COASTAL OBSERVER

A storied Pawleys Island tradition is set to return this weekend, helped by 1,500 pounds of crawfish.

“It was a huge festival. Everybody looked forward to it. There was lots of fun,” said Cindy Bindner, who has spearheaded the effort to revive the S.C. Crawfish Festival, which was a fixture in Pawleys Island for 15 years.

Local businesses immediately jumped on board to support the festival, she said, and it was all made possible through donations. Get Carried Away is the festival’s primary sponsor and source for the main dish.

“The list is too long to go through the whole thing,” Bindner said.

Jim Bindner, her late husband who had a deep love for the festival, wanted to reintroduce the tradition. With help from community leaders, Cindy picked up remaining pieces of an unfinished project after Jim’s death in 2019. JB’s Celebration Park opened at the end of September on land leased from Georgetown County.

“This was my husband’s dream. He wanted to have the Crawfish Festival at this park. That was his idea,” she said. “It’s nice to bring back the festival that he really loved and that everybody loved back then and make it part of a new tradition.”

She moved to the area in 1992 from Chicago and attended the festivals from 1993 until 1995. 

“I don’t remember much, and it’s not because I was drinking. It’s just that I was young,” Bindner said.

She recalled seeing long tables where people tried to claim a spot to stand and tear into a plate of boiled critters.

Bindner said hosting the festival is about carrying out old traditions and creating new ones. The event is a hat tip to the quiet, gentle and slow-paced Pawleys Island community that thrived in the 1980s and ’90s, she said.

“I think a lot of us who have lived here a long time really miss the old Pawleys Island in a lot of ways. It was a very intimate community,” Bindner said. “We’re losing a little intimacy, at least I feel that way. That might just be me. This is a way to try and bring some of the closeness back.”

The festival’s origins go back to a Sunday afternoon when Louis Osteen and his friend Warren Johnston were having a drink at the Pawleys Island Inn the Hammock Shops. Osteen and his wife owned the inn. Johnston was a journalist working at a magazine, the Pawleys Island Perspective.

They were bored.

“We decided we needed something to do, and we decided we needed a bluegrass festival,” Osteen said in a 1996 interview. “That didn’t work so we said, what about crawfish?”

They shared a love of things Cajun, so in 1980 the S.C. Crawfish Festival and Aquaculture Fair was born. 

The two-day event started on the grounds of the Hammock Shops. In 1986, moved it to the parking lot at the Waccamaw House, now known as Litchfield Beach and Golf Resort. The crowd of 32,000 in 1986 was “the largest crowd ever gathered in Georgetown County,” a festival board member said at the time.

After five years in Litchfield, the festival shifted again to the empty lot behind Jim Bindner’s restaurant, Ivory’s, on Highway 17 in Pawleys Island. After two years, it moved farther south to what is now the site of Christ the King Church for the final festival in 1995.

At its peak, organizers estimated attendance at 30,000 to 40,000 people over two days.

Kicking off the last Saturday in April, the schedule for the festival was always packed full of food, games and music. 

The festival featured crawfish and crab races, plenty of beer and a multitude of contests. Crowds could compete in oyster shucking, shag dancing, a greased pole climb  and the infamous flounder fling, an event that got distinctly messy with each round.

The purpose of the festival and fair was to draw tourists and promote the fledgling crawfish industry. Plantation owners were experimenting with raising crawfish in the former rice fields. There were 23 rice plantations that signed on as sponsors for the 1985 festival. 

Aquaculture was seen as a low-tech solution to boost the county’s economy. International Paper Co. ran an aquaculture project  on the Black River that raised two kinds of crawdads.

The state’s Agriculture Commissioner Les Tindal was the honorary chairman of the festival for a number of years. Along with the fun and games there was serious talk about topics like crawfish feed.

“They were involved to try and promote agriculture and awareness of crawfish and try and promote some farms down here,” Bindner said. “I don’t know why it didn’t take. I wish they were around to ask.”

It was a shame, Osteen said, when the festival marked the end of its 15-year run in 1995. By then he had moved to Charleston to open a restaurant. He died in 2019.

Since the industry died off in the county, Bindner said this year’s event will be officially known as S.C. Crawfish and Music Festival.

This year’s festival will revive some classic components from the original event. There will be a chef competition, she said, much like the Great Crawfish Recipe cookoff but with some modifications. Seven local chefs will come up with crawfish dishes for the audience to sample and vote on for the title of Crawfish Chef King of the Day.

“They get to be creative, it just has to have crawfish in it,” Bindner said. “Any one of them is going to be able to win it.”

This year’s festival at JB’s Celebration Park emphasizes music. The old festival featured musicians such as Queen Ida, the Embers and the Mullets, a band set to return for a performance at next week’s event.

“They were my first phone call because they had to be there. They’re the link to the Crawfish Festival other than the people that were there during the ’80s and ’90s,” Bindner said.

Bindner would like to revive the classic contests at future festivals. All proceeds will go back to support JB’s Celebration Park and continue annual Crawfish Festivals.

If you go

What: S.C. Crawfish and Music Festival

When: March 7, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Where: JB’s Celebration Park, Wildcat Way

b General admission is $20 in advance and $30 on the day. That includes a plate of steamed crawfish. Tickets for the chefs competition are $10 for a sample of the seven dishes. Advance tickets available online.