29 www.ReadMPM.com | www.MountPleasantMagazine.com | www.MountPleasantPodcast.com our town Since this is Mount Pleasant Magazine’s Best Of Edition, I’d like to add a few things that weren’t up for a vote but which I think also represent the best of Mount Pleasant (these are not ranked in order). LOCALLY CAUGHT SEAFOOD The cover photo of this edition speaks to the popularity of our locally caught seafood. This eye-catching photo elicits the flavor, the culture, the history and the mystique of our Shem Creek fishing and shrimping fleet and its bounty. The flourishing restaurants lining the creek are a testimony to the demand for fresh, local seafood, as are the local seafood vendors who don’t cook it but sell it to us by the pound. I often say that if we lose the shrimping fleet, Shem Creek would look like any generic marina from Maine to Miami. God bless the fleet! Our shrimpers tell me that due to changes in environmental factors, they now have to go farther away from the mouth of Charleston Harbor to catch shrimp. Conservation of natural resources and limiting development runoff are key to protecting local seafood. SETTLEMENT COMMUNITIES At a big event recently, I was asked by a new resident about settlement communities and why they exist. They are called settlement communities because they are where formerly enslaved people settled upon leaving their former way of life on local plantations when slavery ended with the Civil War. I view them as living historic monuments representing the often slow, often contentious but inevitably effective American march of freedom and civil rights. Our settlement communities are spread all across east of the Cooper, reminding us of our Gullah-Geechie culture and our ties to the land. The town’s Sweetgrass Overlay Zoning District and our Community Conservation zoning category were passed in order to protect settlement communities for generations to come. MUNICIPAL ASSOCIATION OF SOUTH CAROLINA ACHIEVEMENT AWARD This is the most important of my Best Of list items because it involves a life and death issue. Due to our partnership with locally-based nonprofit WakeUp Carolina, founded by Mount Pleasant native Nanci SteadmanShipman, we were the only municipality in the state BY WILL HAYNIE MAYOR OF MOUNT PLEASANT Mayor’s Message Take joy in town pride
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