There’s a narrow strip of lush Carolina coastland nestled between the Waccamaw River and the blue-green ocean. It’s quiet lowland country, a place of swamp oaks and beach boardwalks, a place you wouldn’t expect to find Upstate travelers feeling at home.
Yet the Litchfield area of Georgetown County, South Carolina, is the site of a summer exodus, a haven for countless Greenville families who’ve had a strong hand in shaping the land since the 1950s.
In the last half-century, towns up and down the Lowcountry coast have taken to the ground like kudzu. But Litchfield’s roughly 12-mile stretch—south of Murrells Inlet down to Pawleys Island—has developed at a different pace. For decades, the area has been labeled laid-back, even charmingly primitive in parts like Pawleys Island and the Waccamaw Neck. It was this relaxed quality that beguiled the McKissicks and Stones, Greenville families who enjoyed the area for leisure. But they also saw the business potential. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, they were at the forefront of developing what has come to be known by some as “Greenville by the Sea.”
As the McKissicks and Stones courted homeowners from outside the region, they prioritized maintaining the character of the area. Greenville buyers often held fast to the Litchfield way of life, favoring cottages without air conditioning and waterways over roadways. But they weren’t the first outsiders. An earlier wave of northerners had purchased plantation homes in the early twentieth century, organized formally as the South Carolina Plantation Society.
The last wave of land buys followed the 1929 stock market crash so that “by 1931 there was scarcely a plantation left in the hands of native South Carolinians.” In his History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, George Rogers Jr. records that though socially disengaged with the community, northern owners spurred the local economy. Their seaside and inland homes needed staff and construction workers, jobs that helped the county survive the Depression.
The end of World War II and the arrival of the International Paper Company brought prosperity back to the area. Soon ownership moved back into the hands of South Carolinians, and — according to Rogers — a shift toward recreation and tourism brought the Litchfield area’s biggest boom in modern times. Greenville businessmen took note, and they began investing in the same no-frills way as the place they were developing.
In 1956, the Litchfield Company was created, its founders including James Moore and partners A. Foster McKissick and Bill Miller Sr. The real estate development company grew from a holding in Pawleys Island to include resort communities such as Litchfield by the Sea, Willbrook Plantation, the Reserve at Litchfield, and Prince Creek in Murrells Inlet.
The cohort didn’t have fancy offices at first, and consequently, several deals were done across a card table. “Dad set up an umbrella at a fork in the road going into Litchfield Road,” says E. Stone Miller or “Stoney.” The Litchfield Company Real Estate broker-in-charge, Stoney comes from real estate royalty. “My dad put together packages to sell ocean and canal lots and company stock for $5,000. He would go and get two or three different families to meet together and pre-sell.”
The Millers are closely associated with the Stones, a prominent Greenville family associated with an eponymous textile manufacturing operation and the restored Cherrydale house, which they donated to Furman University. Stoney Miller moved to Georgetown County when he was in the fourth grade, but his connection to Greenville remained strong, even while living in his literal backwater town.
“Schools were in Georgetown, so kids in the winter commuted by boat in the canal. In the summer, lots of people came from Greenville, so you got to grow up with them,” Miller says. “A lot of people call the area ‘Greenville by the Sea.’”
Ocean View // These two-story villas (shown here circa 1960), the first condo development in SC according to Stoney Miller, still exist north of and adjacent to what is now the Litchfield Inn on Litchfield Beach.
Through the decades, development came in spurts. These days, Miller says, it’s a spate of grocery stores. Their services used to be provided only by the Big Top gas station flanked on either side by a small grocery and corresponding liquor store.
While neighboring seaside communities expanded with high-rise hotels and carnivalesque attractions, Litchfield has remained a haven for those who favor unobstructed views and unplanned hours. Instead of a row of beachfront distractions, locals would rather view a row of motorboats floating down an inlet in a come-as-you-are Fourth of July parade.
“Brookgreen Gardens is sort of like our Mason/Dixon line: you go past there, and it gets too commercialized,” he says. Even as growth has made living more convenient, Miller relishes the things that haven’t changed. “I live back on the Waccamaw, and the waterway still looks like it did in plantation days with the wetland and lowlands, the oak trees and the moss.” To the south, evidence of humans is wonderfully scarce for more than 20 miles, where protected waterways are nearly pristine. The South Carolina Environmental Law Project housed nearby has been protecting the area since 1987, and incorporation, a legal maneuver which allows for easy transfers of land ownership, has been utilized to keep development at bay. One argument against these efforts is that threats aren’t pressing since people are choosing developments with protected covenants. Miller also explains that the latest wave of homebuyers seeking multi-million-dollar constructions is interested in older, simpler homes.
“The beach is a little older now, so the beach houses are older. For a while, they would tear them down and build these big boxes. But now they’re coming back. They’re fashionable. People like the way they’ve grown up coming here, and are looking for that still,” Miller says.
The old-fashioned structures and laid-back lifestyles that have kept the area unique are perhaps its best billboards for slow change, but change still happens. Many of today’s newcomers to Litchfield are people who have been successful in other parts of the world, now giving their talents to help sustain and propel the local economy and culture.
The area’s popularity grew further recently when Alice Flagg, the first opera penned by a Pawleys Island native, opened at the Kennedy Center in New York City in April. Locals were treated to the Lowcountry debut the following month. In the opera, composer Joseph Katz reaches back to local lore and his own childhood, telling a well-worn antebellum ghost story in an entirely new way. It’s the kind of approach that makes sense when you consider where Katz grew up: take a long look at something old and figure out how to keep its spirit alive, well into the future.
By Land // Litchfield Beach and Pawleys Island are part of a strip of land in Georgetown County known as the Waccamaw Neck, a narrow peninsula between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean, just south of the Grand Strand.
How to Be Hipp on Pawleys Island
This is how you do Pawleys Island. Or, here’s how Greenville’s Hipp family has done it for three generations over 65 years.
Stock up on groceries before you take the causeway onto the island. Consider this a luxury, because for many years there weren’t any grocery stores within three or four miles. Should you turn on the air conditioning at the house, pause and know that this, too, was a late arrival among Pawleys Island amenities. As late as the 1990s, most folks had only wind, water, shade, or drinks to cool them off, and they liked that just fine.
The Hipps were (and still are) happy to bask in all of the above. Hayne and Anna Kate Hipp bought their home, Newcastle, in 1982, staying at the Tip Top Inn before that. They took their children Mary, Reid, and Tres for the same three-week stint each summer, forming a tribe of sorts with other upland families who arrived at the same time. Phone numbers were just five digits, but they weren’t really needed anyway.
“There were no street addresses,” says Mary, the oldest of the children. “We didn’t even know what the road was named. We just knew a house was Landcastle, or the Boyd’s house, or Tip Top Inn.”
Murrells Inlet Marsh Walk // The Marsh Walk is a half-mile wooden boardwalk along a natural saltwater estuary. The waterfront dining is a must, and establishments have matching glassware so revelers can take drinks from one spot to another as they stroll. (4025 US 17, Business, Murrells Inlet. marshwalk.com)
At age 18, Mary cast her first public vote on Pawleys. The local newspaper from that day in 1985 has a snapshot of Anna Kate and Mary leaving the chapel where they’d voted to incorporate — an effort to keep “the island of quaint beach homes and weathered bungalows out of the hands of high-rolling developers who might raise a forest of high-rise condominiums.” That’s how the paper put it.
Anna Kate had visited Pawleys with her family annually since 1949, making a two-day pilgrimage from Arkadelphia, Arkansas. The ritual left such an impression that she sought her own home on the island as soon as the Hipps moved to South Carolina. Her mother, however, continued to stay at the Tip Top Inn until Hurricane Hugo brought it down in 1992: traditions matter at Pawleys.
As traditions go, consider a game of “Spoons” to pass the time. Match card suits, pass your discards fast and snatch a spoon before you’re left empty-handed. In Mary’s day, it was all quick hands, sharp elbows, and hysterical laughter. Inevitably, a conflict would ensue and the game would end abruptly; girls marched off in one direction, boys in another. For a while.
Embrace the rituals. That means wearing matching patriotic T-shirts with your entire family on the Fourth of July. It means turning bed linens into airy frocks for multi-family toga parties. It means paying homage to the generation before you with, as Anna Kate says, “the incredible taste of an icy vodka and tonic in a rocking chair at the end of the day.” It means prepare thyself for lunch. It’s a big to-do nearly every day on Newcastle’s screened porch. As many as 14 people sit around a spread of crab cakes, green beans, shrimp creole, fresh corn, peach cobbler, and more, and wine. Then, an epic nap.
As you settle in, expect things to be different, yet somehow just the same. “I still followed my older sister Betty around, but it was to the Pavilion instead of the soda shop,” says Hayne. “My parents seemed more relaxed. I remember seeing them sitting on the porch with vodka tonics, which obviously was not an event in Greenville. I enjoyed holding my younger brother under the water in the ocean instead of the swimming pool at home: more dynamics.”
For Mary, on the other hand, the island was so different that she considered settling there. “It’s my happy place,” she says, but a wise friend convinced her that was the very reason it needed to remain a retreat, not a full-time home. Still, the pull of Pawleys is strong, so visitors will find the Greenville home Mary built in 2015 undeniably beachy with its retractable window-walls that let breezes through, and a large yet intimate porch that looks suspiciously like the one at Newcastle, right down to the big dining table and color scheme.
In other words, expect to leave the island, but don’t expect it to leave you.
“Pawleys Island relationships are eternal,” says Tres Small, the youngest of the siblings. “Experiences with family and friends are unforgettable. Every single one of my friends who has been to Pawleys Island says it is one of the best places they have ever been to and that there is no way to put into words the time spent there.”
Hobcaw Barony Nature Preserve // This 17,500-acre wildlife refuge serves as a site for research, education,and conservation. Boat tours are available along with ecology programs through hikes at the beach, marsh, and forests. Both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt stayed at the Hobcaw House. (22 Hobcaw Rd, Georgetown, SC. hobcawbarony.org)
Best Tastes of the Waccamaw Neck
Perrone’s
13302 Ocean Hwy, P.I/Litchfield – perronesmarket.com
The restaurant and tapas bar is popular for its melt-in-your-mouth meats and vegetables cooked sous vide, in airtight pouches submerged in hot water for as long as 72 hours. Top it off with the chef’s choice of wine pairings.
Pawley’s Island Tavern
10635 Ocean Hwy, Pawleys Island – pawleysislandtavern.com
Also known as “The PIT,” it’s an ultra-casual beach shack. Ceilings, walls, and even support beams are papered with one-dollar bills stapled by patrons over the years. Expect steak, shrimp, pizza, beer, and live music four nights a week.
Frank’s Restaurant & Bar
10434 Ocean Hwy, Pawleys Island – franksandoutback.com
Known for its fine dining fare, Frank’s offers internationally inspired dishes and steaks in its elegant dining room; for a more casual feel, try Frank’s Outback, with similar cuisine served under the stars at its comfortable patio space.
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