Barrel Landing, also spelled Barrell, took its name from a nearby docking and landing area on the Okatie River first used by early settlers of the Okatie community after the Revolutionary War. Farmers and tradesmen loaded produce packed in barrels onto river craft there for shipment to larger ports such as Beaufort, Savannah, and Charleston. The original Barrel Landing School was built in the 1800s before the Civil War but was destroyed by fire in the late 1800s. A new school was then built and reportedly was damaged by both a fire and a hurricane earlier in the twentieth century. At one time, four one-room schoolhouses stood in the area, three of them along the historic roadway now S.C. 170. When a central school was built in the Town of Bluffton in 1919, Barrel Landing School closed and became a community center. Although official written records of the schoolhouses have been lost, former students of the Okatie community recalled teachers boarding with families and traveling to school on foot or by horse and buggy, students in grades 1-8 sitting at homemade tables and benches facing a large oak desk, a pot belly stove for heat, wall lanterns because there was no electricity, a built-in bench circling the schoolroom on three sides, and a large wooden log serving as the front steps.