Pawleys Island Historic District

Pawleys Island, a 4-mile-long barrier island located 25 miles south of Myrtle Beach along the South Carolina coast, is one of the oldest summer resort communities in the American South, used as a retreat from malaria-prone rice plantations by Lowcountry planters from the early 19th century onward. The island is separated from the mainland by a tidal creek and reached via two causeways — the north and south inlets — that channel tidal water on either side. The Pawleys Island Historic District encompasses the island's core of antebellum and early 20th-century beach cottages, most built between 1820 and 1930, in a vernacular architectural style adapted to the coastal climate: elevated on pilings for flood protection, oriented to capture the prevailing sea breeze, and constructed of cypress, heart pine, and cedar for rot resistance. The cottages are narrow and elongated, often just one room wide to maximize cross-ventilation. Most are private residences or vacation rentals; the island has no hotels, no chain restaurants, no amusement venues, and no commercial development of the type common on the Grand Strand to the north. The beach on the ocean side is wide and relatively uncrowded even in summer by Myrtle Beach standards. Pawleys Island is historically associated with the origin of the South Carolina rope hammock, first made here in the 1880s by river boat captain Joshua John Ward and later popularized by the Pawleys Island Hammock Shops — a shopping village on the mainland side of the south causeway that still sells hand-woven rope hammocks made using the original technique. The island's appeal lies in its deliberate simplicity and its role as a counterpoint to the commercial development of the surrounding Grand Strand.