Walterboro: Front Porch of the Lowcountry

Walterboro was born from a very specific kind of misery. In the seventeen eighties, rice planters along the Edisto, Combahee, and Ashepoo Rivers spent every summer watching their enslaved workforces sicken and die from malaria while they themselves fled fifty miles to Charleston to escape the fever season. It was an exhausting and expensive annual migration. So sometime around seventeen eighty-three, a handful of planting families decided to build a closer refuge, a little inland village among the pines and freshwater springs of Colleton County, halfway between the swamps and the city. They named it after two brothers whose summer house was already there, the Walters.

What began as a seasonal escape grew into the county seat and one of the Lowcountry's most politically charged towns. In eighteen twenty-eight, a firebrand lawyer named Robert Barnwell Rhett, who would later earn the title Father of Secession, stood at the Walterboro Courthouse and launched the Nullification movement, the doctrine that individual states had the right to nullify federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. The specific target was the Tariff of eighteen twenty-eight, which South Carolina's planting class believed was strangling their economy for the benefit of Northern manufacturers. The speech Rhett delivered here was one of the opening salvos in a constitutional argument that would echo for the next thirty years, right up to Fort Sumter.

Today Walterboro calls itself the Front Porch of the Lowcountry. Its historic downtown retains blocks of antebellum and early-twentieth-century architecture, including the courthouse where Rhett made history. The ACE Basin, one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the East Coast, stretches across the county to the south.