Folly Beach: A Brief History

Ask anyone from Charleston or the surrounding areas, "What do you remember about Folly Beach?" and you will get a remarkable array of answers. For some, Folly Beach is a memory of youthful days of freedom; for others it is where the avant-garde, bohemian types lived. Having hosted plague victims, playwrights and maybe a pirate or two, Folly has had a checkered past.

Folly Beach today is a locale for upscale homes and condominiums. In spite of this shift from a blue-collar retreat to a chic destination, Folly has remained Charleston's wild cousin and hosts more bars and churches per square mile than most American cities five times its size.

Folly native Gretchen Stringer-Robinson takes the reader through the war years, the innocence of the fifties, the recession of the seventies, Hurricane Hugo and the times in between. Join Gretchen as she introduces the characters and revisits the places that have made Folly Beach a unique haven on the Carolina coast.