Thursday 28th. Mr. Vareen piloted us across the Swash (which at high water is impassable, & at times, by the shifting of the Sands is dangerous) on to the long Beach of the Ocean; and it being at a proper time of the tide we passed along it with ease and celerity to the place of quitting it which is estimated 16 miles. Five Miles farther we got dinner & fed our horses at a Mr. Pauleys a private house, no public one being on the road; and being met on the Road, & kindly invited by a Docter flagg to his house, we lodged there; it being about 10 miles from Pauleys & 33 from Vareens.
Both the Long Beach and the swash, a narrow channel cutting inland from the ocean, had to be crossed at low tide (“memorandum of distances,” 1791, , 15:381; , 52–53). On Henry Mouzon’s 1775 map of the Carolinas the name “Lewis Swash” appears at the northernmost entrance to the beach, about two miles south of a house labeled “Varene.” The beach itself is labeled “Eight Mile Swash,” apparently indicating the fact that the road there was often washed over by the high tide. Johann David Schoepf, who traversed the Long Beach in 1784, noted, “Here for 16 miles the common highway runs very near the shore. Lonely and desolate as this part of the road is, without shade and with no dwellings in sight, it is by no means a tedious road. The number of shells washed up, sponges, corals, sea-grasses and weeds, medusae, and many other ocean-products which strew the beach, engage and excite the attention of the traveller at every step. . . . This beach-road consisted for the most part of shell-sand, coarse or fine. . . . So far as the otherwise loose sand is moistened by the play of the waves it forms and extremely smooth and firm surface, hardly showing hoof-marks” (, 2:161–62).
George Pawley of All Saints Parish was in 1790 head of a household of 4 whites and 15 slaves (, 50).
Dr. Henry Collins Flagg (1742–1801), a physician, lived at Brookgreen plantation on the Waccamaw River in All Saints Parish. He came to South Carolina from Rhode Island before the War of Independence and during the war was chief surgeon of Nathanael Greene’s southern army. In 1784 he married Rachel Moore Allston, widow of Capt. William Allston (1738–1781), who developed Brookgreen (, 172–73, 256; , 24, 55).