Hilton Head Island

The island takes its name from William Hilton, an English sea captain who sighted its headland in 1663 while scouting the coast for settlers from Barbados. Spanish and French expeditions had passed earlier, and Native American peoples had lived along its creeks for thousands of years, leaving shell rings such as the one in what is now Sea Pines. From the 1700s planters cleared the island for plantations, from 1790 growing Sea Island cotton, the long-staple variety that made the Lowcountry rich, worked by enslaved Africans whose descendants became the Gullah.

In November 1861 a Union fleet took Port Royal Sound early in the Civil War, and the island became a Union base. Hundreds of enslaved people from across the region came behind Union lines, and in 1862 the army laid out Mitchelville on the north end as a town for them, with elected officials, churches and a compulsory education law, likely the first such law in the South. After the war the island became a place of small Gullah farms and fishing, reached only by boat, and stayed that way into the mid-20th century.

A bridge opened in 1956, the year Charles Fraser, whose father's company held timberland on the island, began developing Sea Pines Plantation at the southern end — a resort planned to keep the trees, hide the buildings and limit signs, a model soon imitated by the other developments on the island. Harbour Town and its lighthouse followed in 1969–70, the Heritage golf tournament the same year, and more gated communities through the 1970s and 1980s. The island incorporated as a town in 1983 to control the growth, and it has since grown into a year-round community of retirees, resort workers and the Gullah families who were here first.

Hilton Head's culture is shaped by its plan. Charles Fraser's covenants made the island a place where the live oaks come first, buildings sit back under the canopy in muted colours, and the resort communities are designed for cycling, golf and tennis rather than boardwalk amusement. The result is a quiet, family- and retiree-oriented resort — famous for its golf courses, its tennis centres and the Heritage tournament in April, when the island fills for the week after the Masters and the winner is given a tartan jacket.

The older culture is Gullah. The descendants of the island's enslaved people kept their land, language and foodways through a century of isolation, and families still live in neighbourhoods on the north end that were theirs long before the resorts. The community's story — Mitchelville, the praise houses, the sweetgrass baskets, the February Gullah Celebration — has moved from the margins to the centre of how the island describes itself.

The island also supports a symphony orchestra, an arts centre with a theatre and galleries, and a crowded calendar of charity events run by its retirees. Manners are Southern and relaxed; a wave from a passing cyclist is normal. The year has two rhythms — the summer invasion of families from the Northeast and Midwest, and the quieter, older winter population of golfers and snowbirds — and the people who serve both often live across the bridge in Bluffton and beyond.

About 38,000 people live on the island all year, a number that can swell to 150,000 at the height of summer, and the island's economy is almost entirely tourism, golf, real estate and the retirement industry — health care, home maintenance, landscaping and clubs. The average age is well above the national figure, and many residents live in the gated plantations where community associations handle roads, security and the look of every house.

The island's workers are a different population. Restaurant, hotel, landscaping and construction jobs are held largely by people who commute from Bluffton, Hardeeville and further up the coast, and the cost of housing on the island is a permanent local argument. Traffic over the bridges and along US 278 is the daily consequence, and the widening of the island's main road is a decades-long debate.

The Gullah neighbourhoods on the north end face their own pressures: land held by large families, rising taxes and offers from developers. Hurricanes and erosion are the shared worries — beach erosion is a constant concern, and Hurricane Matthew in 2016 left the island without water, sewer or power for days. Days follow the sun and the tide: an early bike ride or round of golf, the beach, the marsh at low tide, and supper at a marina as the shrimp boats come in.

This is Lowcountry cooking, the coastal food of South Carolina shaped by the Gullah kitchen. Shrimp and grits — local shrimp cooked with bacon or sausage over stone-ground corn grits — is on nearly every menu. Lowcountry boil, also called Frogmore stew after a settlement on nearby St Helena Island, is shrimp, corn, sausage and potatoes boiled together in a seasoned pot and tipped on to a paper-covered table. She-crab soup is a cream soup of blue crab and roe with a dash of sherry, and oysters from the May River and the sounds are eaten raw, fried or steamed in clusters at oyster roasts through the winter.

Gullah dishes are red rice, simmered with tomato and usually bacon; okra gumbo; Hoppin' John of field peas and rice, eaten on New Year's Day; and seafood stews that go back to West African rice cooking. Carolina Gold, the rice that made the Lowcountry rich, has been revived by local growers. Boiled peanuts are sold at roadside stands, pralines and benne wafers — thin sesame biscuits — are the sweets, and sweet tea is the drink.

The island's restaurants cluster at the marinas and Coligny, serving local shrimp, crab and fish, and Bluffton's old town across the bridge has an oyster company on the May River that has shucked oysters since 1899. Seafood shacks, pancake houses and barbecue fill in the everyday meals, and the dining is more casual than the island's prices suggest.