Beaufort

We parked under a canopy of live oaks so thick it turned midday into dusk, the branches looping down to touch the ground before rising again like something out of a fairy tale. Lia had read that Beaufort — pronounced BYOO-fert, never like its Carolina cousin down in North Carolina — was one of the oldest towns in the South, and within an hour of wandering its historic district we believed it. Porches stacked two and three stories high faced the water, built to catch a breeze that has been arriving off the Beaufort River for three hundred years.

The Point and its grand houses

Beaufort’s oldest neighborhood, known simply as the Point, is a grid of antebellum and Federal-style homes that somehow survived the Civil War largely intact, occupied rather than burned. We walked Bay Street and then wound into the side lanes — Craven, New, and Hancock — past the Beaufort Arsenal and the Verdier House, its widow’s walks and wraparound piazzas built to pull in river air before electricity ever thought to. Lia was fixated on the wrought-iron gates and the sheer scale of the oaks in every yard; I kept noticing how many houses had been used as film backdrops, Beaufort’s marsh light being irresistible to Hollywood location scouts since Forrest Gump ran up its steps.

Marsh, tide, and the Sea Islands

South of town, Highway 21 threads out toward the Sea Islands — Lady’s Island, St. Helena, and eventually Hunting Island, where a lonely black-and-white lighthouse rises out of palmetto scrub. We stopped at the roadside stands on St. Helena for boiled peanuts and shrimp fresh off the boat, and Lia talked with a Gullah basket weaver outside Penn Center, the historic school founded for freed slaves during the Civil War, still standing as a center of Gullah Geechee culture. The marsh out here is not scenery so much as a living, breathing thing — herons stalking the pluff mud, the smell of sulfur and salt, the whole landscape rising and falling twice a day with the Atlantic tide.

Shrimp boats and the waterfront

Back in town, we spent our last evening at Beaufort’s waterfront park, watching shrimp trawlers idle in against a sky gone the color of a ripe peach. This is still a working fishing town, and dinner reflected it: shrimp and grits thick with andouille, she-crab soup, hush puppies fried dark and crisp. A local band played on the park’s bandstand, kids chased each other around the giant porch-swing sculptures, and for a while nobody seemed to be going anywhere in particular. It was the most unhurried evening of our whole Lowcountry trip.

Getting There

Beaufort has no commercial airport of its own; most travelers fly into Savannah/Hilton Head International, about an hour south, or Charleston International, roughly ninety minutes north, and rent a car for the drive down Highway 17 and 21. There is no real public transit to speak of, so a car is essential both for reaching town and for exploring the Sea Islands beyond it — but once you’re parked in the historic district, Beaufort itself rewards nothing more than walking.