Daufuskie Island, South Carolina

Daufuskie Island is a residential sea island between Savannah, Georgia and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It has a full-time population of around 300 and is home to two resorts.

The island was home to a sizable population of Gullah inhabitants from the end of the Civil War until very recently. Gullah are the decendents of freed slaves. The Pat Conroy novel The Water is Wide was set on Daufuskie, fictionalized as Yamacraw Island. The book recounts Mr. Conroy's experiences teaching on the island in the 1960's, when the Gullah lifestyle of living off the crabs and oysters in the Calibogue Sound was threatened by industrial waste.

The island is now split into three parts. To the northeast is the Haig Point Golf Club, an exclusive residential club with a small number of year round residents and a fair number of members who maintain vacation homes there. Membership at the Haig Point is quite expensive. South of this is the Daufuskie Island Club, a private vacation club also centered on golf and tennis, but with no residential component. Members of the public can vacation at this club. The western part of the island is unincorporated land, with several dozen residents living in a variety of accommodations, from trailers to beautiful waterfront homes with private docks.

The Haig Point club has its own private ferry service, which is also contracted by the county to provide public ferry service between Hilton Head and the Daufuskie municipal dock and to shuttle the handful of children on the island to school on Hilton Head. The Daufuskie Island Club also runs its own ferry service. Residents of the clubs, as well as some of the other residents on the island, use golf carts and bicycles to travel around the island, although there are a handful of cars and trucks on the unincorporated portion of the island.