Today, Charleston’s barrier islands stretching north from the harbor are lined with beautiful, expansive vacation homes. Their sparkling shorelines welcome throngs of visitors and local beachgoers spreading blankets and chairs across the sand. With that familiar scene in mind, it may be difficult to imagine one of these pristine islands once dominated not by quiet neighborhoods but by a Ferris wheel turning above the dunes, a merry‑go‑round spinning in the sand, and a Coney Island–style roller coaster called The Steeple Chase thundering across the landscape. Yet the islands have undergone dramatic transformations long before becoming the serene retreats we know today.
To understand how unlikely such amusements once were, it helps to look back to the earliest days of settlement. In the colonial era, a simple plank bridge built on barrels connected what is now Mount Pleasant to Sullivan’s Island at Cove Inlet. When Edgar Allan Poe arrived on Sullivan’s Island in 1827 aboard the Waltham and served as a company clerk at Fort Moultrie, he described the island in vivid, if unflattering, terms. In The Gold Bug, he wrote, “The island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than sea sand, and is about three miles long…” His portrayal—bleak, windswept, and sparsely inhabited—reflects both the island’s raw state and Poe’s own dark literary sensibilities.
Yet not everyone saw Sullivan’s Island through such a somber lens. Around the same time, Charleston architect Robert Mills offered a far more inviting depiction. Writing in 1826, he described the island as “the summer retreat for pleasure and health” for Charlestonians, noting the steady flow of boats ferrying visitors across the harbor and the growing village of Moultrieville with its wooden houses and breezy shoreline. He praised the firm, wide beach at low tide, where “the delighted visitant may inhale the pure and bracing sea breeze, which wafts health and vigor to the system.”
The old floating footbridge stretching across from mainland Mount Pleasant was once the only access to Sullivan’s Island—and the stepping‑stone to the uninhabited six‑mile stretch of sand beyond Breach Inlet known as Long Island. On the 17th of February, under the command of Lt. George Dixon, the Hunley’s crew of eight crossed that same footbridge at Cove Inlet near Fort Moultrie. From there, they hiked 2½ miles north to Breach Inlet and waited for nightfall, following a route that would later become central to the island’s transformation.
As the islands slowly drew more attention, the Town of Moultrieville granted land to Robert Chisolm for the construction of a hotel. Around Station 22, the New Brighton Hotel rose in the mid‑1880s—later renamed the Atlantic Beach Hotel—and included three beach cottages alongside the main structure. This modest development marked the beginning of a new era of leisure along the coast.
That shift accelerated in 1897, when the stretch of sand beyond Breach Inlet—once visited only by the Atlantic surf—began to attract real interest. Dr. J. S. Lawrence established a public amusement and beach resort on the island. With no cottages or hotels yet built, visitors gathered at the Pavilion, where a 50‑cent meal awaited them. The amusements were ambitious: a Ferris wheel, a merry‑go‑round, and a roller‑coaster‑style ride called The Steeple Chase, featuring five mechanical horses racing along a U‑shaped track. The Ferris wheel itself had traveled a storied path—from the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892 to the Cotton Congress in Atlanta and then to Coney Island—before arriving in South Carolina. The resort’s popularity earned it the nickname “Playground of the South,” and with that, the Isle of Palms was born.
Infrastructure soon followed. In 1898, the old planked bridge was replaced by a trolley bridge known as the Cove Inlet Bridge, or the Pitt Street Bridge. Before electricity, the earliest trolleys were horse‑drawn and ran on wooden rails that often shifted in the sand beds, but even this imperfect system marked a significant improvement in access.
At the same time, Charleston embraced new technology. The electric streetcar arrived in the city, and in July of that year the Seashore Road opened. The local paper reported on July 26, “A great event for the city, the Seashore Road formally opened yesterday…” as ferries such as the Commodore Perry, the Sappho, and the Pocosin carried eager passengers across the harbor to Mount Pleasant.
Once ashore, travelers boarded trolley cars that carried them through Mount Pleasant, across the Pitt Street Bridge, and onward toward Breach Inlet before continuing to the Isle of Palms. Development followed quickly: Nicholas Sottile built the island’s first home in 1898 at 807 Ocean Boulevard. The Seashore Hotel opened in 1906 with fifty rooms, and the Hotel Marion by the Sea followed in 1912.
Not all progress was without loss. On January 9, 1925, tragedy struck the Atlantic Beach Hotel on Sullivan’s Island when it, along with one of its cottages, burned to the ground. Rumor held that a bootlegger searching for hidden whiskey lit a match in the bushes beside the hotel, sparking the blaze. No hotel would ever rise on the island again.
Until then, Mount Pleasant and the islands had relied entirely on ferries to connect with Charleston. That changed in 1929 with the construction of the Grace Memorial Bridge, a cantilever span across the Cooper River that finally linked the islands to the city by automobile. The Pitt Street Bridge closed to traffic when its drawbridge was relocated, and in 1945 the Ben Sawyer Bridge was completed. Its rotating center span allowed boats to pass along the Intracoastal Waterway, marking the final step in the islands’ evolution from isolated stretches of sand to accessible coastal communities.
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