Captain Wayne Magwood

1953 – 2020 · Shem Creek, Mt. Pleasant

The bronze man on the boardwalk is not a generic fisherman. He is Captain Wayne Magwood — fifty years a shrimper, a founder of the Blessing of the Fleet, and for most of his life the face of Shem Creek itself. He stands facing the water, a bucket of shrimp at his feet, watching the boats the way he did for half a century.

Find the Creek

The Story

The Face of Shem Creek

Wayne Magwood started shrimping as a boy, working alongside his father, Captain Clarence Magwood Jr. The family was already generations deep on the creek — a cousin, Captain William Magwood, is credited with bringing the first ocean shrimp to Mount Pleasant in 1930. Wayne gave the work fifty years and the trawler Winds of Fortune, a boat that turned up everywhere from a Darius Rucker video to the History Channel. In 2011 the state handed him the Order of the Palmetto, its highest civilian honor. When he died in 2020, the people of the creek answered the only way that fit: they raised him in bronze.

The Memorial

The particulars

Who: Captain Wayne Magwood, 1953–2020
Sculptor: Susie Chisholm, Savannah, Georgia
Cast: Life-size bronze, about five foot eight
Where: The Magwood Boardwalk, over Shem Creek
Raised by: More than 150 donations, over $100,000
Look close: A QR code points to the creek's working fleet

What he stood for

More Than Shrimp

Magwood didn’t only catch shrimp; he fought for the people who do. Through the South Carolina Shrimpers Association and the Southern Shrimp Alliance, he spent years arguing — in town halls and in Washington — that a country eating mostly imported, farmed shrimp was quietly letting its own docks go dark. The memorial points at the same thing he did: the boats are still here, for now, if enough people keep buying the local catch. His daughter says the lesson he left was simpler than any of it — always give back.

On the water

50 years

From a boy beside his father to the face of the fleet.

Winds of Fortune

Since 1987

His 68-foot trawler — a Shem Creek celebrity in its own right.

The honor

Order of the Palmetto

South Carolina’s highest civilian award, 2011.