Missing snow? Take a look back at Beaufort County’s white Christmas of 1989

Snow men in Harbour Town. Icicles on beachfront villas. Skiers on golf courses.

The blizzard of 1989, the largest in history for the southeastern states, blanketed Beaufort County in three to eight inches of snow.

The one and only white Christmas on record wasn’t a cakewalk for those who weathered it. Pipes burst in Bluffton. Many lost power. Cars slid into ditches. Bridges and airports closed. But the storm still left Lowcountry residents with a sense of wonder.

“I think I’m going to build me a snowman tomorrow,” 15-year-old Cadre Murray told The Island Packet on Christmas Eve. “It will be my first one.”

With freezing temperatures on the horizon but little chance of a blizzard, take a look back at our file photos from the freak snow storm of 1989:

This story was originally published December 24, 2020 at 2:13 PM.

Lucas Smolcic Larson

The Island Packet

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Lucas Smolcic Larson joined The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette as a projects reporter in 2019, after graduating from Brown University. His work has won Rhode Island and South Carolina Press Association awards for education and investigative reporting. He previously worked as an intern at The Washington Post and the Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington D.C. Lucas hails from central Pennsylvania and speaks Spanish and Portuguese.