by Jim Morekis
Another way to access the Swamp Fox passage is at Buck Hall Recreation Area (843/887-3257) on the Intracoastal Waterway. This actually marks the trailhead of the Awendaw Connector of that part of the Palmetto Trail, a more maritime environment. Another trailhead from which to explore Francis Marion hiking trails is farther down U.S. 17 at the Sewee Visitor Center (5821 U.S. 17, 843/928-3368, www.fws.gov/seweecenter, Tues.-Sat. 9am-5pm).
Golf
The closest really good links to Georgetown are the courses of the Waccamaw Golf Trail (www.waccamawgolftrail.com), a short drive north on U.S. 17. The best public course close to Georgetown is the Wedgefield Plantation Golf Club (129 Clubhouse Ln., 843/546-8587, www.wedgefield.com, $69), on the grounds of an old rice plantation on the Black River about four miles west of town.
ACCOMMODATIONS
Under $150
Close to the historic district is Quality Inn & Suites (210 Church St., 843/546-5656, www.qualityinn.com, $90-140), which has an outdoor pool and an included breakfast. On the north side of town on U.S. 17 you’ll find the Hampton Inn Georgetown-Marina (420 Marina Dr., 843/545-5000, www.hamptoninn.com, $140-170), which also offers a pool and complimentary breakfast.
$150-300
By far the most impressive lodging near Georgetown—and indeed among the most impressive in the Southeast—is S Mansfield Plantation (1776 Mansfield Rd., 843/546-6961, www.mansfieldplantation.com, $150-200), a bona fide antebellum estate dating from a 1718 king’s grant. It is so evocative and so authentic that Mel Gibson shot part of his film The Patriot here, and renovation was recently completed on a historic slave chapel and cabin. As is typical of the Georgetown area, you will find the prices almost ridiculously low for this unique experience on this historic 1,000-acre tract, with gardens, trails, and free use of bicycles. You can stay in one of nine guest rooms situated in three guesthouses on the grounds, each within easy walking distance of the public areas in the main house, which include a 16-seat dining room.
With the closing of two longtime favorite B&Bs, the Dupre House and the Harbour House Inn, it’s left to another B&B, the Keith House Inn (1012 Front St., 843/485-4324, www.thekeithhouseinn.com, $149-169), to carry on the tradition. Its four 2nd-floor suites, with balconies, are each differently themed. The public areas are wonderfully and whimsically furnished.
FOOD
Don’t be fooled by Georgetown’s small size—there’s often a wait for tables at the better restaurants.
Breakfast and Brunch
The Southern Living-recommended Thomas Cafe (703 Front St., 843/546-7776, www.thomascafe.net, Mon.-Fri. 7am-2pm, Sat. 7am-1pm, $5-9) offers awesome omelets and pancakes in addition to more Lowcountry-flavored lunch dishes like crab-cake sandwiches and fried green tomatoes.
Classic Southern
Georgetown’s best-known fine-dining establishment is The Rice Paddy (732 Front St., 843/546-2021, www.ricepaddyrestaurant.com, lunch Mon.-Sat. 11:30am-2pm, dinner Mon.-Sat. 6pm-10pm, $20-30), with the name implying not an Asian menu but rather a nod to the town’s Lowcountry culture. The seafood is strong, but they do a mean veal scaloppine and rack of lamb as well. Reservations are strongly recommended.
Coffee, Tea, and Sweets
A perennial favorite is S Kudzu Bakery (120 King St., 843/546-1847, Mon.-Fri. 9am-5:30pm, Sat. 9am-2pm), renowned for its fresh-baked goodies such as delectable breakfast muffins, velvety chocolate cakes, and seasonal pies with fresh ingredients like strawberries, peaches, and pecans.
Seafood
Find the best shrimp and grits in town at The River Room (801 Front St., 843/527-4110, www.riverroomgeorgetown.com, Mon.-Sat. 11:30am-2:30pm and 5pm-10pm, $15-25), which combines a gourmet attitude in the kitchen with a casual attitude on the floor. However, dishes like the herb-encrusted grouper or the signature crab cakes taste like fine dining all the way. Reservations are not accepted, and dress is casual. Literally right on the waterfront, the dining room in this former hardware store extends 50 feet over the Sampit River, adjacent to a public dock where many diners arrive by boat. There’s even a large aquarium inside to complete the atmosphere.
INFORMATION AND SERVICES
In the historic waterfront area, you’ll find the Georgetown County Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center (531 Front St., 843/546-8436, www.georgetownchamber.com). Georgetown Memorial Hospital (606 Black River Rd., 843/527-7000, www.georgetownhospitalsystem.org) is the main medical center in the area; this 131-bed institution is in the middle of a proposed expansion and relocation. If you need law enforcement help, call the Georgetown Police (2222 Highmarket St., 843/545-4300, www.cityofgeorgetownsc.com). In emergencies call 911.
GETTING THERE AND AROUND
Georgetown is at the extreme southern tip of the Grand Strand, accessible by U.S. 17 from the east and south and U.S. 521 (called Highmarket St. in town) from the west. Very centrally located for a tour of the coast, it’s about an hour north of Charleston and slightly less than an hour from Myrtle Beach.
Although there’s no public transportation in Georgetown, its small size makes touring fairly simple. Metered parking is available downtown.
historic houses in Charleston
Charleston
HIGHLIGHTS
HISTORY
PLANNING YOUR TIME
ORIENTATION
Sights
SOUTH OF BROAD
WATERFRONT
FRENCH QUARTER
NORTH OF BROAD
UPPER KING AREA
HAMPTON PARK AREA
WEST ASHLEY
NORTH CHARLESTON
EAST COOPER
TOURS
Entertainment and Events
NIGHTLIFE
PERFORMING ARTS
CINEMA
FESTIVALS AND EVENTS
Shopping
KING STREET
CHARLESTON PLACE
NORTH OF BROAD
OFF THE PENINSULA
SHOPPING CENTERS
Sports and Recreation
ON THE WATER
ON LAND
SPECTATOR SPORTS
Accommodations
SOUTH OF BROAD
WATERFRONT AND FRENCH QUARTER
NORTH OF BROAD
UPPER KING AREA
HAMPTON PARK AREA
WEST ASHLEY
ISLE OF PALMS
FOLLY BEACH
CAMPING
Food
SOUTH OF BROAD
WATERFRONT
NORTH OF BROAD
UPPER KING AREA
COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON AREA
HAMPTON PARK AREA
WEST ASHLEY
MOUNT PLEASANT
SULLIVAN’S ISLAND
FOLLY BEACH
NORTH CHARLESTON
MARKETS AND GROCERIES
Information and Services
VISITORS CENTERS
HOSPITALS
POLICE
MEDIA
LIBRARIES
GAY AND LESBIAN RESOURCES
Transportation
AIR
CAR
BUS
TAXI
PARKING
Greater Charleston
SUMMERVILLE AND VICINITY
AWENDAW AND POINTS NORTH
POINTS WEST AND SOUTHWEST
the Pineapple Fountain is illuminated at the waterfront park.
Highlights
Look for S to find recommended sights, activities, dining, and lodging.
S The Battery: Tranquil surroundings combine with beautiful views of Charleston Harbor, historical points key to the Civil War, and amazing mansions (click here).
S Rainbow Row: Painted in warm pastels, these old merchant homes near the cobblestoned waterfront take you on a journey to Charleston’s antebellum heyday (click here).
S Fort Sumter: Take the ferry to this historic place where the Civil War began, and take in the gorgeous views along the way (click here).
S St. Philip’s Episcopal Church: A sublimely beautiful sanctuary and two his
toric graveyards await you in the heart of the evocative French Quarter (click here).
S Aiken-Rhett House: There are certainly more ostentatious house museums in Charleston, but none that provide such a virtually intact glimpse into real antebellum life (click here).
S Drayton Hall: Don’t miss Charleston’s oldest surviving plantation home and one of the country’s best examples of professional historic preservation (click here).
S Middleton Place: Wander in and marvel at one of the world’s most beautifully landscaped gardens—and the first in North America (click here).
S CSS Hunley: Newly ensconced in its special preservation tank and available for public viewing, the first submarine to sink a ship in battle is a moving example of bravery and sacrifice (click here).
Charleston made news when it unseated San Francisco for the first time ever in the annual Condé Nast Traveler Reader’s Choice competition for “Top U.S. City.”
That giant-killing win in 2011 was quite a coup for this smallish, old-fashioned city in the Deep South. But the most revealing Charleston award is its perennial ranking at the top of the late Marjabelle Young Stewart’s annual list for “Most Mannerly City in America.” (Charleston has won the award so many times that Stewart’s successor at the Charleston School of Protocol and Etiquette, Cindy Grosso, has retired the city from the competition.) This is a city that takes civic harmony so seriously that it boasts the country’s only “Livability Court,” a legally binding board that meets regularly to enforce local quality-of-life ordinances.
Everyone who spends time in Charleston comes away with a story to tell about the locals’ courtesy and hospitality. Mine came while walking through the French Quarter and admiring a handsome old single house on Church Street, one of the few that survived the fire of 1775. To my surprise, the woman chatting with a friend nearby turned out to be the homeowner. Noticing my interest, she invited me, a total stranger, inside to check out the progress of her renovation.
To some eyes, Charleston’s hospitable nature has bordered on licentiousness. From its earliest days, the city gained a reputation for vice. (Charleston’s nickname, “the Holy City,” derives from the skyline’s abundance of church steeples rather than any excess of piety among its citizens.) That hedonistic legacy is alive and well today in Charleston; the city is full of lovers of strong drink and serious foodies, with every weekend night finding downtown packed with partiers, diners, and showgoers.
Don’t mistake the Holy City’s charm and joie de vivre for weakness, however. That would be a mistake, for within Charleston’s velvet glove has always been an iron fist. This is where the colonists scored their first clear victory over the British during the Revolution (another Charleston first). This is the place where the Civil War began, and which stoically endured one of the longest sieges in modern warfare during that conflict. This is the city that survived the East Coast’s worst earthquake in 1886 and one of its worst hurricanes a century later.
Despite its fun-loving reputation, a martial spirit is never far from the surface in Charleston, from The Citadel military college along the Ashley River, to the aircraft carrier Yorktown moored at Patriots Point, to the cannonballs and mortars that children climb on at the Battery, and even to the occasional tour guide in Confederate garb.
That said, Charleston is something of a liberal enclave within a very conservative state—liberal by Southern standards, anyway. Some of the nation’s most progressive urban redevelopment is going on in Charleston, from the renovation of the old Navy Yard in North Charleston, to impressive green start-ups, to any number of sustainable residential developments. Charleston is a leader in conservation as well, with groups like the Lowcountry Open Land Trust and the Coastal Conservation League setting an example for the entire Southeast in how to bring environmental organizations and the business community together to preserve the area’s beauty and ecosystem.
While many visitors come to see the Charleston of Rhett Butler and Pat Conroy—finding it and then some, of course—they leave impressed by the diversity of Charlestonian life. It’s a surprisingly cosmopolitan mix of students, professionals, and longtime inhabitants—who discuss the finer points of Civil War history as if it were last year, party on Saturday night like there’s no tomorrow, and go to church on Sunday morning dressed in their finest.
But don’t be deceived by these history-minded people. Under the carefully honed tradition and the ever-present ancestor worship, Charleston possesses a vitality of vision that is irrepressibly practical and forward-looking.
HISTORY
Unlike the many English colonies in America that were based on freedom from religious persecution, Carolina was strictly a commercial venture from the beginning. The tenure of the Lords Proprietors—the eight English aristocrats who literally owned the colony—began in 1670 when the Carolina finished its journey from Barbados to Albemarle Creek on the west bank of the Ashley River.
Those first colonists would set up a small fortification called Charles Towne, named for Charles II, the first monarch of the Restoration. In a year they’d be joined by settlers from the prosperous but overcrowded British colony of Barbados, who brought a Caribbean sensibility that exists in Charleston to this day.
Finding the first Charles Towne not very fertile and vulnerable to attack from Native Americans and the Spanish, they moved to the peninsula and down to “Oyster Point,” what Charlestonians now call White Point Gardens. Just above Oyster Point they set up a walled town, bounded by modern-day Water Street to the south (then a marshy creek, as the name indicates), Meeting Street to the west, Cumberland Street to the north, and the Cooper River on the east.
Growing prosperous as a trading center for deerskin from the great American interior, Charles Towne came into its own after two nearly concurrent events in the early 1700s: the decisive victory of a combined force of Carolinians and Native American allies against the fierce Yamasee people, and the final eradication of the pirate threat with the deaths of Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet.
Flush with a new spirit of independence, Charles Towne threw off the control of the anemic, disengaged Lords Proprietors, tore down the old defensive walls, and was reborn as an outward-looking, expansive, and increasingly cosmopolitan city that came to be called Charleston. With safety from hostile incursion came the time of the great rice and indigo plantations. Springing up all along the Ashley River soon after the introduction of the crops, they turned the labor and expertise of imported Africans into enormous profit for their owners. However, the planters preferred the pleasures and sea breezes of Charleston, and gradually summer homes became year-round residences.
It was during this colonial era that the indelible Charlestonian character was stamped: a hedonistic aristocracy that combined a love of carousing with a love of the arts; a code of chivalry meant both to reflect a genteel spirit and reinforce the social order; and, ominously, an ever-increasing reliance on slave labor.
As the storm clouds of civil war gathered in the early 1800s, the majority of Charleston’s population was of African descent, and the city had long been America’s main importation point for the transatlantic slave trade. The worst fears of white Charlestonians seemed confirmed during the alleged plot by slave leader Denmark Vesey in the early 1820s to start a rebellion. The Lowcountry’s reliance on slave labor put it front and center in the coming national confrontation over abolition, which came to a head with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in April 1861.
By war’s end, not only did the city lay in ruins—mostly from a disastrous fire in 1861, as well as from a 545-day Union siege—but so did its way of life. Pillaged by Northern troops and freed slaves, the great plantations along the Ashley became the sites of the first strip mining in the United States, as poverty-stricken owners scraped away the layer of phosphate under the topsoil to sell—perhaps with a certain poetic justice—as fertilizer.
The Holy City didn’t really wake up until the great “Charleston Renaissance” of the 1920s a
nd 1930s, when the city rediscovered art, literature, and music in the form of jazz and the world-famous Charleston dance. This was also the time that the world rediscovered Charleston. In the 1920s George Gershwin read local author DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy and decided to write a score around the story. Along with lyrics written by Ira Gershwin, the three men’s collaboration became the first American opera, Porgy and Bess, which debuted in New York in 1935. It was also during this time that a new appreciation for Charleston’s history sprang up, as the Preservation Society of Charleston spearheaded the nation’s first historic preservation ordinance.
World War II brought the same economic boom that came to much of the South, most notably through an expansion of the Navy Yard and the addition of a military air base. By the 1950s, the automobile suburb and a thirst for “progress” had claimed so many historic buildings that the inevitable backlash inspired the formation of the Historic Charleston Foundation, which continues to lead the fight to keep intact the Holy City’s architectural legacy.
Civil rights came to Charleston in earnest with a landmark suit to integrate the Charleston Municipal Golf Course in 1960. The biggest battle, however, would be the 100-day strike in 1969 against the Medical University of South Carolina—then, as now, a large employer of African Americans.
Charleston’s next great renaissancecame with the redevelopment of downtown and the fostering of the tourism industry under the nearly 40-year tenure of Mayor Joe Riley, during which much of the current visitor-friendly infrastructure became part of daily life. Today, Charleston is completing the transition away from a military and manufacturing base to a much more diversified economy, attracting high-end professionals and artists to town.
