Congaree National Park

Congaree National Park is on every list for the least-visited national parks. It’s been on my to-do list for years. We finally made it and it is our 156 national park/monument/etc! It isn’t super easy to get to and you don’t want to visit during the hot, humid, and buggy southern summer (which is much longer than a northern summer). They even have a scary sign rating the mosquito activity but luckily we visited at the right time. We can see why people might not visit as often but it is a very nice park.

We walked the 2.4 mile boardwalk loop. The trees average over 130 feet in height so that Congaree is one of the tallest deciduous forests in the world. Bigger trees include former state champion loblolly pine. It’s former since a part of the top fell during a storm. We saw cypress, pines, tupelos, and other species here.

Lots of bald cypress trees and their knees.

The boardwalk made it easy to see a variety of habitats including the ever present sloughs.

We finished our visit with a hike of the 2.2 mile Bates Ferry Trail to the Congaree River. The hike is very easy along an early road. This road had to be a lot of work to make since the dirt was built up along the length of the road so you could travel it even with some flooding. Just cutting down trees for the road must have been a large job.

The ferry was started back in the 1700s. A few pilings are left of what used to be a bridge that replaced the ferry in the early 1900s.

Nice park!

South Carolina Weird

I like the weird “ball of twine” places (yes, we’ve seen two balls of twine). South Carolina had several cool places to stop and all were free. The best stop was the UFO Welcome Center. The house is right in Bowman SC. I’m sure the neighbors love it?

Scrap materials were assembled into two flying saucers. The top is supposed to be unattached from the bottom so it can take off using alien technology. The plan is that aliens are welcomed here as their first stop on Earth.

The side yard has a rocket, two cars, and a control panel. I’m not sure of the purpose of all that but hey, you do you, UFO guy.

Old Sheldon Church was a cool stop. The ruins of this church are pretty outstanding. The history is also fascinating. The British burned the mid-1700s church during the Revolutionary War. The church was rebuilt in 1826 and then burnt during Sherman’s march during the Civil War. It is a big church for what looks like a sparsely populated area.

Fort Motte Jail has some fascinating history but I have to say there isn’t much to see.  The location started as a plantation, then a British military outpost and depot during the Revolutionary War. The site was considered for the capital of the new state of South Carolina before Columbia was picked. The former jail is the only thing we saw that was left.

The Kazoo Museum was a quick but fun stop. We didn’t go on the factory tour but wandered the small museum. There was discussion of the music written for kazoos and performances using kazoos. Did you know the biggest kazoo performance in the world involved 5,190 people playing kazoos in the Royal Albert Hall in London? There were old kazoos.

And different designs.

And a flag display of kazoos.

Georgia Historic Sites

We’ve been to lots of museums and historic sites over the last 10 years but there is always something to learn. At Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation State Historic Site, we did the home tour, which was both interesting and a bit unsettling. The plantation used enslaved labor (350+ at one point) but the film about the rice plantation history only discussed the problems of the owners. The amount of work on this plantation was mind boggling. Over 7,000 acres were cleared of cypress trees and converted to a rice plantation with channels, dikes, and floodgates. Growing and harvesting rice involves a LOT of work in a hot, muggy, and buggy marsh. I think that work was more difficult that the financial problems of the plantation owners. 

The tour guide said the slaves were “treated well” (really?). The owners left the plantation during the summer to avoid the heat and mosquitoes. They also added screens to the big house (one of the first homes with window and door screens) to prevent mosquitoes getting inside. The enslaved workers were left to work the rice fields in the heat but supposedly had no problems with malaria because they had sickle cell anemia. Online, I found that sickle cell does reduce malaria infection but by only 29% and also causes major health issues and early death. Plus, I am pretty sure not everyone had sickle cell anemia. The only building left of the slave homes at this site had half the building converted into bathrooms for us tourists. 

The guide also was indignant that the US government asked Southern soldiers for an oath of allegiance after the Civil War. The guide again emphasized the financial problems of the plantation owners after the slaves were emancipated. The tour guide highlighted the rich mahogany furniture in the home. She didn’t mention that enslaved workers in Caribbean and Central America were used to do the logging or that mahogany trees are widely separated in a forest so that the environmental damage is greater to log these trees than most trees. I was just surprised that in 2021 an historic site had such a limited point of view.  

On a better note, the trees here were gorgeous. Some of the live oaks were over 800 years old. 

I thought the vaseline glass was interesting. It uses uranium in the glass and glows under ultraviolet light. 

We found the second place better. Fort King George State Historic Site shows a reconstructed fort (the southernmost British fort). There are several buildings within the fort area that you can see. It was built in the 1720s to protect the Carolinas from the Spanish and French but no battles were fought here. 

There are stories of the soldiers who lived and died here. Apparently the older and infirm British soldiers were sent here and they were totally unprepared for the heat, humidity, and bugs. Other problems like river flooding, lack of food, alcoholism, and even (possibly intentionally) fires in the fort.

The museum had lots of artifacts that had been found here. 

 

Along with some unsettling medical displays. Hey, every doctor needed a bleeding bowl to do some bloodletting. 

 

The site also had information on saw mills and tidal power used back in the late 1700s. The water from a tide was stored in a pond and then used with a water wheel to power the saw mill. Sounds like a very sustainable energy source!