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The Sunday Observer in Georgetown ran this front-page
headline on June 8, 1902: “HO, FOR PAWLEYS ISLAND.
Georgetown’s Famous Summer Resort Opens Up Today.”
The article’s author noted that he had been getting
inquiries about tourist facilities from “the whole upcountry
Doing Nothing and even from other states” like North Carolina and Georgia.
“With a certain amount of judicious advertising,”
& More than a century later of course sites, upon nine of which houses have
he wrote, “Pawleys Island could be made one of the
Doing It Well
most popular watering holes in the South.”
by Steve Roberts
that prediction has come true. Pawleys has
become a “popular watering hole” for visitors been erected, in which reside forty of the
white population.”
from throughout North America. (The Myrtle That privileged sanctuary began to
Beach newspaper even runs special stories change after the Civil War, with the demise of
about news from Canada!). But it didn’t start slavery and the collapse of the rice industry.
out that way. When Lee Brockington and I Pawleys gradually evolved from a private
were researching our recent book, “Images to a public place, and this transformation
of America: Pawleys Island,” we knew a lot was not as familiar as the founding period,
about the island’s origins. It started as a which was dominated by old families and
private preserve for wealthy rice planters who old money. With the invaluable help of Julie
sent their families to the seashore during Warren of the Georgetown County Library,
the summer months to escape the malaria- we unearthed contemporary accounts and
bearing mosquitos infesting their inland photos that documented the island’s new
farms and fields. The first homes were built identity as a tourist destination.
on Pawleys in 1822 and in 1845 the first
We found a dispatch from an early visitor,
causeway was constructed connecting the
Matthew Tighe, who wrote in 1888 that a
island to the mainland. By 1848 Dr. Andrew
Hasell wrote that Pawleys “contains many
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