After spending three years researching the history of Sandy Island, Conway author Susan Hoffer McMillan declares it a unique place whose history needed to be told. And now it’s been done in a 151-page book featuring original watercolor scenes from the Island and scores of historic photographs from the Brookgreen Gardens collection.
“I knew it was a rice field, but it was also slave villages and several of the plantations had manor houses that were occupied, predominantly two of them, but looking at it today, it’s hard to visualize how it must have been because it’s all grown up in forest." says McMillan. "But, McMillan said, the circumstances surrounding the slaves is one of the least known things about the island. Most of the information available now comes from Ann and Hyatt Huntington, who gathered material and purchased it so they were important chroniclers of history.
Sandy Island is truly an island covering about 40 square miles in Georgetown County. It began as a village for plantation slaves who produced rice. Even today there are no paved roads on Sandy Island and no bridges connecting it to the mainland. The handful of residents who continue to live there either have their own watercraft or take the school ferry boat when they need to go to the mainland.
Sandy Island has several homes, a bed and breakfast house, a general store, a church and an old schoolhouse that has been transformed into a library by a team from Coastal Carolina University. School officials believe the schoolhouse is headed soon to the national historic register list.