Dataw Island is a true island, ringed by the Morgan River and Jenkins Creek, six miles east of Beaufort and reached by causeway. You come out along US 21 and Sea Island Parkway, turn onto Polowana Road, then cross onto Dataw Drive and through the gate.
The gate is recent; the ground behind it is not. At the island’s southern end, near Mink’s Point on Jenkins Creek, stand the Sams Plantation Complex Tabby Ruins, the remains of the plantation house, its outbuildings and the quarters of the people enslaved there.
They are built in tabby, the coastal material of oyster shell, lime burned from oyster shell, sand and water, poured into wooden forms the way concrete is now. The National Park Service added them to the National Register in March 2011. Datha Island, which you will see in older records, is the same place under an earlier spelling.
The community you drive into took shape from 1983, when Alcoa bought the island and filed the development declaration the following June. Two golf courses run through it, Cotton Dike laid out by Tom Fazio and Morgan River by Arthur Hills.
The marina gives the island its working waterfront. It sits on the Morgan River on Marina Drive, owned by the owners’ association, and handles storage, fuel, haul-out and repair for residents and visitors from off the island.
Dataw is unincorporated and is not a Census-designated place, so it has no Census population of its own and any figure you find for it came from somebody’s chosen boundary. Beaufort County treats it as the Dataw Island Planned Unit Development, the Dataw Island Owners’ Association governs it, and Beaufort County School District serves the island.
Sourced: tabby and how it was made, National Park Service. tabby ruins listing and reference 88001820, National Park Service, listed March 4 2011. Development dates, golf course designers, marina address and public access, Dataw Island Owners’ Association. PUD status, Beaufort County. Absence of a Census place or CDP, verified directly against the Census Bureau’s 2020 CDP table for South Carolina.