How Beaufort earned the score
Population A Sea Island city of roughly 13,600 on Port Royal Island, in the South Carolina Lowcountry midway between Charleston and Savannah.
Situation The second-oldest city in South Carolina, sitting on a 304-acre antebellum district that survived the Civil War nearly intact, in the long shadow of the Hilton Head resort market next door.
Action It protected the bones with early, serious preservation, programmed the waterfront, and leaned into three identities at once: film, food, and Lowcountry heritage.
Result Travel and tourism is now a $1.4 billion engine supporting more than 12,000 jobs across Beaufort County, with the town as its cultural anchor. The open opportunity is converting day-trippers and Hilton Head overflow into multi-night Beaufort stays.
The situation
Drive over the bridges into Beaufort and the first thing that registers is the quiet. This is a city of roughly 13,600 people on Port Royal Island, tucked into the saltmarsh maze of the South Carolina Lowcountry, midway between Charleston and Savannah [1]. It is the second-oldest city in South Carolina, chartered in 1711 and named for Henry Somerset, the second Duke of Beaufort [7]. Only Charleston is older.
What makes the place remarkable is not just its age but its survival. By the 1850s, Sea Island cotton had made Beaufort one of the wealthiest towns per capita in the United States, and planters built broad, columned mansions cooled by deep verandas and river breezes. Then the Civil War arrived early. Union forces took the town in November 1861, and because Beaufort was occupied rather than burned, its grand homes were spared the torch that flattened so much of the Confederate South. The result is a 304-acre district so complete that the National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark, one of the finest collections of antebellum architecture in the country still standing in its original setting [2].
That is the raw material. The question, for any town sitting on a treasure like this, is what you do with it.
The task
Plenty of historic towns coast on a single restored block and a gift shop. Beaufort’s challenge was sharper. It sits in Beaufort County alongside Hilton Head Island, a resort machine that pulls millions of beach visitors a year and casts a long shadow. The risk for Beaufort was obvious: become the charming half-day detour people take between the golf course and the outlet mall, a place you photograph and leave.
The opposite outcome was the goal. The task was to build enough genuine depth, in culture, food, story, and landscape, that travelers would treat Beaufort as a destination in its own right and stay overnight. Lodging is where a tourism economy actually pays off: accommodations and hospitality taxes already make up more than 16 percent of the City of Beaufort’s general fund revenue, its third-largest source [3]. Every additional night booked compounds into property-tax relief for residents and payroll for local workers.
Doing that without hollowing out the town was the real trick. Beaufort had to stay a place where people live and work, not a stage set that empties at dusk.
What Beaufort did
The foundation was preservation done early and seriously. Beaufort’s historic district earned National Register listing in 1969 and full National Historic Landmark status in 1973, locking in the antebellum core before mid-century sprawl could chew at its edges [2]. That decision is why a walk down Bay Street or the Bluff today still reads as a coherent 19th-century town rather than a few survivors marooned between parking lots.
A waterfront that does the work
The single best civic move was the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park. Former mayor Henry Chambers secured federal funds to build it along the Beaufort River in the mid-1970s, reclaiming the edge of downtown for people instead of pavement; the city reinvested again with a major renovation in 2006 to 2008 [8]. The result is a swing-bench promenade that hosts festivals, markets, and free concerts and gives every visitor a reason to linger past lunch. A great historic district draws you in; a great waterfront makes you stay the afternoon.
The mansions that survived because the war came early
Beaufort’s antebellum survival is a quirk of timing. When Union forces captured Port Royal Sound in November 1861, the white planter class fled almost overnight, and the town spent the rest of the war under federal occupation as a hospital and supply hub. Occupied towns do not get burned. Homes like the Tidalholm Mansion, the John Mark Verdier House on Bay Street, and the columned riverfront estates along the Bluff came through the war standing, which is exactly why filmmakers and preservationists would later find a near-complete 1850s town waiting for them.
Food as a reason to book a table
Beaufort sits in the cradle of Lowcountry cooking, the cuisine built on shrimp, oysters, blue crab, and the Gullah Geechee kitchen traditions of the Sea Islands. Shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, boiled peanuts, and Frogmore stew (a one-pot boil named for a community on St. Helena Island) are not tourist inventions here; they are local. That authenticity is a draw the resorts cannot manufacture, and it is a big part of why national outlets keep ranking the town. Coastal Living named Beaufort “America’s Happiest Seaside Town,” and Southern Living has put it on its list of the best beach towns in the South [6][9].
Why Hollywood stayed
Beaufort’s preserved streetscape turned it into one of the most filmed small towns in the South. The list is genuinely famous: The Big Chill (1983), shot largely in the historic district at the Tidalholm Mansion; The Prince of Tides (1991), Barbra Streisand’s adaptation of native son Pat Conroy’s novel, which drew seven Academy Award nominations; and Forrest Gump (1994), whose Lowcountry scenes were filmed in and around Beaufort, on Bay Street, and out at Hunting Island and Fripp Island [10]. Local and regional tourism outlets count more than 100 films and television productions shot in the area over the decades, a body of work that has earned the Lowcountry the nickname “Hollywood of the South” [11].
That film legacy is a tourism flywheel. Fans come to stand where Forrest ran and where the friends of The Big Chill gathered, and the same antebellum homes that drew the cameras draw the visitors. It is free, durable marketing that compounds every time one of these movies streams to a new generation.
The Forrest Gump bench, and the locations fans still hunt for
The actual bench from the film’s framing scenes sat on a set in Savannah’s Chippewa Square, but Beaufort owns the rest of the movie’s Lowcountry geography: the shrimp-boat waters, the Bay Street storefronts, and the beaches of Hunting Island where several sequences were shot. Visit Beaufort publishes a self-guided movie-locations tour precisely because so many travelers arrive wanting to retrace the films, which is a small, smart way the town converts cinematic fame into foot traffic and overnight stays.
A heritage capital, not just a pretty one
This is where Beaufort separates itself from every other charming Southern waterfront. Just across the water on St. Helena Island, the Penn Center sits on a 50-acre National Historic Landmark district founded in 1862 as Penn School, one of the first schools in the United States for formerly enslaved people. It is the only African American National Historic Landmark district in South Carolina, and it remains a working center for preserving Gullah Geechee culture, the distinct language and traditions the Sea Island communities carried forward in relative isolation [12].
The town’s most extraordinary native may be Robert Smalls, born into slavery in Beaufort in 1839. In 1862 he commandeered a Confederate steamer, the Planter, and piloted it and its passengers to freedom past the Charleston harbor forts. He went on to serve in the South Carolina legislature and the United States Congress, and his Beaufort home still stands [13]. In January 2017, President Obama established the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park, headquartered in Beaufort, to interpret the period after the Civil War, making the town the official home of the national story of Reconstruction [13]. And the literary line stays unbroken at the Pat Conroy Literary Center, which honors the author whose Lowcountry novels put Beaufort on the page [14].
The result
The payoff is measurable. The hospitality and tourism industry generates roughly $1.4 billion in annual economic impact across Beaufort County and supports more than 12,000 jobs [3][4]. Within the City of Beaufort specifically, tourism supports more than 1,234 jobs and feeds that 16-percent-plus slice of the general fund through hospitality and accommodations taxes, which in turn helps keep Beaufort County’s property-tax millage among the lowest in South Carolina [3].
The natural draw next door reinforces all of it. Hunting Island State Park, about 16 miles east on its 5,000-acre barrier island, is the most-visited state park in South Carolina, pulling an estimated 1.2 million visitors a year to its beach, maritime forest, and the only publicly accessible lighthouse in the state [5]. Those visitors pass through Beaufort, and the town’s job is to give them a reason to stop, eat, and book a room.
The takeaway
The lesson other small towns can take from Beaufort is that its advantages are not transferable, and that is the point. You cannot manufacture a 304-acre antebellum district, you cannot fake a film legacy that spans The Big Chill to Forrest Gump, and you cannot replicate Penn Center or Robert Smalls. Beaufort’s strategy was to recognize what was genuinely rare about itself, protect it with real preservation policy, make the waterfront a place people want to be, and let food and story do the rest.
Scoring an 86 puts Beaufort firmly in the Destination Leader band. The honest, public-facing opportunity is conversion: the county already moves a billion-plus dollars in tourism, but a meaningful share of that flows to Hilton Head’s beaches and to day-trippers who treat Beaufort as a quick photo stop. The upside is in lengthening the stay, marketing the heritage and film story hard enough that travelers build a two- or three-night Beaufort trip around it rather than a 90-minute walk through downtown. The assets are already in the ground. The work is in the booking.