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St. Phillips Island, South Carolina
It's a bit like a fragile family heirloom passed down with care and love. What better way to describe South Carolina's remarkable St. Phillips Island? Jigsaw-puzzled among its marshy sea-isle sisters southeast of Beaufort and just northeast of Hilton Head, St. Phillips lay largely undisturbed—other than by temporary Native American habitation, colonial oversight by the Spanish, and well-heeled sportsmen who came here for pig hunts—until famed media mogul Ted Turner bought the island for $2.4 million in 1979.
St. Phillips encompasses nearly 4,682 acres of ancient landscape, all of it accessible only by boat, featuring narrow ridges of upland dunes flanking freshwater sloughs, with live oaks and magnolias on the high ground, palmettos and marsh grasses on the low. Here was a strand of pale and shifting sands cradling the boneyard remnants of trees, a salty Eden where dolphins leaped and vivid painted buntings perched on low branches while eagles and ospreys gazed from the treetops.