spot on the manicured lawns, is increasingly tenuous. Only Charleston, the gem of the coast, boasts more listed real estate than Beaufort. It could be the provincial Southern sister to Boston, say. But to us, plodding from the coastal suburbs for an afternoon, it’s a jolt of metropolitan life. Even the Urban Outfitters occupies a century-old heritage theatre. Shopping and architecture are accomplished in tandem, as we walk King Street, then explore the manor of Joseph Manigault, a Huguenot merchant who in 1803 commissioned one of the finest spiral staircases in town (no Banana Republic here, thankfully). On a recommendation, we seek out Eli’s Table, a NY deli done Southern style, with po’boys instead of pastrami, and bottomless, icy ginger ale. On our way in we form a Charlestonian bottleneck with a gentleman (‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’ ‘No, after you.’) who turns out to be Eli himself. He lingers by our table and is typically gracious when the girls question the bizarre South Carolinian penchant for orange cheese spread flecked with pimento. We excuse ourselves. The city’s minor-league baseball team, the RiverDogs, are playing at a park just north of downtown, and Jason would give his kingdom to witness the crack of a Louisville Slugger. Our tickets cost less than a fiver, and as we settle into the bleachers we still feel part of an earlier, simpler time. Root-root-rooting for the home team in a crowd of supporters is as Olde American as pecan pie. The added bonus is the supper of alligator sausages and boiled peanuts, washed down with cups of sweet iced tea. That touch is pure South Carolina.
Get Me There Go independent Delta (delta.com) flies from Heathrow to Charleston, via Atlanta or New York, from £695 return. United Airlines (united.com) flies via Chicago, New York or Washington DC from £783. Or try US Airways (usairways.com).
Where to stay In Charleston, Indigo Inn (1 Maiden Lane; 00 1 843 577 5900, indigoinn. com) delivers your 18th-century fix (four-poster bed, mahogany suite) in a former indigo warehouse; doubles from £102, B&B. Vendue Inn (19 Vendue Range; 00 1 843 577 7970, thevendue.com) has canopied beds and a rooftop restaurant; doubles from £118, room only. The Beaufort Inn (809 Port Republic St; 00 1 843 379 4667, beaufortinn.com) occupies a 19th-century McMansion in Beaufort’s historic district; doubles from £85, B&B.
Go packaged What’s the catch? Edisto Island seafood joint
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Go Collette (0800 804 8705, gocollette.com) offers a seven-night ‘Southern Charm’ tour, visiting
map: Scott Jessop
Charleston, Beaufort and a Southern plantation, from £2,099pp, B&B, with flights from Heathrow. Tauck (0800 961834, tauck.co.uk) has a seven-night Charleston & Savannah tour, including a visit to Beaufort, a cruise in Charleston harbour and a plantation tour, from £1,784pp, B&B, including five dinners and three lunches; excludes flights.
Where to eat and drink River Room (801 Front St, Georgetown; 00 1 843 527 4110, riverroomgeorgetown. com); mains about £5. Plums (904 Bay St, Beaufort; 00 1 843 525 1946, plumsrestaurant.com); mains about £5. Eli’s Table (129 Meeting St, Charleston; 00 1 843 405 5115, elistable.com); mains about £6.50.
Further information For beach villas on the South Carolina coast, try VRBO.com (Vacation Rentals By Owner). In Edisto Island, regulars use Atwood (00 1 866 713 5214, atwood vacations.com). And in Litchfield and Pawleys Island, there’s Pawleys Island Realty (00 1 843 237 2000, pawleys islandrealty.com).
