The Legend of Goat Island

There is a tiny barrier island, only 200 yards off the Isle of Palms, where legend still lingers. It is called Goat Island. In the early ’30s, a man and his wife lived there in self-exile without electricity or water, choosing to turn their backs on civilization forever. Goat Island remains a place of rustic solitude - a precious, slender slice of land beyond the reach of street lights and bus stops.

It is this sense of mystery and unknown in the midst of a controlled society that has created the “Legend of Goat Island.” It began long ago and has been passed down through generations of locals who sometimes share it with worthy tourists. I’m not a native, but I was lucky to discover the truth in it.

The legend of the Goat Man began in 1931, when a Charleston butcher, Henry Holloway, and his wife Blanche, decided to free themselves form the rules, regulations and stresses of modern day society. Repelled by the intrusion of what was labeled as “progress,” the Holloways retreated from the real world as we know it, into a timeless, peaceful life of seclusion on their own deserted island - an island whose only inhabitants were a herd of goats.

There, alone, in a driftwood covered hole in the ground, sheltered only by palm fronds, they claimed squatters’ rights over the island - the sole living heirs to the virgin paradise of Goat Island’s undeveloped beaches and marshlands.

Even though the Goat Man and his wife only lived 200 yards from the shore of the Isle of Palms, they shunned the developers and life on the far side of the waterway. They learned to naturally accept what God provided them with, drinking rainwater and eating the natural vegetation underfoot. They lived in solitude under the aimless canopy of tree limbs and palms on the tiny island that provided them shelter in the rainy seasons, shade in the hot, sweltering summers, and firewood in the deathly chilling, wet island winters.