Case Study HiltonHead, NC
Amason is not the only one to chronicle the long-term results of the mass-scale tourism industry. Scholar Dominique T. Hazzard provides us with another view into the effects on people and place in the aftermath of the mass tourism industry. Her work “The Gullah People, Justice and the Land on Hilton Head: A Historical Perspective” argues that, far from lifting the residents out of poverty, the mass-scale tourism industry is, in fact, the factor responsible for the local people’s disinheritance and loss of land and cultural identity.
A Brief History of Hilton Head’s Tourism Boom
The Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, are considered the homelands of the Gullah-Geechee people, descendants of enslaved Africans. Through the generations, the Gullah-Geechee people maintained and cultivated their West African-rooted culture. These traditions are present in the language, music, and land use customs. As the Sea Islands have become more popular as a tourist destination over the last century, the Gullah-Geechee people faced mass displacement from their lands as a result of gentrification and other causes. The island where this is most apparent, Hilton Head, provides another example of the long-term societal and environmental effects of mass-scale tourism.
After the civil war, Hilton Head was large and was left abandoned to a handful of Gullah-Geechee people. The population fell from 40,000 to less than 3,000 by the year 1868.
For generations, the Gullah people made a living from the land. Yet much of the island was not formally owned by the Gullah people, as slavery left them asset poor. Hilton Head was abandoned as valueless by plantation owners following emancipation.
As years passed by, the island’s natural resources grew, attracting the eyes of real estate scout Fred Hack and Joseph Fraser of Fraser Lumber Company, and they visited the island. Prospects looked favorable to these businessmen, and within a year of the initial visit, in 1950, they set up the Hilton Head Company and purchased over 19,000 of the island’s 25,000 acres at $60 an acre for timber harvest. Charles Fraser later created a separate company, Sea Pines, seven years later with 5000 acres. His vision was to develop an upper-scale destination resort while preserving the natural beauty of the area. These developments were wildly successful, sparking a boom of further developments on the Island.
From 1960 to 70, the island underwent dramatic changes. The island became a well-known tourist destination. Telephone service, electricity, grocery markets, and running water came in. However, these facilities did not benefit the Gullah-Geechee people. Facilities were brought only to the south of the island to service the ever-expanding upper-class developments.
With the arrival of the tourism industry, the demographic of the island shifted rapidly, even forcing generational residents out.
Before the arrival of Hack and Fraser in 1949, Gullah-Geechee people accounted for 98% of the island’s population and owned an estimated third of the land. By 1985, the population of the island had grown to more than 17,000 residents, now 87% white, largely affluent upper-class individuals. By 2000, Gullah Geechee owned only 10.2 percent of the island. In 2003, the property tax on five acres amounted to $2,000 per year. By 2021, property tax on the same five acres increased to $11,000 a year, making it almost impossible for low-income service-working residents to hold on to their historically inherited land.
In most cases, low-income property owners could not pay, and the land was auctioned off to make up the delinquent sales tax allowing developers to acquire the land at a fraction of its’ value. Soledad O’Brien expressed his perplexion to the Island Packet News, “Why should people...lose their land because everything else around them has gotten more valuable?” “I think that’s the goal, to move black people off Hilton Head as if we never existed,” concurred Mary Allen, Hilton Head native.
The environmental state of affairs in Hilton Head, as with Gatlinburg, is a nightmare. Sadly, large-scale development is associated with mass pollutants of various kinds. In 1970, Gullah fishers from the Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative were so concerned about pollution from a planned chemical plant that they sailed one of their largest ships to Washington. D.C in hope of gaining national recognition of the mounting issues in Hilton Head resulting from the tourism boom on the island. In 1974, Charles Fraser, owner of Sea Pines Resort, and responsible for much of the mass-tourism initiative, was quick to assure the public, “We are making every effort to protect the environment of Hilton Head because we want at least one section of this nation to be untouched by pollution.” Nevertheless, pollution continued to increase, jeopardizing many fishermen’s livelihoods. A little over a decade later, Stuart Reginald, a journalist for the New York Times, chronicled the overflowing of sewer systems into the once pristine freshwaters of the island. It became so bad that oyster and clam harvesting became banned in many areas. Shortly after Charles Fraser began selling off his shares in Sea Pines Company, acknowledging the urgency of the problem, “The poison is leaking into the water, and we want to cut off the faucet.” The difficulty is that there is no way to turn the faucet off once a mass-tourism system is in full motion. As Amason observed in her study of Gatlinburg, the identity reformation that happens as a result of mass tourism erases the once prevalent cultural and spatial identity of the place. Fourth-generation native, Arthur Schultz was unequivocal in his analysis of the situation, “This is not Hilton Head anymore—it’s not a pristine place where you are going to see seagulls flying,” he told the New York Times. Newton’s first law of motion states that once a force is in motion, it stays in motion. This may also apply to the concept of tourism.
The difficulty with mass-scale tourism is not that it creates economic stimulus but rather that such an economic stimulus markets people and places in such a way that destroys and reforms identity to the mercy of capital demand and fails to address the issue of poverty. In so doing, mass-scale tourism not only fails to provide a viable socioeconomic framework for impoverished communities but even obliterates any semblance of community that once existed, forcing individuals and families to move away from their generational homes.
As Amason and Hazzard pointed out through their research, both Gatlinburg and Hilton Head certainly had issues before tourism. In both places, as now in the RRG region, tourism initiatives began as an effort to do something good for the region. However, the tourism industries grew quickly and soon beyond control, eventually perpetuating cycles of poverty instead of successfully addressing the problem of poverty on a generational and region-wide scale. The aim of such tourism initiatives in both Gatlinburg and Hilton Head, on some level, initially, was to provide better infrastructure, better jobs, and provide a vacation for people to enjoy the ecology and beauty of the region. Similarly, such are the stated goals of officials responsible for initiating the tourism plan in the Red River Gorge Region. In the case of both Hilton head and Gatlinburg, the result is that these regions have to deal with the consequences of collapse for the underclass people, the infrastructure, and the ecology. If nothing changes, the Red River Gorge Region faces a similar fate, and the dire economic affairs of Eastern Kentucky will remain in a state of eternal deadlock and even inevitable continued decline.