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The area may be awash in jobs, but most are in relatively low-paying service and construction work. Average income in Beaufort County is well above the state and national averages, thanks to well-heeled retirees. But the jobs there don't pay well. Last year, the average weekly wage in private industry was $564, well under the South Carolina average of $623.

A county committee set a goal this summer of trying to lure 10 companies with jobs that pay higher than the area average.

Still, plenty of jobs is a good thing, said Fred Hamilton, a town council member whose family has lived in Bluffton for generations. When he was growing up, many locals earned their income from the May River and oysters. If you didn't want work in the seafood business, he said, you had to drive elsewhere to find it, and many commuted to Savannah.

He sells cars at a local dealership and said it's great to have a job practically around the corner from his home instead of having to commute, given the area's traffic.

"We were just a one-horse town before," he said. "Now we have jobs and shopping, and bringing those things was great. But what we don't appreciate is the overcrowding. At some point it gets so overcrowded that you don't want to even leave the house."

Many of the newcomers to the area are Hispanics, posing fresh challenges for local governments, who have to spend more on teachers of English as a Second Language and other bilingual workers.

The Lowcountry boom helped give South Carolina the fastest growth in immigrant population of any state -- 48 percent from 2000 to 2005, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

At Bluffton Elementary, there were two Hispanic students when the school opened seven years ago. Now Hispanics make up more than a third of the enrollment of just more than 950 children.

Spanish-speaking residents are so numerous that the Town of Hilton Head decided in August to give $1,200-a-year raises to town employees who demonstrate that they can speak, write and understand Spanish. In 2001, the Beaufort County sheriff's department started a similar program.

Luis Bell, director of the Latin-American Council of South Carolina, which is based on Hilton Head, estimates that 20,000 Hispanics now live and work in the coastal area south of Charleston and north of Savannah, Ga.

Last oyster house

With the fishing industry badly depressed because of cheap imports, tough regulations and high fuel prices, the fish houses and crab processors along North Carolina's coast where watermen sell their catch have been closing in alarming numbers. Often, a developer is waiting with a fat check, and the property is sold for houses or condominiums.

Oyster houses, the Lowcountry equivalents to fish houses, are almost gone. The only oyster house, where the shellfish are cleaned and shucked, left in South Carolina is the Bluffton Oyster Co., which opened in 1899.

The operators say that it would have closed, too, if not for a radical step: The county bought it to keep it open, and leases it at a subsidized rate to a family with a long history in the oyster business, the Toomers.

"It's a tough enough row as it is now," said Tina Toomer, who along with her husband, Larry, runs the business.

With its ramshackle ambience, dogged insistence on selling only high-quality local seafood and its place in history, it also has become something of a tourist attraction, with T-shirts for sale and a world map on the wall with pins for the homes of foreign visitors.

Beaufort County's purchase of the oyster house echoes ideas discussed by activists who want to protect North Carolina's traditional waterfront businesses.

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