10 Of The Quietest South Carolina Towns

South Carolina's quietest towns sit well away from the resort beaches and golf corridors that draw most of the state's visitors, often miles off the nearest major highway. On Daufuskie Island, getting there still requires a boat, and Edisto Beach keeps its distance from the high-rise development found elsewhere along the coast. In McClellanville, working shrimp docks and vast stretches of protected marsh dominate the scene. In the Blue Ridge, Walhalla lies a short drive from the unfinished Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel, abandoned when funding ran out on the eve of the Civil War. The ten towns below are some of the quietest in South Carolina.

Georgetown

Georgetown was producing nearly half the nation's rice by the 19th century, and the wealth from that industry built a historic district of Georgian and Federal homes that remains largely intact, with the finest examples concentrated along Prince, Highmarket, and Cleland streets. The Rice Museum on Front Street covers the plantation system, the enslaved African labor that built it, and the tidal irrigation engineering that made the Winyah Bay lowlands productive. The Kaminski House Museum, a colonial-era merchant's home overlooking the Sampit River, and the Gullah Museum of Georgetown a few blocks away sit in a walkable downtown that sees a fraction of the traffic Beaufort and Charleston draw. Boat tours from the waterfront go out into the Black River rice field canals, which have been returning to marsh for the past century.

McClellanville

McClellanville is a shrimping village on the Charleston County coast, an hour north of the city. Francis Marion National Forest presses in from the landward side. The Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge takes up the coastline beyond the marsh, 66,287 acres of barrier islands and salt flat that absorb what would otherwise be the town's Atlantic horizon. Jeremy Creek runs through the center of town, and the working docks still smell like shrimp. Visitors who want the outer islands take a concessionaire ferry to Bulls Island, which has loggerhead nesting habitat, alligator ponds, and shell middens from pre-colonial settlement. A few miles north on Old Georgetown Road, the St. James-Santee Episcopal Church, the Brick Church at Wambaw, was completed in 1768 and is one of the oldest church buildings remaining in the Lowcountry.

Salem

Three miles up SC Highway 11, Lake Jocassee covers 7,500 acres between Blue Ridge ridgelines, fed by four rivers and clear enough to read the road signs submerged when the valley was flooded. Devils Fork State Park controls the only public boat launch onto the lake. Several waterfalls empty directly into the water from the surrounding cliffs, including Laurel Fork Falls, which requires a boat to reach. The park also holds most of the world population of the Oconee Bell, a small white wildflower endemic to this particular corner of the Appalachians.

Walhalla

German immigrants from the German Colonization Society of Charleston founded Walhalla in 1850 and named it after the Norse hall of the slain. The most visited landmark is outside town on a gravel road: the Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel, an antebellum railroad project conceived in the 1830s and drilled 1,617 feet into Blue Ridge granite by the Blue Ridge Railroad Company before funding gave out on the eve of the Civil War. The unfinished bore is open to walk through. Adjacent to it, the 100-foot Issaqueena Falls drops off a granite rock ledge above the parking area, named for a Cherokee legend. The town is near the western end of the Palmetto Trail and the departure point for Oconee State Park, ten miles northwest, which has a mountain lake and backcountry trails through the Sumter National Forest.

Landrum

Landrum sits in the Blue Ridge foothills in the northern corner of Spartanburg County, below the North Carolina line, surrounded by horse farms and breeding operations that have made it a center of the Upstate's equestrian community for generations. The downtown is a single walkable strip anchored by a train depot from 1877 on North Trade Avenue. About ten to eleven miles southwest in northern Greenville County near Gowensville, Campbell's Covered Bridge crosses Beaverdam Creek on a timber frame built in 1909. It is the last covered bridge left in South Carolina. The Blue Wall Passage of the Palmetto Trail begins nearby and runs 14 miles toward the ridgeline through second-growth hardwood forest and open meadow.

Edisto Beach

Edisto Beach is the incorporated town on the southern end of Edisto Island in Colleton County. The broader island, spanning into Charleston County as well, holds a few thousand year-round residents. Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve occupies 4,687 acres at the island's northeast end, ending at Boneyard Beach, where bleached oak skeletons stand in the surf with their root systems exposed by decades of erosion. The Edisto Island Museum documents the Gullah-Geechee communities whose land tenure, language, and crafts survived here after emancipation in ways they have not in more developed parts of the coast. Edisto Beach State Park runs about four miles of trail through palmetto, magnolia, and live oak on the southern shore.

Pendleton

Pendleton's Village Green has been the center of the town since commissioners laid it out in 1790, and the ring of antebellum commercial buildings surrounding it has not changed much. The town was established in 1790 as the seat of Pendleton County and drew both Scots-Irish settlers and wealthy Low Country planters who built summer houses in the cooler Upcountry air. Ashtabula, an 1820s plantation house open for tours two miles outside town, is accompanied by a detailed plantation diary from the period. Woodburn Historic House, built around 1830 by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Jr., later lieutenant governor of South Carolina, sits on a similar scale nearby. Three miles from the square, Fort Hill Plantation, John C. Calhoun's home and now on the Clemson University campus, is open for tours.

Pawleys Island

Pawleys Island has been a vacation address since the 18th century. Two short causeways cross the marsh on either end, connecting the island to the mainland. The island has only two small inns and no commercial strips, and the beach is lined with weathered residential cottages behind the dune grass rather than high-rises. Hammock Shops Village on the mainland causeway side has sold the Pawleys Island rope hammock since the design was worked out around 1889 by riverboat captain Cap'n Josh Ward. The salt marsh creek between the island and the mainland is calm enough for flat-water kayaking from the public landing near the south causeway. The beach faces southeast and runs wide at low tide.

Hartsville

Hartsville is a Pee Dee town with a botanical garden that most people outside the region have not heard of. Kalmia Gardens covers 35 acres on the banks of Black Creek, opened to the public in 1935 by Mrs. David R. Coker and donated by the Coker family to Coker University in 1965, which manages it today. The mountain laurel along the creek blooms densely in May. The Lawton Park Boardwalk runs along the creek corridor and connects to the broader trail system through town. The Hartsville Museum, in the restored 1930 post office, covers the region's tobacco and textile history. The Thomas E. Hart House, a federal-period home on the garden property, is one of the oldest structures in Darlington County.

Daufuskie Island

Daufuskie Island has no bridge. Getting there means a passenger ferry or water taxi from Hilton Head Island or the Bluffton mainland. Residents here get around by golf cart on unpaved roads through live oak and palmetto. The Gullah community that built the island's cultural identity is documented in the National Register Historic District, which includes the First Union African Baptist Church from 1884 and several 19th-century tabby and timber structures. The Bloody Point Lighthouse, built in 1883, marks the island's southern tip where Calibogue Sound meets the New River. The Atlantic beach on the island's eastern edge is accessible by dirt road and draws almost no foot traffic on weekdays.

The Quiet The State Keeps To Itself

South Carolina's tourism infrastructure points toward the coast resorts, the golf corridors, and the antebellum cities. McClellanville, Daufuskie, and Salem do not compete with the resort traffic. They run on their own local schedules, largely indifferent to the highways passing miles away.