Pawleys Island — South Carolina

A four-mile barrier island that's proud of calling itself arrogantly shabby, where rope hammocks were invented and nobody's in a hurry to modernize anything. Lia and I napped in one of those hammocks so long we missed our own dinner reservation and didn't mind at all.

Pawleys Island bills itself, unofficially but proudly, as “arrogantly shabby,” a phrase locals use to explain why nobody here paints their beach houses or replaces a porch rail that’s still structurally sound. Lia and I drove across the short causeway from the mainland expecting something like Myrtle Beach’s overflow, twenty minutes north, and found instead a four-mile strip of weathered gray cottages on stilts, most of them owned by the same families for generations, with no chain hotels and barely any commercial development at all on the island itself.

The original rope hammock

The town’s most famous export is the rope hammock — invented here around 1889 by a riverboat pilot named Joshua John Ward who wanted something cooler and more forgiving than a canvas cot for sleeping on hot nights. The Original Hammock Shops complex on the mainland side still makes them by hand using the same basic pattern, and we bought one to ship home before spending most of an afternoon testing a demo model strung between two live oaks, which is how we ended up late for dinner and completely unbothered about it.

A hand-woven rope hammock strung between live oaks at the Hammock Shops near Pawleys Island, South Carolina

Marsh walks and the ghost of the Gray Man

Behind the dunes, a wide expanse of salt marsh separates the island from the mainland, and we spent an early morning kayaking through it with a local outfitter, watching fiddler crabs scatter and egrets stalk the pluff mud at low tide. Locals also love to tell newcomers about the Gray Man, a ghost said to walk the beach before major hurricanes to warn residents to evacuate — sightings are reported, only half-jokingly, before nearly every major storm that’s threatened the coast. Whether or not you believe it, the story tells you something about how seriously this low, exposed island takes its relationship with the sea.

Getting There

Myrtle Beach International Airport (MYR) is the closest, about 25 minutes north. From Charleston, it’s roughly an hour and a half up Highway 17. A car is necessary to get here and to reach the marsh put-ins and hammock shops, though the island itself, once you’re parked, moves at a walking or biking pace.