8 South Carolina Small Towns Locals Love (and 3 Tourists Overrun)

Pearl Fryar hauled a dying azalea home from the dump one afternoon in Bishopville, chasing a Yard of the Month award the local garden club had never handed a Black homeowner.

He grabbed a chainsaw instead of pruning shears.

Three decades later, a few tourist buses park outside his old cornfield while a horse race an hour up the road can fill a town of around 9,000 with 71,000 strangers in one afternoon.

These are the South Carolina small towns locals love away from the sand, and those they hand over to strangers once a year.

Let’s start with the towns South Carolinians love.

1. Abbeville

Abbeville centers on a Court Square that looks lifted from a movie set.

Restored storefronts from the 1800s wrap the block in brick and iron balconies.

The Abbeville Opera House commands one corner, reopened to its 1908 grandeur and still staging shows more than a century after vaudeville’s touring companies once packed its stage.

Fewer than 5,000 people call Abbeville home.

History leans harder on this small town than its size suggests.

Locals gathered on a hill outside town in November 1860 to push South Carolina toward secession, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis held his final council of war at the Burt-Stark Mansion less than five years later, a short walk from the Square.

This one town claims both roles.

2. Cheraw

Cheraw earned the nickname the Prettiest Town in Dixie, and the title still fits.

Merchants laid out the streets and a central Town Green back in the 1760s, and that green still anchors the historic district today.

A bronze statue of jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie stands on the Town Green, trumpet bent skyward, marking the town where he grew up before he left for music school at 16.

Cheraw never forgot him.

Nearly 40 buildings in the Cheraw Historic District carry a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

Locals gather there most Sundays for a concert under the same shade trees Gillespie once knew.

3. McClellanville

McClellanville runs on shrimping, the same way it has for generations.

Trawlers head out from the town docks before sunrise and come back loaded with shrimp, oysters, and whatever else the tide brought in.

Fewer than 700 people live here.

Hurricane Hugo hit McClellanville dead-on in 1989, and the storm surge climbed to about 16 feet, dropping shrimp boats in front yards and flattening century-old oaks.

The town rebuilt anyway.

Walk the shaded streets today, and Hugo barely shows, aside from a few markers noting how high the water climbed.

Locals still measure a bad storm against that one.

4. Walhalla

Walhalla carries its German name on purpose.

Members of Charleston’s German Colonization Society settled the town in 1850.

Fewer than 4,500 people live there full time.

Every third weekend of October, Walhalla throws an Oktoberfest complete with dirndls, lederhosen, and enough bratwurst to feed the whole Upstate.

Tens of thousands show up.

The rest of the year, Walhalla settles back into its usual calm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, close enough to Issaqueena Falls and the old Stumphouse Tunnel that locals treat both like a backyard.

5. Bishopville

Bishopville is the town Pearl Fryar put on the map.

He rescued discarded plants from a local nursery’s compost pile and shaped them with a chainsaw into arches, spirals, and a giant topiary heart.

He won his Yard of the Month award in 1985.

Three decades of work turned his three-acre yard into an internationally known topiary garden, drawing thousands of visitors a year from well outside Lee County.

Fryar passed away in April 2026, but the garden he built stays open to the public year-round, free of charge, tended now by a nonprofit that carries his name forward.

The chainsaw is retired.

The garden isn’t.

6. Blackville

Blackville's biggest attraction sits down a dirt road outside town, not on Main Street.

God's Acre Healing Springs sits on five acres a local landowner deeded directly to God in 1944, land nobody can ever sell or tax.

People drive in from across the Southeast to fill jugs with water they believe carries healing properties.

Nobody charges a cent.

Blackville itself holds fewer than 2,000 residents, a low-key grid of streets a few minutes from the springs.

Locals fill their own jugs on the way to church and think nothing of it.

7. Due West

Due West runs on college time, and has since 1839.

Erskine College sits at the center of the whole town, one of South Carolina's oldest colleges, and Due West still leans into calling itself a classic college town.

About 800 students fill Erskine's halls most semesters, in a town of roughly 1,300 people total.

The math is close.

Move-in weekend nearly doubles the population overnight, then the town settles back into a calmer, tree-lined routine for the rest of the school year.

8. Ridgeway

Ridgeway holds 266 people, according to the last census.

Most drivers need the town's historical marker to notice they've arrived.

The whole town grew up around a railroad decision, when the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad chose a ridge route over the Camden line in the 1800s and left the name behind.

Storefronts from the cotton boom of the 1890s through 1915 still line the tracks, largely unchanged.

Ridgeway never got big enough to tear any of it down.

Small stayed put here.

Where Crowds Outnumber Locals

These are the small towns that receive so many tourists that many South Carolinians avoid them.

1. Camden

Camden is the oldest inland town in South Carolina, platted in the backcountry in 1733.

Most weekends, that history barely registers past a stroll around the historic district and a stop at the National Steeplechase Museum.

Then the Carolina Cup steeplechase arrives every spring at Springdale Race Course.

The race once packed 71,000 fans onto the grounds in a single afternoon, a National Steeplechase Association attendance record that still stands.

Camden holds around 9,000 people now.

Locals plan their whole week around which back roads still move on Cup Saturday.

2. Beaufort

Hollywood keeps returning to Beaufort's Bay Street.

Forrest Gump, The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, and The Big Chill have all used the town as a backdrop, drawn to streets of antebellum homes that date back to 1711.

Tour buses now line Bay Street most weekends, cameras out for the same waterfront park the films made famous.

Parking vanishes by mid-morning on a Saturday.

Some longtime residents walk the historic district at sunrise now, before the tour guides start their first loop, or drive over to Lady's Island to shop and eat instead.

The film crews always find their way back.

3. Travelers Rest

Travelers Rest spent most of its history as exactly what its name promised, a stopover on the old stagecoach road into the mountains.

Then the Swamp Rabbit Trail opened in 2010, a nearly 20-mile bike and walking path connecting the town straight to downtown Greenville.

More than 500,000 people use the trail every year now.

Most of them are visitors.