Flowing through swamps and wooded areas, the slow moving waters of the Black, Big Pee Dee, Little Pee Dee, Sampit and Waccamaw rivers converge along the coast of Georgetown County to form the third largest estuarine drainage area on the Eastern Seaboard – Winyah Bay. 

-The Nature Conservancy

Winyah Bay has long been the sustenance for the geographic region now known as Georgetown South Carolina. From the first inhabitants, the Indians, hunting and fishing has always been the way of life around Winyah Bay.  In 1526, Spaniards made the first recorded North American expedition to Winyah Bay. For a colonist, the indigenous fauna of waterfowl, turkey, deer, fish and shellfish provided the basics to survive. In addition to providing an exceptional wildlife habitat, the rivers that fed the Winyah Bay also provided a ripe environment for a burgeoning planter society. It began with indigo, but following the American Revolution, rice became the staple crop. By 1840, the tidal fields along the six rivers around Georgetown were responsible for producing nearly one-half of the total rice crop of the United States. Rice planting not only produced tremendous wealth for the people of Georgetown, but also provided for a leisurely lifestyle that included hunting waterfowl in the harvested rice fields during the winter months. At the beginning of the 1900’s, a compounding of adverse impacts on the Georgetown rice planters, which included new mechanization that created better efficiencies for upland planting and increased global production from Asian markets, in addition to the disrupted labor resources for the southern planters, virtually ended all commercial rice production around the Winyah Bay.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland fell out of a boat while visiting a Georgetown-area rice plantation on a wintertime duck hunting trip. The hefty President’s misfortune made the headlines on newspapers across the country, and thus Georgetown’s rice fields of wintering waterfowl was no longer a local secret. In 1898, a group of wealthy hunters from mostly New York and Philadelphia established the Santee Gun Club. This gun club was the Augusta National for duck hunters with about 23,000 acres at South Santee River delta. It was reported that 6 members of the Santee Gun Club went out at 4:00 in the morning on November 15, 1902, and in seven hours they shot 242 birds. Stories like this quickly spread among the well-off northern industrialist duck hunters, so that they started to winter south at numbers that would seem to rival the waterfowl they wanted to hunt.  

In 1905, Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, a native South Carolinian who became a Wall Street financier, bought all the rice plantations at the foot of the Waccamaw Neck; a total of more than 17,000 acres. Baruch’s Hobcaw Barony was his winter retreat to hunt ducks, turkey, and deer, as well as to entertain many of his notable friends, which included Winston Churchill and FDR. After visiting the Santee Gun Club in 1906, Captain I.E. Emerson, who made his fortune with BromoSeltzer, liked the area so much that he purchased several rice estates along the Waccamaw River to create his Arcadia Plantation. In 1911, William Yawkey started purchasing large tracts at the mouth of the Winyah Bay that would eventually accumulate to more than 20,000 acres. William died in 1919 and his maternal nephew and adoptive son Tom, inherited his considerable fortune in timberland, mines and oil wells. Tom Yawkey, who would later be known as the legendary Boston Red Sox owner, enjoyed visiting his Georgetown properties, wintering there every year until his death in 1976.

For some of Georgetown’s new Yankee landowners, Winyah Bay property was never meant to be an investment. As property values began to rise along the South Carolina coast, their appreciation and respect for the pristine natural resources that provided them regular escapes from their northern city life, guided them to put their lands into protective custody. Yawkey and the Santee Gun Club members gave their large tracts to conservation organizations and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Hobcaw Barony is operated by the Belle W. Baruch Foundation, dedicated to marine, coastal, and forestry research under agreements with the University of South Carolina and Clemson University. Many other private owners of former rice plantations in Georgetown County have entered into conservation easements that prohibit their lands from ever being subdivided or developed in the future.    

The Winyah Bay is Georgetown’s heritage.