Hardeeville

Hardeeville sits just above the Savannah River at the South Carolina-Georgia line, and it has reinvented itself more than once. The area's first European settlement was Purrysburg, a Swiss Huguenot colony planted on the Savannah River in seventeen thirty-one under Colonel Jean Pierre Purry, but it barely lasted a generation before residents drifted toward Oglethorpe's more promising Savannah. The town that stands today traces its name to the Hardee family, whose descendants established a stop called Hardee's Station on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad in the mid-eighteen hundreds.

Timber and a lumber company kept the economy going in the early nineteen hundreds. Hardeeville was formally incorporated in nineteen eleven and has been among the fastest-growing municipalities in South Carolina, fueled by its location where Interstate Ninety-Five crosses into Georgia.