Kensington Park’s pavilion was not the only Georgetown County dance pavilion to burn to the ground mysteriously during the dark hours between midnight and dawn. One fateful June night in 1970, the most famous of the county’s pavilions was consumed in an inferno that is believed to have been deliberately set. To this day, no one has been able to solve the mystery of what started—or who set—the fire that destroyed the last Pawleys Island Pavilion.
Chartered in 1960, the Pawleys Island Pavilion Company still exists—as if the pavilion might one day rise Phoenix-like from the spot near the ocean that has remained vacant ever since the last pavilion burned.
Every year as spring blossoms into summer, many an individual reminisces about the Pawleys Island Pavilion. Depending on the person, the memories are mostly fond and may focus on the last pavilion, the Old (Lafayette) Pavilion, the second pavilion, or the first pavilion. All four of the pavilions were physically on the island, not merely within Pawleys Island’s mainland perimeter.
As early as 1920, a pavilion stood in the dunes on the Pawleys oceanfront just north of the south causeway. Molly Mercer’s mother danced there as a twelve-year-old.
“They would get Mama and my future godfather, who was also about twelve years old, to start dancing when nobody else was,” Mercer remembered. “Then the grownups would see these two children dancing, and they would start.”
The first pavilion disappeared in the early 1920s.
Around 1925, the second pavilion was established near the middle of the island, close to the oceanfront sand dunes. Revelers of the mid- to late 1920s paid a quarter apiece for an evening of dancing to music played on the pavilion’s Victrola. For those who reveled too heavily and chose not to drive home after the evening’s festivities, a second-story loft afforded sleeping space.
“It was right out on the dunes in the middle of the island,” said the late captain Sammy Crayton, who spent many pleasurable hours during the 1930s at the second pavilion. “There was a big, wide porch that opened right onto the beach on the prettiest spot on the island. The pavilion was lit up with lanterns. They didn’t have lights on Pawleys Island then. Everything was lit up with lanterns or gas lights.”
The second pavilion had a dance floor lined with seating. An upright piano, covered with a tarp against the dampness when not being played, was a fixture there. Cato and His Red Hot Peppers, a black band, played there most weekends. Cato was the piano player.
“We danced mostly the waltz and the foxtrot,” said Captain Sammy. “We all took off our shoes and danced barefoot.”
The second pavilion was open year-round, said the captain. Live entertainment arrived on weekends.
“The orchestra came over Saturday morning to prepare for Saturday night, and the dampness would have the piano keys stuck together. We’d fire up a couple of lanterns under a tarp in the morning so the piano would be ready for the piano player that night.”
Captain Sammy recalled how cheap it was for a fellow to take a date to the second pavilion.
“It didn’t cost you anything to dance,” he said, “and all you had to buy was pop.”
Soda pop was the only beverage officially sold at the second pavilion. Unofficially, though, corn whiskey could be had for a price.
“You could order it,” said Captain Sammy, “and they came and buried it in the sand. You could buy a quart of corn liquor for seventy-five cents and a pint for fifty cents.”
Other bands that appeared at the pavilion included the Clemson Jungle Aires and a Georgetown swing band, Belo Jones and His Five Men from Harlem. Surrounded by a soda bar and booths, the hardwood dance floor was home to the Big Apple and Little Apple dances.
It is not certain what became of the second pavilion. It closed around 1935 and is sometimes mistaken—by those who were born after its heyday—for its contemporary, a nightspot called The Towers. Built nearby on the mainland creek, The Towers purportedly was a wild place that burned to the ground after the owners had a falling out. One owner allegedly poured lacquer thinner throughout The Towers’ attic and was blown out the end of the building by the blast that erupted when he ignited the solvent. Although The Towers was not a pavilion, it operated concurrently with the second of the pavilions. The alleged cause of The Towers’ demise may have given rise to rumors years later, when the third and later the fourth pavilion also burned mysteriously.
The third pavilion, known as the Lafayette Pavilion or the Old Pavilion, was built during the Great Depression. The Old Pavilion was a bare wood building on stilts located on the marsh on the west side of the south causeway. It stood across from the Sea View Inn.
Featuring shuttered windows for ventilation and marsh-directed plumbing, the Old Pavilion rang through the summer nights with the sounds of early shag music as teenagers and college students perfected their versions of what would become the most famous dance in the state of South Carolina.
Doc Baldwin remembered three generations of the same families spending time there.
“Everyone had a good time,” Baldwin said. “That was the last pavilion I remember as a family place. Of course, you’d have the local folks and tourists there, and things tended to get a little touchy sometimes. I remember fights in there, especially when there were house parties.”
The Old Pavilion burned down, circumstances unknown, in 1957. Although rumors of foul play circulated, old wiring was finally blamed for the fire.
The New Pavilion was, for the most part, the 1960 project of Old Pavilion alumni who wanted the same youthful island experiences for their progeny. It was also intended to keep fun-loving young people close to home.
The Pawleys Island Pavilion Company was chartered in 1960 with a president, a secretary-treasurer, a board of directors, and nearly fifty members. To belong to the company, each member paid $100 and promised to loan, if necessary, as much as $750 to the New Pavilion cause. The purpose of the company was not to make money, but rather to benefit island young people by providing entertainment. One bylaw of the company said, in effect, that if the corporation were dissolved, a Georgetown County charity would receive its assets.
With the help of State Senator James Morrison of Georgetown, a road was built southeast from the beach road to the causeway. There, on stilts in the creek, the new wooden pavilion rose. It had generous porches and proper modern indoor restrooms.
For ten years, the New Pavilion was a living legend complete with live music. Otis Goodwin and the Castanets, the Travelers, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, Drink Smalls, the Jetty Jumpers, the Rivieras, the Monzas, the Sensational Epics, Harry Parker and the Caravelles, the Embers, the Catalinas, and other bands entertained on summer weekends. The joint was jumping!
Barry McCall was a bartender at the New Pavilion for three years.
“The Travelers was probably the hottest band we had play there,” said McCall, who no longer stands behind the bar but sits on the bench—as Pawleys Island magistrate. “Everybody who worked there was involved in booking the bands. A lot of the very prominent people in music were just starting out. We would bring them down and give them a place to stay—and that was about all the pay they got.”
Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs played the New Pavilion three separate weekends the summer their song “Stay” became a hit, he noted.
McCall remembered the pavilion as a place for everyone.
“It’s hard to relate in words,” he said, reflecting on the atmosphere of the island’s gathering place. “There were groups from eight- or nine-year-olds to eighty- to ninety-year-olds. We had very little underage drinking; we carded everybody. I got a lot of tips from eighty- to ninety-year-old people that I’d carded!
“From the time we’d open during the day in the summer to the time we closed the doors at night, we’d have a low average of two hundred people during the week to five hundred people on a summer weekend. Some were local; some came from Georgetown; some came from Andrews. Then there were the people staying on the island. You wouldn’t have a family of two or three renting a house like you do now. There’d be ten or fifteen, and they’d all come to the pavilion. They’d bring babies. It was a family beach and a family pavilion.
“Once in a while, we’d have a fight, but never a heavy one,” said McCall. “We had a deputy, Claude Altman, and he had a sub-deputy, Wolfe—a big dog.”
Altman was the only deputy on Pawleys Island then, remembered Doc Baldwin.
“Wolfe was a German police dog—and he was the crowd control. You didn’t have knifings and shootings like you do now.”
Having grown up going to the Old Pavilion, Baldwin did not spend much time at the new one, but he remembered it as being more lively than its predecessor.
“I went in the service in ’59 and never went in that one much,” Baldwin said. “It was more of a jam-packed, hardrockin’, hard-drinking kind of place.”
On June 16, 1970, fire claimed the New Pavilion. The June 18 issue of the Georgetown Times had a picture of the smoking ruins on the front page.
“The Pawleys Pavilion, enjoyed by young people for a decade, burned to a total loss about 5 A.M. Tuesday with only the piling remaining,” the paper noted. “Flames had engulfed the building when the fire was detected and the alarm sounded by a nearby resident, Larry Holliday…. The cause of the fire is unknown.”
“I had just finished school in Atlanta,” said Barry McCall, “and my wife and I were living on the island. I saw the big orange glow in the sky and just sat on the edge of the bed and cried.”
But what caused the fire?
“Anytime you have a fire like that, there’s always a rumor,” McCall said. “There was a lot of rumor, and a lot of mourning.”
No explanation could be found that the fire was accidental. The general consensus was that arson caused it, though most folks did not know who or why. And those who knew were not saying.
Rumors persist to this day that it was arson—that someone paid someone else a hundred dollars to do it. The someone who set the fire, according to the rumor, is dead now, but the someone who paid that person is not. As for motive, a grudge has been rumored for years—someone who was thrown out of the pavilion sought revenge by having it burned down so no one else could enjoy it.
To date, a fifth pavilion has never come about, although the Pawleys Island Pavilion Company is still in existence.
“People ask me,” said Molly Mercer, whose grandfather was a member of the company, “if there’s going to be another one built, and I say, ‘Well, if it hasn’t been built yet, it’s probably not going to be.’ ”
A short distance from the ocean, the triangle of land where the last pavilion stood is now a grassy space, the reminder of a legend that went up in smoke decades ago, gone like the dance music that used to drift across the marsh on summer evenings.
It is on that triangle that the Pawleys Pavilion Reunion is held each spring. For one magical May evening, the spirit of the last pavilion is revived, with many of the habitués of the vanished pavilion in attendance.
“I’ve been asked many times why we have it there,” Molly Mercer said, “and I just tell them, ‘We have to have it where the ghosts are.’ ”