South Carolina - Day 7 - Orangeburg, Barnwell

Barnwell State Park, Blackwell

Monday, 15 May 2023

I forgot to mention earlier that when I first called for a reservation at the Newberry KOA and said there'd be 2 adults and a dog, they asked for the names of both the 2nd adult and the dog.  Of course, there isn't a 2nd adult but I always say there is as a safety measure (since the good advice I got at the Las Vegas KOA).  But I didn't want to say that, so I told them the 2nd adult was named David (first man's name I thought of), and of course gave Dexter's name.

What a surprise when I got there and found on my handout from the office a message: "Welcome Kate, David & Dexter!"  That was along with the bubble machine and the gnomes.  An unusual place.

This morning I woke up at 1:30 when Dext set off the carbon monoxide alarm and couldn't get back to sleep.  Not the first night recently that this has happened and, over the last 4 nights, I've averaged 4 hours of sleep/night.  Not the greatest for doing a driving trip.

today's route

I took a route from the Newberry campground to Orangeburg that was as direct as a non-interstate route would allow.  Still, Google claimed that all that driving would only take me 3 hours  but I didn't believe them and left the campground before 8:30 (and wasn't surprised when the drive was actually closer to 6 hours).

At Joanna I noticed some crops starting to grow - 1' to 2' tall.

A string of industries was spread all along the road from Newberry (not marked by a highway sign) to Prosperity, where I missed a directional sign and made a 3-mile round trip in the wrong direction.

I noticed that both the Saluda River and the Little Saluda River were very full.  So were the plentiful blooming magnolias.

We passed cows and calves, horses, goats, donkeys.  South Carolina has a range of farm animals.

I saw a license plate that said "NGNEER."

I saw a sign for a product to "Kill Barn Flies."  City girl that I am, I hadn't heard of a critter called a barn fly, and the internet tells me I'm lucky.  They look like small house flies but bite and suck blood - typically from the animals that spend time in barns/stables.  They sound truly yucky and I can see why farmers wouldn't want them around.

In this area corn was 2' to 3' tall.  Farther along I passed a pecan orchard.

At the town of North, we stopped for a break in a city parking lot, with a playground at one end and a mobile clinic in the middle.  This clinic was in a fancy RV and their signs said they were in town daily to provide basic medical care.  Nobody was patronizing them while we were there, so of course I was tempted to go be a customer so they wouldn't feel unused.  But my list of ailments goes on too long for a mobile clinic, so I spared them the trouble.  

North looked like a nice old town centered around the railroad tracks.  Now most of the storefronts were empty, so the clinic may be needed because the town might no longer have a doctor.

Lots of corn growing in this region.

I saw a sign for Cimarron Outdoors For the Mobility Impaired.  They seem to be based in Lexington, SC, which is just outside Columbia, some way to the north of where we were, but maybe this area is where they come for their activities.  Which apparently consist of helping people with various types of mobility impairment go out and, with Christian fellowship, kill deer.  At least, that's what I gleaned from their website.  But most of their presence is on Facebook, which I can't access, so I may not have gotten it straight.  

At Woodland, I passed a Baptist church with a sign saying their worship service is held at 10:00 AM and a mask is required.  I was really surprised, because for 2 years the news has been full of churches proudly defying government orders to use masks in crowded places.  And South Carolina ranks as a pretty Republican state, the party of no-mask-mandates.

Orangeburg has a population of 87,000 and is called The Garden City.  I learned it also has 2 historically Black schools: Claflin University, a private school founded 1869, and South Carolina Southern University, a public land-grant school founded 1890.

I don't know if that makes it more surprising or less that this was the site of a massacre by state police during the 1960s.  I'd heard about it by accident and went looking for the historical marker I'd seen online.

Google said it stood on the road by South Carolina State University, but in fact I found it inside the college's metal fence that made it hard for me to read and impossible for me to get a photo of.  So I begged the guard at the entrance to the school if there was anywhere I could park for a short time so I could visit that monument, and she directed me to a small crowded lot where I did find a spot big enough for the RV.  Here's the historical marker.

The startling brevity - and somewhat coldblooded wording - of this sign make it clear there's a lot to this story that isn't mentioned.  After all, why would police - even in the Jim Crow South - kill and wound so many because of "tension" at the bowling alley?  The rest of the story (as Paul Harvey used to say) is found at this Wikipedia page.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Orangeburg-massacre

As I was driving away from the campus, I noticed a historical marker about the school that I'd missed earlier.  The sign and its text are found here:   https://www.hmdb.org/SCSU  That entry references another historical marker "700' away" for Claflin, so I looked that up and learned the marker for SCSU was lacking a lot of important information about the school's beginnings.   https://www.hmdb.org/Claflin-College

On the way out of town I passed a Methodist church with a sign: "Welcome Back - Preaching Only."  Do you suppose that means they won't be having any singing, for instance, which is an activity known to spread the Covid virus?  

And the real question for me was, why were 2 churches in one town acting as if Covid were still in its flood stage?  I mean, this is mid-2023 and most people decided Covid was behind us a year ago.  The current data in the US shows the weekly totals as more than 12,000 being hospitalized with Covid and more than 700 people dying.  Nothing like it used to be but, of course, still tragic for those being afflicted.  Anyway, I'm just reporting what I saw.

South Carolina has neighboring towns named Sweden, Norway and Denmark.  Denmark is the "City of Pride," they say, and the home of the annual Dogwood Fest.  Online I learned that this April was their 41st year.  They also say one of the annual activities is the "painting of the dogwoods," which sounded pretty weird to me as I thought trees don't react well to paint on their trunks.  But it turned out the city has pictures of dogwoods painted on the streets, and each year volunteers freshen them up.  Denmark is also home to Vorhees University, established in 1896.

A highway sign told me I was in the "Heritage Corridor."  Which meant nothing to me, but I learned online it's an official designation and promoted by the National Park Service.  It's a corridor that runs from the Appalachians down through Charleston to the Atlantic and contains sites important in the Revolutionary War.

Just down the road from Denmark was Blackville, and a T intersection that Google hadn't mentioned.  Luckily I guessed right, that I should turn left, but that wasn't the end of it.  Google's mileage was way off and the state park's sign was almost useless: it was a small sign that couldn't be read from the road, posted on a short concrete pillar near the entrance to the park, where the road sign read, in small letters, "State Park."  It was just lucky that I noticed that road sign, since Google had told me it was much farther down the road.

Once in the campground, I found the campsite I'd chosen online was sloped and I couldn't find a position where we could be anything more than not-too-uncomfortable.  As I saw when I went around the area, my site wasn't any worse and was actually much better than the other campsites.

The campground was tiny - I think there were only 25 campsites and there were only 7 groups of campers that night, though as it was a Monday it wasn't too surprising.  That 7, by the way, included the camp host who apparently only came on weekends, because no one ever showed up to his RV while we were there.

All that added up to almost no place for Dext and me to walk, which was a shame because we both needed it after staying in one campground for a week and then driving all day.  We just weren't used to it.  This was my first night in a South Carolina state campground, and I hoped my reservations at other parks next week would prove more comfortable.