Old Town Bluffton

Park once and walk. Calhoun Street runs downhill to the May River, and the whole of Old Town is within a few blocks of it.

The galleries are the main event, and there are a lot of them for a town this size — painting, photography, pottery, printmaking, furniture and framing, most in converted cottages with the artist frequently on the premises. This is where to buy Lowcountry work if you want something better than a lighthouse print: marsh at low light, tidal creeks, oyster shell, egrets, shrimp boats, painted by people who see it in February as well as July.

The Church of the Cross at the bottom of the street, on the bluff. Go inside if it is open, look up at the heart pine, and then go round to the river side and look at the view the congregation has had since 1857.

Eating: Calhoun Street and its immediate surroundings carry a disproportionate number of good restaurants for a town of this size, from casual seafood to proper dinner. Book in season.

The weekly farmers market takes over part of Calhoun Street in season, with produce, seafood, prepared food and music. The day it runs has moved over the years, so check before planning around it.

The May River is a short, clean tidal river, and its oyster beds have supported Bluffton since before the Civil War. The Bluffton Oyster Company on Wharf Street still works them, and it is the last place in South Carolina where oysters are shucked by hand rather than machine-processed — mostly by women who have been doing it for decades, in cold concrete rooms, standing on a foundation of discarded shell built up over two hundred years.

Buy over the counter and cook them yourself, or eat next door. Lowcountry oysters are clustered rather than single, small, intensely salty, and traditionally roasted over a fire under wet sacking rather than served on ice — an oyster roast is a social event here, not a menu item.

Seasons matter. Local oysters, clams and mussels run roughly mid-September to mid-May; local shrimp from around mid-June into January. Outside those windows what you are eating came from somewhere else, and any honest place will tell you so.

Water quality in the May River is a live local issue, and the reason development pressure around Bluffton is fought over so hard. The oyster beds are the tell.

Bluffton was a summer town for Lowcountry planters, built on a bluff to catch the river breeze, and it was also politically incandescent. In 1844 a meeting held here launched what became known as the Bluffton Movement, an early push for South Carolina to act alone against federal tariffs — a precursor to secession that is a real part of why the town is in the history books at all.

In June 1863, Union troops came up the May River and burned it. Most of Bluffton went. A small number of buildings survived, the Church of the Cross and a handful of houses among them, and the town rebuilt slowly and stayed small for the next century.

That is why Old Town is a few streets of modest wooden cottages rather than a grand antebellum district: what you are looking at is mostly the rebuilding, around a few survivors. Oyster Factory Park, a small waterfront park on the river, holds the Garvin-Garvey Freedman's Cottage, a restored house built by a formerly enslaved man after the war — the freedmen's side of the same story, and the one usually left out.