Bluffton Old Town: Oysters, Gothic Churches & May River Light

Bluffton's Old Town is a surprise in a region dominated by resort development: a genuine antebellum Lowcountry town, most of it surviving intact on a narrow bluff above the May River, with pre-Civil War houses under live oak canopies, a functioning oyster company on the waterfront, and a streetscape that has changed only incrementally in 150 years. The town was founded in the 1820s as a summer retreat for Sea Island planters, who came here to escape the malaria season on their island plantations, and the resulting architecture — modest but graceful wooden houses with deep piazzas and board-and-batten siding under enormous live oaks — reflects a genuine vernacular Lowcountry building tradition rather than the deliberate antebellum grandeur of Beaufort or Charleston. In July 1863, Union troops burned most of Bluffton in retaliation for Confederate guerrilla activity along the river. Only two structures are documented to have survived the fire: the Church of the Cross and the Heyward House. Everything else in the Old Town, including the surviving antebellum-looking houses along Calhoun and Boundary streets, was rebuilt in the immediate postwar years by returning residents — so it is a Confederate-era townscape rebuilt in Confederate-era style by people determined to recreate what they had lost, which is itself a kind of historical document.

The Church of the Cross, completed in 1857 on a bluff overlooking the May River, is the finest Gothic Revival church in the South Carolina Lowcountry and one of only two buildings in Bluffton to survive the 1863 Union burning. The church was designed by Edward Brickell White, the Charleston architect responsible for several important antebellum Gothic Revival buildings in the region, in board-and-batten Gothic style with pointed arched windows of unusual elegance and proportions. The interior is simple and beautiful: exposed ceiling timbers, original pews, and colored glass in the lancet windows casting patterns of light across the nave in morning. The churchyard, surrounded by live oaks, contains graves dating from the antebellum period. Union soldiers camped in and around the church during the 1863 occupation but did not burn it — accounts vary on whether this was deliberate sparing or simply good fortune — making it the oldest surviving church building in Bluffton.

The Bluffton Oyster Company on Wharf Street is the last working oyster shucking house on the May River and one of the most authentic seafood operations on the South Carolina coast. The company harvests wild May River oysters from the estuary in the traditional Lowcountry cluster style — not the individual single oysters of the fine dining world, but the natural-growth clusters of multiple oysters sharing a shell, with a brine intensity that reflects the particular chemistry of the May River estuary. Oysters are sold raw by the bushel or half-bushel directly from the shucking house, or you can arrange to have them roasted in the traditional Lowcountry style — piled on a sheet of metal over a wood fire, covered with burlap soaked in river water, steamed just until they open. The simplicity of the operation — the weathered dock, the river traffic, the smell of salt water and wood smoke — is as close as you will get to old Lowcountry oyster culture without traveling to the 19th century.

The Heyward House, one of the two buildings to survive the 1863 burning of Bluffton, is a modest 1840s plantation house that has been restored and furnished as a museum of antebellum Lowcountry domestic life. The house belonged to the Heyward family, a prominent South Carolina planter family, and the docent tours are unusually candid about the social world — including the lives of enslaved domestic workers — that the house represents. The house also serves as the Bluffton visitor center, with maps of the Old Town walking tour and information on the surrounding area.

Calhoun Street, the spine of Bluffton Old Town, is lined with a cluster of independently operated art galleries, antique shops, and artisan studios that draw buyers from Hilton Head Island and beyond. The art here runs toward Lowcountry subject matter — marsh landscapes, shrimping boats, herons and egrets — and the antique shops have the kind of deep, eccentric inventory that only small Southern towns accumulate: silver, furniture, quilts, old maps of the coast, and occasional extraordinary finds from the estates of longtime Lowcountry families.