Beginning in the late 1600s, coastal South Carolina's unique blend of low-lying rivers and tidal surge prompted the cultivation of rice. By 1850, Georgetown County was producing a million pounds a year, a full half of the nation's output. With prices averaging 32 cents a pound, the small community of Georgetown had become the wealthiest city in the state and South Carolina the second-wealthiest state in the country, behind Massachusetts. The only problem was living long enough to enjoy it.

Percival Pawley was one of those early planters, and his agriculturally useless island earned a second look in the early 1700s, when it was discovered that the steady offshore breezes not only kept the malaria-carrying mosquitoes who flourished in the flooded rice fields grounded, but that the twice-daily tidal flow in the marshy channels prevented them from breeding. The first "summer houses" were built on the mainland, but beginning in the 1820s, the island itself became the place to be from May to November.

And it still is, though all that remains of those early days are 12 well-weathered clapboard cottages (one of which is now Evans Pelican Inn), plus Allston's Bank (also known as the South Causeway), built by South Carolina governor and Pawleys Island landowner Robert F. W. Allston in 1846.