Debordieu Colony — Guarded, Golf-Centered, and Genuinely Hard to Get Into

What Actually Makes DeBordieu Colony Different

DeBordieu Colony is not a town you can drive through on the way to somewhere else -- it is a private, gated residential and golf community in unincorporated Georgetown County, reached off US 17 about three miles north of the historic port city of Georgetown and about five miles south of Pawleys Island. A continuously staffed, 24-hour manned guardhouse controls every vehicle entering the community; only residents, their guests, DeBordieu Club members, and confirmed, registered renters are let through, and multiple local sources describe the gate as genuinely difficult to get past even for contractors and delivery drivers who aren't expected. That single fact -- a real, staffed gate, not a decorative one -- shapes nearly everything else about how this market functions differently from an open beach town: there is no walk-up public beach access, no drive-by curiosity showings, and no casual tourism economy inside the gates the way there is in nearby Pawleys Island or Myrtle Beach.

The land itself carries real, documented plantation-era history. Before the Civil War, the Waccamaw Neck -- the strip of coast running from Georgetown north through Pawleys Island -- was part of one of the most productive rice-growing regions in the country, and wealthy planters who worked inland rice fields customarily moved their households to the shore each summer to escape the malaria associated with the flooded rice fields. Planter William Alston is documented as having built two seashore houses at DeBordieu by 1800. After the Civil War ended the plantation economy, the land passed through a series of private owners rather than being subdivided immediately: Dr. Isaac Emerson, the inventor of Bromo-Seltzer, acquired significant acreage here in the early 20th century, and multiple local histories describe members of the Vanderbilt family using the property for vacations and hunting. Modern residential development did not begin until the early 1970s, which makes DeBordieu, as a planned community, considerably younger than its land's documented history suggests -- roughly a half-century of residential development sitting on top of nearly two centuries of plantation and private-estate history.

Golf and club life sit at the physical and social center of the community in a way that is more central here than at most other markets on this site. The DeBordieu Club's 18-hole course was designed by Pete Dye and his son P.B. Dye and opened in March 1987 -- about five years before Pete Dye designed the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, site of the 1991 Ryder Cup's "War by the Shore." The course was renovated in 2014 with new MiniVerde putting surfaces and lengthened to more than 7,200 yards. Separate from golf, the Club's Beach Club offers oceanfront dining and pools, and the DeBordieu Tennis & Fitness Club runs eight Har-Tru courts (four lit for night play), four pickleball courts, one hard court, and a fitness facility. This page could not confirm from primary Club bylaws whether DeBordieu Club membership itself is mandatory for every property owner, as opposed to simply being restricted to property owners as the only people eligible to join -- what is clearly documented is that the separate DeBordieu Colony Community Association, the governing property-owners' association responsible for the gate, roads, architectural review, and covenants, applies to every property owner in the community, as is standard for a deed-restricted development.

Erosion and beach management here are not abstract concerns -- DeBordieu is specifically named in South Carolina legal literature as a case study in how the state's 1988 Beachfront Management Act plays out on the ground. That Act bans new hard erosion-control structures (seawalls, bulkheads, revetments) seaward of the state's regulatory setback line, and it is the same law this site's Seawall & Bulkhead Guide page covers for every ocean-market destination -- but DeBordieu's own erosion fight became specific and public: after a 2015 nourishment project's roughly 795,000 cubic yards of sand had lost about 500,000 cubic yards back to erosion at the beach's south end, the Community Association sought a permit for three rock-and-concrete groins plus further nourishment. The Department of Health and Environmental Control's Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management issued that permit in 2018, environmental groups sued, and the permit was ultimately upheld by an Administrative Law Court and affirmed by the South Carolina Court of Appeals in 2024 -- six years of litigation over structures meant to slow erosion on a beach every owner here has a direct financial stake in.

Several facts that matter to a buyer were not independently confirmed at a level this page is willing to state as settled, and it does not invent them. Not confirmed: current DeBordieu Club initiation fees and annual dues (a golf-industry aggregator site cites roughly a $91,000 initiation fee and about $8,640 in annual dues, but this was not confirmed from the Club's own current fee schedule and dues change over time); whether DeBordieu Club membership is mandatory for every property owner or optional beyond the mandatory Community Association covenants; the exact combined property-tax millage a specific DeBordieu parcel pays today, since Georgetown County is mid-cycle on a 2025 countywide reassessment with state-mandated rollback rules; and any DeBordieu-specific casualty or damage count from Hurricane Hugo in 1989, as opposed to the well-documented damage at neighboring Pawleys Island and Georgetown. Anyone seriously evaluating a purchase here should confirm current numbers directly with the DeBordieu Colony Community Association, the DeBordieu Club membership office, the Georgetown County Assessor and Tax Office, a licensed SC coastal insurance agent, and a South Carolina real estate attorney -- state law requires a licensed attorney to conduct every SC real estate closing -- rather than trusting a number found online.