9 Arguments Georgians and South Carolinians Will Never Settle

About 300 miles of river separate Georgia from South Carolina, and that hasn’t settled a single argument between residents of those two states.

From the football field to the barbecue pit, these are the arguments Georgians and South Carolinians will never settle.

1. Who Grows More Peaches

Georgia stamps a peach on its license plates and calls itself the Peach State. Many Georgians expect that settles things.

It doesn’t.

South Carolina produces roughly 11% of the peaches grown in the U.S. to Georgia’s nearly 4%, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures reported by the Greenville News.

South Carolina’s peach farms have averaged more than 63,000 tons a year since 2004, worth about $1.3 billion to state growers.

The gap holds up even in a disaster year for Georgia.

A brutal spring freeze wiped out much of the Southeast’s 2023 crop, and Georgia’s harvest that year fell to its lowest level since 1955, according to USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, while South Carolina still moved about 38,000 tons.

South Carolina walked off with the actual tonnage, leaving Georgia to defend a nickname the numbers don’t back up.

South Carolina also beat Georgia to the paperwork, declaring the peach its official state fruit in 1984, eleven years before Georgia followed suit in 1995.

Many Georgians counter that the state got into the peach business commercially first, which is the entire reason the nickname stuck in the first place.

That argument doesn’t move a single crate of fruit.

A South Carolina peach still outships a Georgia peach in many seasons, whatever the license plate says.

2. Bulldogs Against Gamecocks

Georgia and South Carolina have been settling their differences on a football field since 1894, and the fans still haven’t calmed down about any of it.

The Georgia Bulldogs lead the all-time series 55-19-2 across 76 meetings, including a 10-game win streak that ran from 1908 to 1941 and another from 1966 to 1977.

South Carolina fans point to a different stretch.

The Gamecocks beat Georgia twice in a row in 2000 and 2001, right as the series heated back up after South Carolina joined the Southeastern Conference (SEC) in 1992.

The two teams are scheduled to meet again on November 21, 2026.

Bragging rights reset every fall.

Neither fan base has ever agreed to let the other side keep them.

3. Who Owns the River Islands

Georgia and South Carolina share one state line, and it runs straight down the middle of the Savannah River.

That should be simple.

It isn’t.

Dredging and shifting sediment kept building new islands in the river through the 20th century, and by 1990 the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in and decide who owned them.

The court ruled for South Carolina, awarding the state roughly 3,000 acres of land and 7,000 acres of water that Georgia had assumed was still up for grabs.

Many Georgians haven’t let it go, and the ruling didn’t end the fight.

Every fresh sandbar reopens the same argument, whatever the 1990 ruling said.

4. Whose Barbecue Wins

South Carolina and Georgia both smoke a mean pork shoulder, and neither state will touch the other’s sauce.

South Carolina’s mustard-based “Carolina Gold” is the outlier of the barbecue world, a tangy yellow sauce food historians trace to a spot near Holly Hill, South Carolina, as far back as the early 1930s.

Joe Bessinger started selling it at his Holly Hill Café in 1939, and his son Maurice, just 9 years old at the time, grew up working the stove there.

Maurice didn’t open his own place, Piggie Park, until 1953, and it’s carried the family’s mustard sauce ever since.

Georgia never adopted it.

Georgia barbecue joints largely stick with the tomato-and-vinegar sauces common across the rest of the South, the kind South Carolinians consider ordinary.

Ordinary sells fine in Georgia.

Nationally, South Carolina narrowly edges out Georgia for barbecue quality in a YouGov-backed survey, 32% to 30%.

Georgia counters with the number that counts on a Tuesday night: It ranks second in the country for barbecue restaurants per capita, ahead of South Carolina’s fifth-place finish.

A bottle of mustard sauce on a Georgia table still gets a second look.

5. Charleston or Savannah

Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, sit close enough to share tourists, and far enough apart to never share the crown.

Charleston held the No. 1 spot in Travel + Leisure’s reader-voted Best City in the U.S. survey for 12 years straight, all the way through 2024.

Then 2025 happened.

Santa Fe took the top spot, New Orleans came in second, and Charleston slipped to third, with Savannah right behind it in fourth.

Savannah’s visitor numbers are closing the gap.

Charleston’s tourism boosters still aren’t handing over anything.

6. Whose Beaches Win

Georgia’s Golden Isles and South Carolina’s Grand Strand both promise a barrier-island vacation, but the Grand Strand pulls in far more visitors every year.

Georgia’s Golden Isles, which include St. Simons, Jekyll Island, and Sea Island, generate more than $1.6 billion a year in visitor spending.

Jekyll Island alone draws about 3.6 million visitors annually, according to the Golden Isles Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Jekyll Island Authority.

South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach alone drew about 18.2 million visitors in 2024, spending more than $13.2 billion along the Grand Strand, though 2025 turnout slipped roughly 3% behind that pace.

Roughly five times the crowd.

Many Georgians counter that the Golden Isles never wanted Myrtle Beach’s kind of crowd in the first place, and many visitors agree that’s the appeal.

Fewer crowds, better parking.

7. Who Profits From the Masters

Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament belong to Georgia, on Georgia soil, under a Georgia zip code, and Georgia claims the lion’s share of the credit for hosting it.

South Carolina’s own state tourism office disagrees with how the credit gets split.

An estimated 35 to 40% of the tournament’s economic impact spills across the Savannah River into South Carolina towns like Aiken and North Augusta, according to the state’s own tourism office.

That’s not pocket change for a tournament Georgia treats as entirely its own.

Hotels fill up on both sides of the state line every April.

Restaurants in North Augusta book tables a year in advance.

Georgia keeps the green jacket.

South Carolina keeps insisting it earned its cut.

8. Who Invented American Golf

Georgia and South Carolina both claim to have invented American golf, and the argument predates the Civil War by about 75 years.

Charleston’s South Carolina Golf Club organized in 1786, playing out of a course called Harleston Green.

Savannah’s own golf club didn’t organize until the mid-1790s, roughly a decade later.

Golf historians and Charleston’s own record widely credit the South Carolina Golf Club with the earlier claim, though Savannah’s club still calls itself the oldest golf club in the country.

Ten years.

In a 240-year-old argument, that’s the whole case.

9. Whose Boiled Peanuts Rule

Georgia and South Carolina both treat a bag of boiled peanuts like a birthright, and only one of them made it official.

South Carolina’s legislature signed boiled peanuts into law as the state’s official snack food in 2006, under Gov. Mark Sanford.

Georgia has no official state snack at all.

It didn’t need the paperwork.

Food Network named boiled peanuts Georgia’s most iconic food in 2026, beating out peach cobbler, fried chicken, and Brunswick stew for the title.