Drive into DeBordieu Colony and one of the first things you notice is that it doesn’t feel new.
It doesn’t really feel old, either.
It feels established.
Massive live oaks spread across roads and homesites. Mature trees seem to have been there long before the houses. The golf course, marsh, beach and neighborhoods don’t feel as though they were simply imposed on the land. They feel as though they grew into it.
I’ve always noticed that about DeBordieu. I just didn’t fully understand why.
Then I started looking at the names on the street signs.
Vanderbilt Boulevard.
Wallace Pate Drive.
Those aren’t names somebody pulled out of a hat.
They are clues to the story of how DeBordieu became DeBordieu—and particularly to the life of a woman named Lucille Margaret Vanderbilt Pate.
Before DeBordieu Was DeBordieu
The story begins long before there was a gated community, golf course or beach club.
The larger Waccamaw Neck was once one of America’s great rice-growing regions. The history is beautiful in some respects and deeply difficult in others. Its extraordinary agricultural wealth was created through the knowledge and forced labor of enslaved African Americans.
What eventually became the larger Arcadia property included several of these historic plantation tracts.
By the early 20th century, the economy had changed dramatically. Wealthy Northerners were buying former Lowcountry plantations and turning them into winter residences, hunting properties and sporting estates. By the 1930s, South Carolina historical research says the former plantations of Waccamaw Neck had largely become winter homes and hunting lodges for Northern owners. (SC Department of Archives and History)
One of those owners was Dr. Isaac E. Emerson.
If that name isn’t familiar, his product probably is.
Emerson made his fortune from Bromo-Seltzer, the famous headache remedy whose blue bottles became ubiquitous in American medicine cabinets.
In 1906, Emerson purchased the historic Prospect Hill property near Georgetown and began adding neighboring plantation tracts. He called the combined estate Arcadia. The old Prospect Hill house became the center of the property, surrounded by gardens, guest buildings, stables and thousands of acres of Lowcountry landscape. (National Register)
Eventually, Arcadia passed to Emerson’s grandson:
George Washington Vanderbilt III.
And that is how this particular piece of Georgetown County became part of the Vanderbilt family story.
The Vanderbilt Connection
It’s easy to hear the name Vanderbilt and immediately think of railroads, mansions and one of America’s most famous fortunes.
And yes, this was that Vanderbilt family.
But there’s an important distinction.
The Georgetown property did not originate as some grand purchase by the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. It came through the Emerson side of the family and ultimately passed to George Vanderbilt.
George spent time at Arcadia and developed a strong interest in the natural world. Ducks Unlimited records that in the 1950s he designated Middleton Pond on the property as a refuge where waterfowl could feed and rest without disturbance. (Ducks Unlimited)
His daughter spent time there with him during winter vacations.
Her name was Lucille Margaret Vanderbilt.
Her family called her Lulu.
And eventually, Arcadia would become hers.
Lucille Vanderbilt Pate
Lucille was born in Honolulu in 1938, the daughter of George Washington Vanderbilt and Lucille Parsons Balcom. She grew up largely in Palm Beach, attended Foxcroft School in Virginia, traveled on nature expeditions in the Pacific with her father and spent part of her childhood at Arcadia. (Legacy.com)
When her father died, she inherited the property.
That fact alone doesn’t tell us very much about a person.
What happened afterward does.
Her family’s account of her life describes conservation not as a late-life interest, but as something central to how she viewed Arcadia. Her obituary says that preserving the land—and caring for the people connected to it—became a focus of her life, describing her as a responsible steward of the property. (Legacy.com)
Ducks Unlimited later described her philosophy similarly. According to the organization, Lucille viewed herself as a caretaker for the next generation, balancing the revenue necessary to operate an enormous property against preservation of its natural features. (Ducks Unlimited)
That distinction matters.
Maintaining thousands of acres isn’t free.
Neither is preserving them.
Over time, Lucille and her family placed conservation easements on nearly 4,000 acres of Arcadia, including property extending for miles along the Waccamaw River. Ducks Unlimited reported the combined value of those easements at approximately $60 million. (Ducks Unlimited)
And yet preservation did not mean that nothing could ever change.
Part of the land would become something new.
It would become DeBordieu.
Wallace Pate
This is where another name from those street signs enters the story.
Wallace Fennell Pate.
Wallace wasn’t simply an outside developer who appeared one day and purchased Vanderbilt property.
He was Lucille’s husband.
That makes the creation of modern DeBordieu considerably more interesting than the simplified version of the story.
The transition wasn’t merely:
old family owns land → developer buys land → subdivision gets built.
Development occurred within a family whose life was already tied to this property.
Wallace Pate was involved in real estate, but he was also an outdoorsman and conservationist whose interests included hunting and fishing. Lucille’s obituary identifies her as his widow, and historic documentation for Arcadia itself lists Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Pate as owners of the property. (Legacy.com)
A portion of the family’s land ultimately became the community we now know as DeBordieu Colony.
And suddenly the road signs make sense.
Vanderbilt Boulevard.
Wallace Pate Drive.
You’re driving through the family history.
A Place That Was Already Something
Learning this history changed the way I look at DeBordieu.
I’ve built homes all over this part of South Carolina, and there’s something physically different about this place.
For me, it’s the trees.
There are enormous live oaks everywhere.
They immediately communicate something that can’t be recreated with a landscaping budget. You can build a beautiful house in a year or two. You can plant an expensive tree.
You cannot buy 100 years.
And that’s part of why DeBordieu doesn’t feel like somebody simply found valuable coastal acreage, cleared it, maximized the number of lots and sold everything to the highest bidder.
It feels like the community grew out of something that was already here.
The history bears out at least part of that feeling.
The land had already passed through generations of human history before modern DeBordieu existed. It had been part of the rice culture of the Waccamaw Neck. Later, this region became a retreat for wealthy Northern families. Emerson assembled Arcadia. The property passed to George Vanderbilt. Then it passed to Lucille.
And Lucille didn’t disappear from the story once development began.
She remained connected to Arcadia for the rest of her life.
She died there in 2018, at age 80. (Legacy.com)
What She Left Behind
I want to be careful here.
It’s tempting when telling a story like this to turn a real person into a legend—to assign motives we can’t know, simplify complicated decisions or credit one individual for everything that came afterward.
That’s not necessary.
The documented story is impressive enough.
Lucille Vanderbilt Pate inherited an extraordinary piece of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
She lived with it.
She developed portions of it.
She preserved enormous portions of it.
And her family continued that stewardship.
Today, nearly 4,000 acres of Arcadia have been protected through conservation easements. Longleaf pine forests continue to be managed there. Wetlands remain habitat for waterfowl. The larger property still carries physical evidence of centuries of Lowcountry history. (Ducks Unlimited)
And part of what was once that larger landscape became DeBordieu.
That doesn’t mean every decision made along the way was perfect. No place with centuries of history has a simple story.
But it does help explain something I’ve always felt when I drive through the gate.
DeBordieu feels like it earned itself.
There is an age and permanence here that can’t be manufactured.
Letting the Land Decide
Our first article in this series was called “Let the Land Decide.”
It was about something very specific: before designing a house, understand the land. Look at the views. Look at the trees. Understand the orientation, privacy, elevation and constraints.
Don’t force a house onto a piece of property.
Listen to what the land is telling you.
I didn’t expect the history of DeBordieu to lead right back to that idea.
But in a way, it does.
Long before we’re building our new home here, generations of people were making decisions about this same landscape—sometimes exploiting it, sometimes changing it, sometimes protecting it, and sometimes deciding that certain things were worth leaving alone.
Lucille Vanderbilt Pate was one of the people entrusted with making those decisions.
Today, you can still see her family’s name on the roads.
But the more meaningful legacy may be everything around those signs:
the live oaks, the marsh, the forest, the wildlife, the open land—and the unmistakable feeling that DeBordieu was built in a place that had a life long before any of us arrived.
Maybe that’s why it feels different.
And maybe the best thing we can do when we build here today is remember that we’re only adding the next chapter.
