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Alright, let's make one thing clear right up front: I
don't golf. And I feel compelled to lay that out first thing because for as
long as I've lived in the Capital Region, whenever I've mentioned that I was
about to embark upon one of my regular trips to the South Carolina Low
Country, someone invariably says "Ah! Gonna
play a little golf, huh?" And that's understandable, I guess, since the
only thing that most folks know about the Low Country (roughly defined
geographically as the tidal marshlands between Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia) is that Hilton Head is down there, somewhere, and that there's
golf a-plenty to be had on that opulent resort island.
They're right--but along with all that golf (and all those golfers) on Hilton
Head come all of the bugaboos associated with coastal over-development: high
prices, rush hour traffic to rival the Long Island Expressway, and a spoiled
leisure class behaving badly, because they're paying for the privilege of
doing so. I rarely go to Hilton Head when I visit the Low Country
accordingly, instead spending the lion's share of my time in the lovely city
of Beaufort, where I was born, and around which my ancestors have been
romping and stomping since the late 1600s. That makes me a local by Southern standards.
The first thing you need to know before visiting Beaufort if you're not
a local, though, is how to pronounce the city's name: say BYOO-fert, as opposed to the city in North Carolina that's
spelled the same way, but is pronounced BO-fort. Let's practice, shall we,
with a popular little native ditty: "BYOO-fert,
BYOO-fert, by the sea, twenty-six miles from Yemassee." Stress the first syllable of the second
town in the couplet, please and thanks, and repeat as necessary. And note
well that all that the flat, green, wet stuff you see all around Beaufort is
marsh, not swamp. Swamps have trees in 'em, marshes
don't. They both smell funny until you get acclimated, though, but the
similarity ends there.
It also wouldn't hurt for you to bone up a little of the region's multi-culti history before you go knocking about on Bay Street
or Ribault Road, the latter named after the leader
of the French Huguenots who became the first Europeans in the area when they
established the Charlesfort settlement at the mouth
of the Port Royal Sound in 1562. Bugs, heat and bad water drove the Huguenots
home to prison cells in France within a few years, but by 1566 opportunistic Spanish settlers had
established the city of Santa Elena atop the site of Charlesfort.
Santa Elena had over 500 citizens in its heyday and served as the capital of
Spanish Florida from 1568 to 1576, when Indian attacks (those dad-blamed Yemassees, don'tcha know)
forced an evacuation. The Spanish returned in 1577 and remained in Santa
Elena until 1587, when they consolidated their American holdings around St. Augustine in Florida. Port Royal and its environs were then left to the Yemassees and other Native American nations for nearly a
century, until King Charles II of England granted the coast of modern-day North and South Carolina to a group of eight proprietors for settlement in 1663.
Beaufort was formally incorporated in 1711, and much of its early
architecture endures, since the city was spared many of the ravages of the
Civil War, having been recaptured by the Union Navy a mere seven months after
the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The economy, on the other hand,
crumbled during and after the Civil War, since the Low Country was one of the
most slave-intensive farming regions in the South.
The Sea Islands off the coast of Beaufort became safe havens for former slaves, with the Penn Center being established in 1862 as the first school in the South for
freed slaves. The relative isolation of the Sea Islands, with boat access
only until the 1950s, also bred and sustained Gullah language (a mix of
Elizabethan English and West African dialects) and culture. Beaufort-bred
best-selling author Pat Conroy's first book, The Water is Wide, (later
made into the John Voight film Conrack)
detailed his experiences teaching Gullah children on isolated Daufuskie Island, just down the coast a spell from Beaufort. There are luxury condos
there now.
As there are in Beaufort, which has also undergone significant tourism-driven
change over the past quarter century. Fortunately, though, many of those
changes have been positive ones, as Beaufort's restored waterfront area has
resisted the Banana Republicking to which most
revitalized coastal cities fall prey. There are no major hotel chains
represented downtown, for instance, leaving visitors with the options of
sleeping on their boats (if they sail into town, as many Intracoastal
Waterway navigators do) or in such fabulously sumptuous (yet affordable)
nineteenth century guest houses as The Cuthbert House Inn (1203 Bay Street,
843-521-1315) or The Beaufort Inn (809 Port Republic Street, 843-521-9000).
If you can't stay in the latter Inn, at least be sure to get one meal in their restaurant; they've got
some of the best food the area offers, presented magnificently. Other
restaurants downtown have tended to come and go over the past few years, but
The Bank on Bay Street and Dockside in Port Royal stand as a couple of the
more consistent, enduring, recommendable mid-level eateries, both of them
featuring fine local seafood brought in by the shrimp fleet that calls
Beaufort home.
At the most affordable end of the dining spectrum, Fuji on Lady's Island (the
first Sea Island after you follow Highway 21 East over the drawbridge that
dominates the view from Beaufort's riverside parks), and the Shrimp Shack on
St. Helena Island (the next one out after Ladies Island) are both excellent.
Be sure to get a Shrimp Rice Bowl at the former and a Shrimp Burger at the
latter. You'll be glad you did in both cases.
And on your way out the Shrimp Shack, be sure to explore the rest of St.
Helena Island, home of the aforementioned Penn Center, the hamlet of Frogmore (which no longer appears on the official maps of
the islands, even though everyone knows where it is; look for the post office
with the giant metal frog in front), and a wide variety of traditional craft
and art outlets. Handmade sweet grass baskets from St. Helena's traditional
artisans still stand as one of the most distinctive icons of Low Country
culture.
If you keep following Highway 21 East, you'll soon cross onto Harbor Island, then Hunting Island, then Fripp Island, at which point the public roadway ends. Hunting Island (most of it
a State Park) features one of the most distinctive beaches on the East Coast,
with jungle-like foliage and palms creeping almost all the way down to the
surf, and a great lighthouse to climb for obligatory oceanfront views. Harbor
and Fripp Islands offer more sane, affordable
options to Hilton Head if you're looking for beachfront rental properties;
the latter even features a trio of golf courses, for those of you who still
can't comprehend the Low Country without clubs, gloves and spikes.
In addition to the Sea Island tour, Beaufort also serves as a great launching point for a variety
of other day driving trips up and down the Low Country. Historic Charleston (home of Fort Sumter and the only South Carolina city older than Beaufort) is a couple of easy hours to the North,
with ooky-spooky Savannah, Georgia (think Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) an equal
distance to the south. Yemassee, named after the
region's legendarily fierce first inhabitants (and a mere 26 miles from BYOO-fert BYOO-fert by the sea)
sports the evocative ruins of Old Sheldon Church (definitely haunted, per my
grandfather) and a Le Creuset manufacturing plant
where you can get cast iron cookware, cheap.
The famed boot camp at Parris Island, just outside of Beaufort city limits, makes for a great afternoon
trip that can incorporate a stop at the Marine Corps Museum and a walk around Santa Elena/Charlesfort.
And, of course, there are also plenty of things to walk around and see right
in downtown Beaufort: the historic Beaufort Arsenal, or acclaimed artist
Nancy Ricker Rhett's gallery, or Tidalholm (the
house where The Big Chill was filmed), or the Joseph Johnson House
(known colloquially as "The Castle" due to its medieval overtones),
or the National Cemetery, where so many of South Carolina's Civil War dead
are buried.
You can even just sit on one of the nice benches by the river and admire the
ancient live oaks, draped with their distinctive festoons of Spanish moss.
Don't touch the Spanish moss, though, since chiggers live in it, and you want
your trip to Beaufort to be memorable for reasons other than experiencing
your first chigger bites. There's lots of other stuff to do down there, too:
things like sailing, crabbing, biking, antiquing, water-skiing, and, uh, y'know, even golfing, if you absolutely have to, I mean.
But I don't recommend it.
Copyright 2001: J. Eric Smith.
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