Port Royal occupies the southern end of Port Royal Island, where Battery Creek meets the Beaufort River. The French, the Spanish, the English and the Scots had each claimed this ground before anybody laid out a town on it. The town that exists now dates from 1874, when it was planned as a railroad terminus and incorporated in March of that year.
The century before that is what the town still carries. Camp Saxton was established here in 1862, and the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation was celebrated on this ground on New Year’s Day 1863. Pinckney-Porter’s Chapel, a reconstructed freedpeople’s chapel in Naval Heritage Park, carries the interpretation of it. Older still, Fort Frederick Heritage Preserve holds the ruins of a British fort from the 1730s on six acres beside the river, built in tabby, the coastal building material of oyster shell, lime burned from oyster shell, sand and water, poured into wooden forms the way concrete is now, and it went on the National Register in 1974.
What makes Port Royal unusual is how much water sits inside the town rather than around it. Cypress Wetlands lies almost at its center, on Paris Avenue, a rookery where herons and egrets nest within sight of the street. A few minutes away, the Sands landing on Sands Beach Road puts a boat on Battery Creek without leaving the town limits.
People are moving here for it. The Census counted 14,220 residents and 4,764 housing units in 2020, and by July 2025 the Bureau’s estimate had reached 16,648, seventeen percent higher. Only 123 of those homes were held for seasonal or occasional use, under three in a hundred, so what gets built in Port Royal gets lived in. The housing we handle runs to single family houses and townhouses.
Some of that demand comes from who the neighbors are. Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island lies inside the town limits, annexed in 2002, and Naval Hospital Beaufort is on Pinckney Boulevard here despite the name it carries. Beaufort County School District serves the town, and SC 170 and Ribaut Road carry you in.
Sourced: tabby and how it was made, National Park Service. founding and 1874 incorporation, South Carolina Encyclopedia, University of South Carolina. Population and housing units, U.S. Census Bureau 2020 count and Vintage 2025 estimate. Fort Frederick, Camp Saxton and Pinckney-Porter’s Chapel, National Park Service and Beaufort County. Parris Island annexation and Naval Hospital location, Beaufort County Joint Land Use Study. Seasonal use, 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics file, table H5, vacancy status. Housing character, our own listing and sales records.