12 Best Places to Live in South Carolina if You Hate Crowds

The towns on this list don't have a PR budget, a tourism board, or a ten-year downtown revitalization grant. I drove through every single town on this list, and a few of them genuinely stopped me cold. We're talking about the town settled by a German colonization society in 1850 and named after Norse mythology — sitting right there in the Blue Ridge foothills like it always belonged. The courthouse square that produced ten South Carolina governors, including one who served in the United States Senate until the age of one hundred. The birthplace of the father of bebop, on a colonial village green that hasn't been asked to hurry in two and a half centuries. And the number two town on this list has a police station that is ten feet wide and twelve feet long — it used to be a wellhouse, and the whole thing fits inside a parking space. These aren't tourism destinations. They're real towns with real prices that held onto their character precisely because the growth never came for them. 12 best places to live in South Carolina if crowds genuinely drain you, counted down from quietly overlooked to genuinely hard to explain. #1 has a median home price that will make you read it twice.