|
|
||||
South Carolina 
State bird, Carolina wren. State flower, Carolina jessamine. State tree, palmetto.
South Carolina's fascinating subtropical coastline of sea islands , great beaches, marshes and lush palmetto groves.
Lake
Wiley just out side of Rock Hill, has beautiful homes and private docks
around it, but there is a park 
and
many places you can just relax or fish from, they get world class
Bass out of the lake, the lake is about 40 miles long extending up into
North carolina, A wonderful place to spend the day.
Some of the smaller towns are very nice, and some appear as they did 150 years ago, so much movies are made in them, about the civil war.
when you goto South Carolina you realize by the accents and plantation style houses, you are now in the very deep south. The people are wonderful and easy going.
The beaches are very nice, you will see the beach houses very close to the beaches, on pilings about 12 ft tall to prevent the sea from taking them during storms.
The Civil War started on Charleston's very door step, at Fort Sumter in the harbor.
The relatively small state of SOUTH CAROLINA remains, with Mississippi, one of the poorest and most rural pockets of the US, although the prime real estate along its coast has lately been developed into exclusive golf courses and tennis clubs. Politics in the first state to secede from the Union in 1860 have traditionally been conservative. Reconstruction was mired in terrible Klan violence, while demagogues openly espoused lynching and enforced "Jim Crow" laws with frightening zeal. The state contains two of the country's most right-wing minor universities - football-fixated Clemson, and Christian Bob Jones University in Greenville, a training ground for the fundamentalist right.
CHARLESTON , one of the finest-looking cities in the US, today spreads way beyond its original confines on the tip of a peninsula at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, roughly one hundred miles south of Myrtle Beach and north of Savannah, Georgia. It's a compelling place to visit, its historic district lined with tall, narrow houses of peeling, multicolored stucco, adorned with wooden shutters and ironwork balconies wrought by slaves from Barbados. The Caribbean feel is augmented by palm trees, a tropical climate and easygoing atmosphere, while the town's pretty hidden gardens and leafy patios evoke New Orleans.
Founded in 1670 by a group of English aristocrats as a specifically money-making venture, Charles Towne swiftly boomed as a port serving the rice and cotton plantations. It became the region's dominant town, a commercial and cultural center which right from the start had a mixed population, with immigrants including French, Germans, Jews, Italians and Irish, as well as the English majority. One-third of all the nation's slaves came through Charleston, sold at the market on the riverfront and bringing with them their ironworking and building skills. The town had a sizeable free black community too, and its then unusually urban density allowed an anonymity and racial openness that, although still dominated by slavery, went a lot further than in the rest of the South. Nevertheless there was still slave unrest, culminating in the abortive Veysey slave revolt of 1823, after which the city built the Citadel armory and later the military university to control future uprisings.
The Civil War started on Charleston's very doorstep, at Fort Sumter in the harbor. Fire swept through the city, destroying large chunks, in 1861; more damage was inflicted when it was taken by Union troops in February 1865. The decline of the plantation economy and slump in cotton prices led to an economic crash after the war, made worse by a catastrophic earthquake in 1886. As the upcountry industrialized, capital steadily deserted the city, and it only really recovered when World War II restored its importance as a port and naval base. Since then, a steady program of preservation and restoration - not helped by the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 - has made tourism Charleston's main focus. Despite the crowds, however, it has kept its atmosphere, while maintaining all the energy and life of a real, working town. The gullah traditions of the sea islands are a tangible presence here, too: "basket ladies" weave their sweetgrass baskets all around the market and near the post office, and many people - black and white - speak the distinctive gullah dialect.
The
City
Charleston's
Historic District is fairly self-contained, a predominantly residential
area of leaning lines, weathered colors and exquisite hidden courtyards,
bounded by Calhoun Street to the north and East Bay Street by the river
MYRTLE BEACH is a brazen splurge of seaside fun, an unmitigated stretch of commercial development twenty miles down the coast from the North Carolina border at the center of the sixty-mile "Grand Strand." Predominantly a family resort, it's packed fit to burst during mid-term vacations with leering, jeering students in fluorescent beachwear - if you've seen the movie Shag , you'll know what to expect. Fans of crazy golf, water parks, factory outlet malls, funfairs and parasailing will be in heaven, and the beach itself isn't bad. The widest stretch is at North Myrtle Beach, a chain of small communities among which Ocean Drive is the center and Atlantic Beach is exclusively used by African Americans.
South of Myrtle Beach lie Murells Inlet , a fishing port with lots of good fish restaurants, and Pawleys Island , a secluded resort once favored by plantation-owners and today retaining a far slower pace than its neighbors. Between the two on Hwy-17 is the beautifully landscaped Brookgreen Gardens (summer daily 9.30am-9.30pm; rest of the year 9.30am-5pm; $8.50; tel 1-800/849-1931), a former rice and indigo plantation with an outdoor display of American figurative sculpture, and the setting for many of Julia Peterkin's novels of gullah life. There's also a wildlife sanctuary, where you're likely to spot alligator and deer, and an hour-and-a-half boat tour around the area.
GEORGETOWN , the first town beyond Myrtle Beach to be anything more than a beach town, makes a refreshing and quite extraordinary contrast, while the main street has a late-Fifties feel. Ask at the visitor center , 1001 Front St (tel 1-800/777-7705), for a self-guided walking tour sheet to the fine antebellum and eighteenth-century houses in the 32-block historic district in the center. A quick stroll down the boardwalk, however, gives all-too-clear views of the monstrous steel works on the opposite bank. The Rice Museum , in the clock tower on Front Street, tells how the cultivation of rice flourished on the coast during the slavery period. On the north side of town, turning east after the bridge, is the Belle W. Baruch Plantation ( by appointment only; tel 843/546-4623). Though fairly overgrown, the plantation's original " slave street " is still standing, complete with wooden shacks and a church. It serves as a powerful reminder of the brutal basis of antebellum southern prosperity, and an interesting look at the home of Bernard M. Baruch, who gave economic advice to presidents Woodrow Wilson on up to JFK.
Hopsewee Plantation , the grand mansion home of Thomas Lynch, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, is set in Spanish moss-draped grounds, twelve miles south of Georgetown on US-17 (March-Oct Mon-Fri; Nov-Feb by appointment only; $8; tel 843/546-7891). Clouds of large and ferocious mosquitoes drift up from the adjacent river, so think twice before visiting in summer. The less manicured, and slightly less mosquito-plagued Hampton Plantation State Park , further south, two miles off US-17 on Hwy-857, is probably closer to the look of a typical plantation. The grounds (9am-6pm; free) are pretty, but the house (summer Thurs-Mon 11am-4pm; rest of year 1pm-4pm; $2) is most impressive, a huge eighteenth-century Neoclassical monolith built by Huguenots, yet, while its exterior has been restored, the inside is pretty bare. The plantation itself is isolated in the heart of the dense Francis Marion National Forest . This heavily black area is particularly known for its sweetgrass basket-weaving, a craft that originated with the slaves in West Africa, using tight bundles of grasses to make intricate baskets and pots. Despite the enormously time-consuming work and the cost of materials
Further south, beyond the forest and a few miles north of Charleston, is the much-publicized Boone Hall Plantation (April-Aug Mon-Sat 8.30am-6.30pm, Sun 1-5pm; Sept-March Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sun 1-4pm;). A visit is a sanitized and annoying experience: the plantation may date from the late seventeenth century but the house is a twentieth-century reconstruction used for much television and movie filming. Tours are conducted by hapless young women in southern belle costumes, who rather overplay the connections with Gone with the Wind . The grounds are more interesting, with a long, tree-lined drive and another rare slave street, this time of small mid-eighteenth-century brick cabins that housed privileged slaves - domestic servants and skilled artisans.
South of Charleston toward Savannah, the coastline dissolves into small, marshy islands. Edisto Island , south of US-17 on Hwy-174, is typical: huge live oaks festooned with great drapes of Spanish moss line the roads, beside bright green marshes with rich birdlife, and great beaches on the seaward side. If you want to stay, there are no budget motels, but the campground at Edisto Beach State Park (tel 843/869-2156, fax 843/869-3022) is near a great beach lined with palmetto trees and other semitropical plants.
BEAUFORT
(pronounced Byoofert ), the biggest town, is rather twee but the old district
is lovely - offset somewhat by racial tensions and the baleful proximity
of Parris Island US Marine Base, notorious for the brutality of its training
regime, as mythologized in Kubrick's Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket . The
Greyhound bus station is two miles north of town on US-21. The visitor
center at 1106 Carteret St (tel 843/986-5406) has details of tours around
the small historic district and discount coupons for the motels out on
US-21. In town, the Best Western Sea Island Inn , 1015 Bay St (tel 843/522-2090,
fax 843/521-4858, ), has nice rooms with an old-fashioned feel. Ultimate
Eating , 859 Sea Island Parkway (tel 843/838-1314), serves nourishing Low
Country and gullah -style dishes. For magnificent views of Beaufort River
visit Ollie's Seafood Restaurant where the oysters are a specialty.
