South Carolina Lowcountry

The region includes significant salt marshes and other coastal waterways, making it an important source of biodiversity in South Carolina.

Once known for its slave-based agricultural wealth in rice and indigo, crops that flourished in the hot subtropical climate, the Lowcountry today is known for its historic cities and communities, natural environment, cultural heritage, and tourism industry.

The Carolina Sandhills are interpreted as eolian (wind-blown) sand sheets and dunes that were mobilized episodically approximately 75,000 to 6,000 years ago.

[2] Most of the published luminescence ages from the sand are coincident with the last glaciation, a time when the southeastern United States had colder air temperatures and stronger winds.

Once used to fertilize fields of cotton, the mud is pervaded by decaying organic matter and bacteria that feed on it, giving it a notoriously sulfurous stench.

[15] Timothy Ford, a lawyer born in Trenton, New Jersey, moved to the Lowcountry in 1760 and criticized the gentry as having an "effeminate spirit of luxury and dissipation" and seemingly only cared about amusement, gambling, accumulation of wealth, and vanity.

[15] At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, a subgroup of Lowcountry gentry emerged to prominence, the "Rice Pharaohs" who would create generational wealth with them and their descendants dominating South Carolinian politics in an effort to preserve slavery at all costs.

[15] Due to the harsh climate and labor intensive work required to harvest rice, planters at the time deemed it "impossible" to cultivate the region.

[15] In order to compete with inland plantations, the Lowcountry gentry began buying land from Alabama to Texas and advocating for the reopening of the slave trade.

A scenic vista from an observation area at Hunting Island State Park near Beaufort . Such salt marshes are emblematic of the Lowcountry and its landscapes, but are also vulnerable to climate change caused sea level rise and development of tourism and housing .
Definitions of the "Lowcountry" area always include the counties in dark red, less often those in lighter shades.
Before the Civil War, the Lowcountry referred to all territory east and south of the Sandhills , while all territory to the north and west where considered the "Piedmont"