Pawleys Island

The history of Pawleys Island can be summed up in four words: rice, sea, golf, and hammocks.

The rivers threading through coastal South Carolina created an ideal environment for cultivating rice, and by the mid-18th century, vast plantations were producing profitable crops and wealthy landowners.

But those plantations also produced malaria-carrying mosquitoes, so the landowners sent their families to the seashore for the summer and built the first houses on Pawleys Island starting in 1822.

The end of slavery doomed the rice culture, and the old plantations were sold to rich Northerners for hunting and fishing retreats.