For the Love of Folly

Stratton Lawrence first fell in love with Folly Beach from a photograph. It was a simple black and white of the Morris Island lighthouse hanging on his friend’s dorm room wall at Davidson College and without knowing where the photo was taken, Lawrence knew he wanted to see it in person. He was shocked when he found out that the island was near Charleston, a place his family visited regularly while he was growing up.
“I had grown up going to Camp St. Christopher [on Seabrook Island], but this was the first time I had seen Folly and I really connected with the place,” says Lawrence.
Within a couple months, Lawrence drove down to see Folly Beach in person and for his last few college years, three months didn’t go by without a visit.
By 2007, Lawrence was finally able to move to the island and as of 2009, he was able to work and live there without needing to cross the bridge.
Known for his 40 plus cover stories in the Charleston City Paper and, more recently, his cover stories in the Charleston Scene as well as several other well-known area publications, it was his work as the editor of the former Folly Current newspaper that encouraged the publishers at the local Arcadia Publishing company to approach him about writing a book on Folly.
“Arcadia already had books on Isle of Palms, Johns Island, Wadmalaw, and other Charleston islands but no book on Folly Beach. They asked me and I reached out to the community to see if there was an interest and if there were any pictures out there [from the island’s history] that had not been published yet. I got a great response,” says Lawrence.
After a little more than a year of interviews, research, and culling through more than 1500 images of Folly’s past, Lawrence was pleased to announce the release of Folly Beach this past April, the latest in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series.
Consisting of five chapters and 128 pages, Folly Beach opens with the chapter “A Wild Sliver of Land,” which describes Folly as a summer hunting and fishing ground for early Native American Indians and as an overnight campsite for pirates. The name “folly,” he notes, was an Old English term for dense foliage, though the island enjoyed a few monikers, such as Coffin Land, before settling with Folly Beach. The following chapters, according to Lawrence, are written in an order “that makes the most sense when telling the story of Folly.”
“People weren’t coming to Folly to vacation until 1918 and between 1921 and 1925, life on the island exploded. I loved learning about that era and the boom and how Folly became a day trip destination within half a decade,” says Lawrence.
From hurricane aftermaths to hard-up surfers using canvas mattresses as surf boards, Folly Beach conveys the wild spirit as well as the great hearts of the people who have chosen to live on this remarkable little island.
“One of the most important things I wanted to convey [with the book] is that no matter how much Folly Beach has changed, so much has remained the same. I found pictures of bumper to bumper traffic on Center Street from the 1940s, and surfers marching in protest of an attempt to limit the surf area on the beach in the 1970s. This past year may have been divisive for Folly Beach, but we’ve persevered in the past and we’ll keep doing so going forward,” says Lawrence.
Want your own copy of Folly Beach and a chance to meet the author? Lawrence is holding a book signing at Oak Barrel Tavern, 825 Savannah Highway, in West Ashley’s Avondale district on Tuesday, May 21, from 6 – 8 p.m. If you don’t get a chance to drop by, however, you can always purchase a signed copy for $22 at www.strattonlawrence.com.