Three empires fought over this South Carolina port town, and it outlasted all of them

It’s older, deeper, and stranger than you’d expect

Port Royal Sound is the second deepest natural harbor on the East Coast, and for 300 years, everyone wanted it. The Spanish came first, then the French, then the British.

The British finally made it stick in 1711, and the city they built on Port Royal Island has been quietly collecting history ever since. Beaufort doesn’t shout.

It just sits there under its live oaks with 300 years of stories, and the more you look, the more you find.

475 historic buildings packed into 304 acres

Beaufort’s historic district covers 304 acres and holds 475 contributing historic resources, from Federal-style row houses to Greek Revival mansions with two-story porticos.

It landed on the National Register of Historic Places in December 1969 and earned National Historic Landmark status in 1973, making it one of only four such landmark districts in all of South Carolina.

The period of significance was later extended to 1950, so the story the district tells runs longer and wider than most people expect.

Beaufort’s walls are made from oyster shells

Builders here didn’t always use brick or wood. They burned oyster shells and mixed the ash with sand and lime to make tabby, an early form of concrete that hardens into walls still standing today.

Beaufort and the surrounding Sea Islands hold the largest concentration of tabby structures in America.

You can see it in the foundation of the John Mark Verdier House on Bay Street, in the walls of St. Helena’s Episcopal Church, and in exposed sections along Bay Street alleyways.

Fort Frederick, built by the British in 1730, contains the oldest known example of tabby in the country.

Step inside the only antebellum planter’s house open to the public

The John Mark Verdier House went up around 1804, built for a French Huguenot merchant who made his money in indigo and Sea Island cotton.

It’s the only historic planter’s house in Beaufort you can actually walk through as a museum. The Marquis de Lafayette stayed here during his 1825 tour of the United States.

During the Civil War, Union Army officers used it as their headquarters. In the 1940s, a group of local citizens stopped it from being torn down.

It opened as a museum in 1976, sitting on its original tabby foundation on Bay Street.

Robert Smalls sailed a Confederate ship to freedom and then came back

Robert Smalls was born into slavery in 1839 at 511 Prince Street, right here in Beaufort.

In 1862, while working as a crewman on the Confederate transport ship CSS Planter, he commandeered the vessel and sailed it past Confederate guns to the Union fleet, taking his family with him.

After the war, he bought the house where he had once been enslaved, paying $605 at a tax auction in January 1864.

He went on to serve five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and authored the state legislation that created South Carolina’s first free public school system.

His statue stands at Tabernacle Baptist Church on Craven Street, where he is buried.

The first national park dedicated to Reconstruction sits downtown

No other unit in the entire National Park System focuses on Reconstruction the way this one does.

President Obama established it as a national monument in January 2017, and it was redesignated a national historical park in 2019. The visitor center operates out of the Old Beaufort Firehouse at 706 Craven Street.

Rangers lead walking tours multiple times daily.

The park also covers Penn Center’s Darrah Hall and Brick Baptist Church on St. Helena Island, plus the Camp Saxton site in Port Royal, where the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud to roughly 3,000 enslaved people on January 1, 1863.

Gullah Geechee culture is alive and rooted here

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor runs along the coast from North Carolina to Florida, and Beaufort sits close to its center. In 2022, the corridor commission moved its headquarters here.

About 16 miles away on St. Helena Island, Penn Center was founded in 1862 as one of the first schools in the South for formerly enslaved people.

It became a National Historic Landmark District in 1974 and still operates as a center for Gullah cultural heritage.

The York W. Bailey Museum at Penn Center tells the history of the Gullah Geechee community across the Sea Islands, and it does it without filters.

Seven acres of waterfront park right in the middle of downtown

Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park stretches seven acres along the Beaufort River, named after the mayor who pushed to replace rotting, abandoned docks with public green space.

Walk the paved promenade along the seawall, or sit on one of the oversized swinging benches that face the water. A pavilion hosts concerts, and a playground makes it work for families.

Two of the bigger events on the local calendar happen here: the Beaufort Water Festival in July and the Beaufort Shrimp Festival in October.

Watch the Woods Memorial Bridge swing open for passing boats, one of only a handful of swing bridges still operating in South Carolina.

Bay Street has no chains, just local shops and a literary legacy

Bay Street is where Beaufort does its daily business.

Locally owned shops, art galleries, and restaurants line the street, and there are no national chains anywhere downtown.

St. Helena’s Episcopal Church, established in 1712, stands on Church Street with a graveyard holding headstones from the mid-1700s.

On Craven Street, the Pat Conroy Literary Center honors one of the South’s most celebrated writers, who called Beaufort home.

The whole downtown moves at walking pace, and that turns out to be exactly the right speed for a city this old.

10 miles of flat trail through Lowcountry marsh and trestle

The Spanish Moss Trail follows the former Port Royal Railroad right of way through northern Beaufort County, running 10 miles on a 12-foot-wide paved surface that stays flat the entire way. You can walk, run, or ride a bike.

The trail crosses tidal creeks, cuts through Lowcountry marshes, and passes over a restored railroad trestle. A downtown connector ties the Depot Trailhead to the Bay Street waterfront.

Outside magazine named it one of the top urban trails in the country in 2020. When the full project is done, it’ll stretch close to 15 miles.

South Carolina’s most visited state park is 16 miles away

Hunting Island State Park covers roughly 5,000 acres about 16 miles east of downtown, and more people visit it than any other state park in South Carolina.

The park takes in more than four miles of beach, maritime forest, and saltwater marsh.

The Civilian Conservation Corps built it out during the 1930s, and it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Hunting Island Lighthouse was first built in 1859, destroyed in the Civil War, rebuilt in 1875, and moved more than a mile inland in 1889 when the beach started eating away at its foundation.

It’s the only publicly accessible lighthouse in South Carolina, with 167 steps up to views of the ocean and the forest below. As of May 2026, it’s scheduled to reopen following renovations.

A Civil War cemetery with 18,500 graves still takes new burials today

President Lincoln designated Beaufort National Cemetery on Feb. 10, 1863, making it one of the oldest national cemeteries in the country.

The 33-acre site holds more than 18,500 interments, beginning with Union troops and sailors who died in the region during the Civil War. Graves from every major American conflict since then fill the grounds.

Live oaks draped in Spanish moss shade the cemetery, and a brick wall built in 1876 runs along the perimeter. It’s not a memorial.

It’s an active national cemetery, still receiving burials, in the middle of a city that started before the United States did.

Explore Beaufort’s Historic District in South Carolina

You can start your visit at the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park visitor center at 706 Craven Street, where rangers can point you toward walking tours of the area.

The Beaufort Visitor Center also has self-guided walking tour maps that cover the historic district on foot. Hunting Island State Park is a short drive east if you want a beach day or a lighthouse climb.

The Spanish Moss Trail is accessible from the Depot Road Trailhead near downtown. Beaufort sits about 70 miles south of Charleston in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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