At the southern end of Wadmalaw Island, overlooking Bohicket Creek, sits the summer village of Rockville. The village was laid out in 1824 as a retreat where island planters escaped the heat and the mosquitoes of plantation life each summer, the same tradition told in the story of the summer-home tradition on Johns Island and Wadmalaw.
The finest home in the village.
The Edward D. Bailey House was built in 1853 for Edward D. Bailey and is considered the finest home in the village. With its wide front porch, it is a typical example of Rockville architecture, a house made for shade and breezes in the Lowcountry summer.
Listed on the National Register.
The Bailey House is part of the Rockville Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The district holds the village's antebellum and Victorian summer houses, laid out when Rockville was founded in 1824.
A Confederate hospital during the Civil War.
During the Civil War the house served as a Confederate hospital, one of the many roles the war pressed onto the Lowcountry's finest homes as it reached the sea islands.
The Bailey House still stands today as one of the village's best-loved landmarks. Beneath its moss-draped live oaks, the white two-story house remains what it was built to be in 1853: a place to escape the summer, and a quiet monument to the Lowcountry's summer-village tradition.