Ninety minutes south of Myrtle Beach, down a two-lane stretch of US 17 that the colonists once called the Sewee Broad Path, the pine woods thicken and the saltmarsh widens until a small green sign marks the town of **Awendaw**, a place rich in Awendaw history.
For Horry County readers who know the Grand Strand as a place of new construction and newer arrivals, Awendaw reads at first like a curiosity — a coastal village of fewer than 1,400 people tucked between the **Francis Marion National Forest** and the **Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge** [Wikipedia, 2026].
The land we drive past on a Saturday holds one of the deepest seams of Lowcountry memory anywhere on the South Carolina coast: the country of the Sewee, of the first New England dissenters to plant a meeting house south of the Chesapeake, of the rice fortunes that built a world, and of the 1989 storm that took much of it apart in a single night. Horry County shares every chapter, whether through the Waccamaw rice corridor to our own south or through the eyewall of Hurricane Hugo that crossed both coasts. Awendaw history is our neighbors’ history, and it is also ours.
Understanding the awendaw history adds depth to the experience of visiting this unique coastal village.
Discovering the Rich Awendaw History
The Sewee and the Lowcountry That Was
Long before any English ship drew a line on a chart of this coast, the Sewee lived across a territory that ran from Charleston Harbor north to the Santee River and inland toward present-day Moncks Corner, with their main village at the place they called Awendaw [AccessGenealogy; Dewees Island Blog, 2020].
They were a small Siouan-speaking tribe — near 800 people in 1600 by standard ethnographic estimates — who fished the sounds, hunted the barrier islands, and left behind a pottery style so distinctive that archaeologists still call it the *Awendaw fingerpinch*, named for the lunate nail-presses they worked into wet clay [Dewees Island Blog, 2020]. Older still is the Sewee Shell Ring inside the Francis Marion National Forest, a circular earthwork of oyster and clam shells dated roughly 2200 to 1000 BCE and the northernmost of a chain of such rings that once ran down the Atlantic coast to Florida [SAH Archipedia; Post and Courier].
The word *Awendaw* is Sewee; most sources translate it as “red clay,” though one regional history renders the cognate Wappetaw as “sweet water” [Town of Awendaw; Mount Pleasant Magazine, 2022].
In April of 1670, when the frigate *Carolina* put in at what the English would call Bulls Bay and the Sewee themselves called Sewee Bay, the Sewee became the first South Carolina tribe to meet English colonists — and some of them, startlingly, greeted the newcomers in Spanish, carried over from earlier contact with Spanish Florida [Charleston Time Machine; Isle of Palms Magazine, 2023].
The meeting was cordial. The century that followed was not. By 1715, disease, rum, and the Indian slave trade had reduced one Sewee village to fifty-seven souls [AccessGenealogy]. The naturalist John Lawson, writing in 1709, recorded the episode that broke the tribe: most of its able-bodied men, having decided that English middlemen were cheating them, built a fleet of canoes and set out to sail directly to England to trade. A storm scattered the fleet, many drowned, and an English ship picked up the survivors and sold them into slavery in the West Indies [Lawson, *A New Voyage to Carolina*, 1709]. The remnant merged into the Catawba, and the village at Awendaw emptied.
Land Grants and the Rise of Plantation Awendaw
What came next arrived in two different waves. In 1696, roughly fifty-two Congregationalist dissenters from **Ipswich** and the towns around **Salem, Massachusetts**, sailed south looking for a place to practice their faith outside the Anglican establishment [Mount Pleasant Magazine, 2022; Coastal Expeditions].
Their ship wrecked off Cape Fear; survivors made their way overland to Sewee Bay, where they founded a community they called Wappetaw. Some accounts connect their departure to the 1692–1693 Salem witch trials, though contemporary documentation describes them as New England dissenters rather than refugees in any formal sense [Town of Awendaw; Post and Courier].
They built a meeting house around 1700 — the Wappetaw Independent Congregational Church — whose live-oak graveyard at what is now 15 Mile Landing Road is all that remains [New Wappetaw Presbyterian Church]. Tellingly, the Wappetaw yeomen worked their own land and did not, at first, adopt the Anglican planter class’s scale of enslaved labor [Awendaw History recorded by Mount Pleasant Magazine, 2022].
The second wave shaped the physical landscape a modern visitor still sees: the Barbadian-Anglican planter migration. In 1705, a royal land grant went to Captain John Collins, a Barbadian, establishing **Tibwin Plantation** on a tidal creek north of the old Sewee village [Town of Awendaw; South Carolina Plantations].
The Collins family held Tibwin until William Matthews bought it in 1794 [South Carolina Plantations]. Other grants followed up the Sewee Broad Path — Buck Hall, Laurel Hill, Doe Hall, and, north on the Santee, **Hampton Plantation**, founded in 1735 by the Huguenot **Noe Serre**. [Wikipedia; Charleston Living Magazine]. The plantations ran in a near-continuous chain along what is now US 17, the economic spine of this part of the coast for the better part of two centuries.
Awendaw History: Rice, Indigo, and the Labor That Built It
The crops explain the architecture, and the architecture explains the wealth. Tibwin at its peak grew rice, Sea Island cotton, corn, and potatoes, and enslaved 105 people [Town of Awendaw; South Carolina Plantations]. The Tibwin house that still stands today was built in 1805 close to the water, then dragged inland after the Great Hurricane of 1822 scoured the coast — a detail familiar to any 19th-century Grand Strand planter [South Carolina Plantations].
Laurel Hill, assembled beginning in 1850 by **Richard Tillia Morrison II**, grew to 1,688 acres of rice, cotton, and timber; during the Civil War, with cash crops disrupted, the Morrison family boiled seawater into salt for income [South Carolina Plantations]. Laurel Hill’s surviving plantation store ledgers record 144 enslaved people by name*— one of the more complete rosters of the enslaved community of this stretch of the coast [South Carolina Plantations – Awendaw History].
**Hampton Plantation**, a short drive up the Santee, tells the same story on a grander scale. It passed through the Serre, Horry, Pinckney, and Rutledge families; it hosted **President George Washington** in 1791; and its temple-front portico, completed in **1790–91**, is considered one of the earliest examples of the Greek-temple form in American domestic architecture [Wikipedia; SC State Parks and Awendaw History].
**Archibald Rutledge**, South Carolina’s first poet laureate, was Hampton’s last private owner; the state bought the house in **1971**, and it was designated a National Historic Landmark on April 15, 1970 [SC State Parks]. The portico is worth the drive, but it is worth remembering whose hands shaped the bricks. The same Carolina Gold rice economy that built Hampton and Laurel Hill built Hobcaw Barony on Winyah Bay and the plantations along the Waccamaw that Horry neighbors pass every day [Hobcaw Barony; SC Encyclopedia] — an older chapter of the same book, not a foreign country.
Awendaw History: War, Storms, and What Was Lost
The Civil War broke the rice economy; the long decades that followed finished it. By the 1930s the worn-out fields of the old Awendaw plantations were available cheap, and on **July 10, 1936**, the federal government consolidated **263,904 acres** across Charleston and Berkeley counties into the new **Francis Marion National Forest** [USFS; Wikipedia].
Tibwin itself passed into the Forest Service’s hands in 1996 and can now be walked along the South Tibwin Trail [Town of Awendaw; South Carolina Plantations]. The plantation landscape became a public landscape — open to anyone willing to drive down and walk it.
What the ledgers and the Civil War did not erase, one September night nearly did. On September 21–22, 1989, **Hurricane Hugo** came ashore near Awendaw with sustained winds of roughly **130 mph**, and the Francis Marion took the brunt of it [National Weather Service Charleston].
The storm removed about 75 percent of the forest’s overstory, put an estimated one billion board feet of timber on the ground, and killed more than two-thirds of South Carolina’s red-cockaded woodpecker population [Post and Courier]. It also took the Laurel Hill plantation house, which had been moved to neighboring Doe Hallin 1983 for restoration and was destroyed there in the storm [South Carolina Plantations].
Horry County readers will not need the significance explained: Hugo crossed both coasts, Awendaw caught the southwest eyewall and we caught the northeast, and both communities are still living with what that one night rearranged.
Conclusion: What the Drive Is For
The Town of Awendaw was incorporated in 1992, with **William H. Alston** as its first mayor; Alston founded the **Blue Crab Festival** that still draws visitors each spring [Town of Awendaw].
The 2020 Census counted 1,399 residents across about 17.59 square miles; commercial crabbing and fishing remain part of the local economy, alongside the **Center for Birds of Prey**, founded in 1991, and the refuge and forest that frame the town [Wikipedia; Town of Awendaw]. A Saturday in Awendaw can mean the **Sewee Shell Ring** trail in the morning, the Wappetaw graveyard in the early afternoon, a walk along South Tibwin, and a stop at Hampton Plantation before the drive home.
It is ninety minutes each way, and it rewards those willing to spend a day with it learning Awendaw History and experiencing the marshes. The Lowcountry story our neighbors to the south carry is not a separate story from our own — it is the older chapter of the same coast.
### Further Reading
– [Town of Awendaw — Official Awendaw History](https://www.townofawendawsc.org/history.html)
– [Awendaw, South Carolina — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awendaw,_South_Carolina)
– [Sewee Shell Mound Interpretive Trail — USDA Forest Service](https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/regions/southern/SeweeShellMound/index.shtml)
– [Sewee Shell Ring — SAH Archipedia](https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/SC-01-019-0008)
– [What is the Sewee Shell Ring? — The Post and Courier](https://www.postandcourier.com/news/sewee-shell-ring-charleston-sc/article_f8e9fb22-d116-4452-901e-c181f48f752e.html)
– [A History of Awendaw’s First Residents — The Post and Courier](https://www.postandcourier.com/a-history-of-awendaw-s-first-residents/article_d39ba248-6dc5-11ee-adf5-cbf67704a486.html)
– [From Salem to Sewee: The Forgotten Story of Awendaw’s Earliest Settlers — Coastal Expeditions](https://coastalexpeditions.com/blog/from-salem-to-sewee-the-forgotten-story-of-awendaws-earliest-settlers/)
– [Gone and Nearly Forgotten: East Cooper’s First Place of Worship (Wappetaw Church) — Mount Pleasant Magazine](https://mountpleasantmagazine.com/2022/remembering/gone-and-nearly-forgotten-east-coopers-first-place-of-worship/)
– [Giving Thanks for Native American Food in 1670 Charleston — Charleston Time Machine](https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/giving-thanks-native-american-food-1670-charleston)
– [Hampton Plantation State Historic Site — SC State Parks](https://southcarolinaparks.com/hampton)
– [Hampton Plantation — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Plantation)
– [Tibwin Plantation — South Carolina Plantations](https://south-carolina-plantations.com/charleston/tibwin.html)
– [Laurel Hill Plantation — South Carolina Plantations](https://south-carolina-plantations.com/charleston/laurel-hill-mcclellanville.html)
– [Doe Hall Plantation — South Carolina Plantations](https://south-carolina-plantations.com/charleston/doe-hall.html)
– [Springtime Ramblings up the Sewee Broad Path Awendaw History— Charleston Living Magazine](https://charlestonlivingmag.com/springtime-ramblings-up-the-sewee-broad-path)
– [Francis Marion National Forest — USDA Forest Service](https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/francismarionsumter/recreation/discover-history)
– [How Hurricane Hugo Shaped Francis Marion National Forest — The Post and Courier](https://www.postandcourier.com/environment/francis-marion-forest-hurricane-hugo-charleston/article_3dae4a0e-7753-11ef-be33-bb89ca00687d.html)
– [Hurricane Hugo — National Weather Service Charleston](https://www.weather.gov/chs/HurricaneHugo-Sep1989)
– [John Lawson, *A New Voyage to Carolina* (1709) — Documenting the American South, UNC](https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lawson/lawson.html)
