Touring Sandy Island

by

At the Sandy Island landing, live oaks bearded with moss, seem to stoop like wizened men above old boats creaking in their dockside slips. The air and sunlight seem hushed, as if they’ve been waiting a long time for something else to arrive. You can sense it in your bones, immediately—this is a place of ancient passages, of voyages and crossings.

One chilly December morning, Berkeley Electric Cooperative member Captain Rommy Pyatt meets his tour group there. Tall, soft-spoken and bundled up in a camouflage jacket, he is a native Sandy Islander who now lives in Ladson as a member of the Air Force Reserve.

In November of 2005, after a tour of active duty as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he bought a pontoon boat and a 15-passenger van to start a tour service that would show people the 40 square miles of island where he grew up.

“Folks come down here and they go straight to Myrtle Beach and the entertainment, but for those who really want to know what South Carolina was like back in the days, this is like a hidden jewel,” he says.

The path the tour takes in his Suncruiser pontoon—from the mainland, down the canal, across the Waccamaw River and onto Sandy Island—is more or less the same path his ancestors first took in rowboats in the 19th century.

“I wouldn’t call my ancestors slaves,” he says, as the boat putters downriver. “They were beyond slaves. I call them the architects and the engineers of the rice.”

Looking out over a part of the Brookgreen Gardens property that once was a rice field, Captain Rommy explains that his ancestors’ knowledge of how to cultivate rice in a tidal basin made Carolina Gold rice the No. 1 cash crop in the world at the time.

“Not to mention they had to take out the pine trees and oak trees and vegetation, and clear out all the marsh, the weeds and the wag,” he says. “They had to fight off the alligators, snakes, mosquitoes, malaria, all that stuff.”

Then they built irrigation canals, berms and rice trunks. Then they flooded the fields. Then they harvested the rice. Then they thrashed the rice to separate the grain from the husk. Then they winnowed the rice to separate the grain from the chaff. Then they bagged the rice, and loaded it on English ships. Repeat. Season after season, year after year. All for the profit of the white plantation owners. Of the 7,000–10,000 people working the rice fields in this area before the Civil War, most lived on the island’s nine plantations.

“When the Emancipation Proclamation finally made it to this area … it was like a mass exodus,” he says. “Some went north, some went out west. But there were those who remained and stayed here on the island. And since it was too much for the plantation owners to pay for labor, they let the rice go out of business.”

The federal government did not fulfill its “40 acres and a mule” promise, so Sandy Islanders fended for themselves.

“The island itself is pretty much self-sufficient,” Captain Rommy says. “The people—how can I say it?—we are survivors. Resilient. Adaptive. Adaptable.”

Early Sandy Islanders used the discarded ballast bricks from English ships to build chimneys and homes. They hunted and fished. In 1880, they built the New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. They worshiped and prayed. They sang and they cooked.

Captain Rommy tells us all of this as we make our way across the Waccamaw and dock at the Mt. Arena community. His mother, Beulah Pyatt, greets us at the Pyatt General store, where she sells books, cookbooks, homemade clothing, postcards and artwork.

On our visit, recent flooding and high tides had damaged the store, but Mrs. Pyatt, a true Sandy Islander, demonstrated her flexibility and resilience—she set up shop on the porch. And it’s not the first time she’s had to accommodate the aftermath of storms. The store opened in 1986, and she says, “Three years later, Hugo came around and blew up the foundation.”

Mt. Arena is just one of several African-American communities on the island, where folks routinely travel the unnamed, unpaved roads for supplies at the General Store, thus avoiding the voyage to the mainland. When necessary, barges have been brought in to ferry people and supplies.

The straightforward question—one he always gets—is: Why not a bridge?

But “bridge” is kind of a curse word around here. The last talk of one happened when a textile tycoon and timber baron wanted to harvest their acreage on the island, and then secretly begin building a golf course. Through the work of institutions such as the Southern Environmental Law Center, the S.C. Coastal Conservation League, and the S.C. Department of Transportation, the preservationists persevered. In 2011, the Nature Conservancy purchased the land holdings for $11 million, in part to help preserve the red-cockaded woodpecker.

For his part, Captain Rommy is leading efforts to revitalize Sandy Island—to both preserve its old traditions and to secure its future.

“A lot of history has gone to the grave, but what’s still here, we’re trying to preserve,” he says. “I’d like to see our population—the families actually from the island—actually come back and utilize the land and see what a jewel they have here.”

___

Get There

All tours begin at the boat landing at the end of Sandy Island Road near Brookgreen Gardens, between Litchfield and Murrells Inlet.

Hours: In the summer, tours run Tuesday–Friday, 9–11:30 a.m. Winter hours are the same, but only run on Thursday and Friday.

Cost: Guided history tours start at $35 per adult, $20 for children ages 8–16, and $10 for children ages 7 and under. Captain Rommy Pyatt also offers senior and military discounts.

Details: For online booking and a complete listing of scheduled tours, visit toursdesandyisland.com or call (843) 408-7187.