Carvel Ice Cream Charleston, Mount Pleasant

If Tom Carvel's ice-cream truck hadn’t had a flat tire one fateful day during Memorial Day weekend in 1934, he may have never started the country’s first retail ice-cream company. Faced with losing his entire supply of ice cream to the heat, he simply sold it from the side of the road. He was so successful that, years later, he opened his first store on that same site.

Carvel stores soon sprang up across the Northeast, including DeWitt’s own Carvel shop. Opened in the 1940s, the same year ice cream was first declared a food group, it’s the oldest still-operating Carvel franchise in the country, according to the Syracuse Post-Standard. Every day, the store’s staffers layer their famous chocolate and vanilla ice-cream cakes with crunchies, and whip up batches of their soft-serve ice cream each day to create cones, sundaes, and shakes. Customers can place cake orders online, choosing from shapes ranging from a small square to a football to the famous Fudgie the Whale.