Hello I'm Beryl Dakers and this is Palmetto Scene we're here today at the beautiful Swan Lake Iris Gardens of Sumter, South Carolina.

signified by Grainger McCoy's magnificent sculpture, Recovery.

Home to some of the nation's most intensive plantings of Japanese Iris, this park is the only public park in the United States to feature all eight swan species.

It's also just one of the many very unique places in the palmetto state.

Consider South Carolina's upstate for example set at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, this majestic region is full of natural scenic wonders.

One of the most popular places for people to go here the Table Rock is to reach the summit.

And that's always is a goal for people to get out and say that they've been up to the top.

You know Table Rock Mountain has a granite top.

So you got views all throughout Pickens in Greenville county that you can kind of you can kind of get a great overview of the surrounding area and it's just the place that people enjoy to say that they summited, that they've gone and done it and then brag to their family and friends and say Hey this is something that I did and you know challenge them to do the same thing.

The dam here on Pinnacle lake at Table Rock it's a special place.

It was built by the CCC in the in the 1930s.

That's the Civilian Conservation Corps.

It's unique they use materials, stone that are source locally throughout the area and it's built in a way to blend in to the scenery here.

In the 30's, the CCC, they built places to to blend into to the environment you know to to enhance the parking not detract from it.

I think you know part of that construction was they termed the phrase park-i- tecture because it was the you know the architecture was something that was those built into the park.

It was supposed to enhance it.

You kind of this is I think is one of the best examples that we have here at the park is the Gain's Lodge where it was built as a meeting place for people to come and enjoy.

We host the music on the mountain here.

One of the things I like to tell people is that you know the Table Rock is a great place for you to make connections, make connections to nature, make connections to the people that you love and have experience with them that you can that you can take away from this.

Oconee State Park is nestled in the upstate of South Carolina roughly about fourteen miles from the state of North Carolina state line in the mountains of South Carolina.

It has 1,165 acres that has 19 cabins.

It has multiple day use facilities to include four shelters.

It has a 139 site campground.

It also has a natural swimming area in our 20 acre lake stands behind me here at the park.

We do also have a 12 acre lake fishing pond which is located right on the edge of our campground.

The lake offers fishing from bass and brim.

Also too rainbow trout, brown trout which is stocked yearly by local fisheries.

We also have the camping, which most people enjoy on a good campfire along with S'mores at night and good stories.

And then we also with our 19 cabins, the folks just kind enjoy family time.

The bath house is one of the most iconic buildings here at Oconee State Park.

It's the original building at Oconee.

Again Oconee was established in 1935.

It was built by Civilian Conservation Corps.

Each stone laid by hand, each timber cut by hand and still stands here today.

It sits right on the edge of our lake.

It's also the housing for the spill way that feeds from our main lake.

But then also we provide our movies at night.

We do movies at night here at the park, we actually do it right beside here at the bath house and the lake.

It's very much a traditional park, which is where we have the slogan of experience, the tradition of Oconee because families have been coming here for years.

They've been coming with their grandparents and their parents and now their parents.

And they've been coming here for decades together as families.

Devil's Fork State Park was established in 1991.

It's one of the, our newer state parks here in South Carolina.

It is the only access to Lake Jocassee for the general public.

here does for state park Here at Devil's Fork State Park we have 20 mountain villas.

There are 15 two bedrooms and five three bedroom available for reservations all year round.

They come supplied with all your basic cooking supplies that you may need and your basic linens and things like that.

There's also a wood burning fireplace in most of them.

Some of them we are actually upgrading to our gas fireplace.

Our villas are available year round and up to thirteen months in advance currently.

Every weekend we are pretty much well booked.

So if you really want to get that perfect view of Lake Jocassee we go ahead and suggest you make that reservation 13 months in advance.

There is some development around Lake Jocassee, so you do have some private homes over here.

They'll be some private homes towards the back creek project.

Really once you get out into the rivers of Jocassee, it's just pristine wilderness, no development you feel by yourself and even though the park may be at capacity the lake is not at capacity.

It's about three quarters of a mile, a mile to get from the remote ramps to this overnight bowed in sites.

Along this bed, there are sites.

There are sites and there's 13 currently we'll actually expand that to 25 sites.

They're very rustic and for those who are looking for that premium experience of being by themselves and away from the hustle and bustle of the city life.

This is one way of really doing it.

Just beautiful!

There are also many hidden gems in Horry county.

One happens to be just off the beaten path in Little River.

The Vereen Memorial Gardens provide a treasure trove of history.

Fortunately, family descendants have preserved the property so visitors can experience the area just as it once was.

♪ The Vereen Memorial historical Gardens today has got so many thing's offer.

You know, in addition to being a historical plantation.

It goes back to the roots in the seventy hundreds.

And it has the old broad road that George Washington and others crossed through.

There's also nature trails that run all through there.

And these are great trails and it shows you what this area along the coast line would have looked like, you know, prior to development.

Ben Burroughs, Director of the Horry County Archives Center at Coastal Carolina University, has traced the arrival of Jack Vereen and his wife Susan Horry Vereen to Charleston South Carolina in the late 1600's.

Jacques Vereen or Varin spelled V A R I N in those early records.

But they must have sounded like Vereen.

His descendants eventually moved up into the Horry County.

Which is now the Horry county area.

Which at the time in the 1700's, was Georgetown district and really comprised the northeast corner of the state of South Carolina.

And after a couple generations, we had Jeremiah SR.

Jeremiah Vereen SR, who was a veteran of the revolutionary war.

And he's interesting because he actually was host to President George Washington, when Washington did his tour of the southern states.

That Jeremiah, lived on a long bay plantation, which was right at Singleton Swash, just above present day Myrtle Beach.

George Washington kept a great diary during his southern tour of the states.

And we have his actual hand writing, his own diary where he talks about coming through this area.

And its wonderful.

Especially if you are familiar with our local old names and families.

You can follow very easily, where he's going and who he's talking about and he talks about coming down from North Carolina crossing the state line.

Coming right through the Vereen Memorial Gardens on down to eventually where he stops and has to make a decision.

He can divert over to the beach and travel down along that hard packed beach, at low tide, basically right through what is now Myrtle Beach.

And at that fork, where you have to decide that, is where the Vereen Plantation was.

They would make arrangements to stay at the Vereen Plantation and wait for the tide to be low.

And then Mr.

Vereen would take them down to the beach road and guide them across the Swash.

Which is now called Singleton Swash and that's exactly what Mr Vereen did with President Washington.

And in Washington's diary, he writes all this down and he explains that he had tried to pay Mr Vereen for room and board, but Mr Vereen would not allow him to make compensation.

And he described Mr Vereen as a very kind gentlemen.

His son Jeremiah junior, in seventeen ninety seven.

Jeremiah Vereen junior acquired four hundred acres of land.

which became Big Landing Plantation and part of that land, is what later ended up as the Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens.

Now, it came down that Vereen family line from Jeremiah Vereen junior down to a Hartford Vereen in the early nineteen hundreds and then it went from Hartford Vereen to his son Jackson H. Vereen.

And it was Jackson Vereen or Jack Vereen that actually deeded acreage part of the acreage of Big Landing Plantation to Horry County for the formation of the Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens.

In 1971 Jackson H. Vereen deeded 115 acres of land to the Horry County Historic Preservation commission for five dollars.

But before he did that he made sure the Vereen family cemetery on the property was taking care of.

In nineteen fifty seven descendants of Jacques and Susan Vereen from all over the country joined together at the gardens for the unveiling of the Vereen family memorial.

The family cemetery on the property was improved and expanded to include eight new markers for Confederate and revolutionary war veterans, whose graves were destroyed when the Intracoastal Waterway was dredged.

He had a love for the history, and the land.

and I think he just wanted to see that heritage preserved for the people of the county.

Today Horry County parks and recreation operates the Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens and it's open to the public.

When you enter the parking lot, front gate at Vereen Memorial Gardens the gate actually is right at the old original Kings Road or original Broad Road really.

If you go to where the gate is and look to the left that's the best preserved part of it.

You can walk right down it on towards Mullet Creek, which is that Creek that shows up on the land grant.

Horry County, the government is trying to restore that road so it gives more of a feel of what it would have been like when President Washington came down it.

And what they're doing is they're gonna let the undergrowth grow up on either side of the road and then put an old wooden rail fence on further out of the undergrowth to create that tunnel effect.

So, what they would have seen back then see, is a like a tunnel, and on either side there would have been the native trees and stuff growing up and arching over the road.

And that's what we're trying to recreate.

While we we're up there doing some of that work, putting up the fence and stuff.

Actually somebody walking on the road, I think, found this.

It was an old horseshoe, which we thought was very appropriate that on the old broad road they found an old horseshoe.

We think dating it is around the 1800's.

So it's very appropriate that we found that.

I think it's on display now at the gardens.

The C.B.

Berry Community Center at Vereen Gardens Exhibits Historical artifacts like the horseshoe in an effort to preserve the area's history.

At the gardens visitors can explore the land that the Vereen family preserved for generations.

There are three miles of nature trails over land and water.

As visitors walk through the woods they'll notice guide signs pointing out plants and animals native to the area.

Much of the property is shaded with canopies of trees and there are several locations for sitting picnicking or even taking wedding photos.

Visitors in search of some sun can venture out on to the boardwalks that connect hammocks or small islands in the marshland before reaching the water way lined with shelled beaches.

On the journey fiddler crabs, birds, and seagulls will make a visit.

Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens is one of the last undeveloped stretches along the coast of Horry county in part of south Carolina's natural history.

♪ Another area of interest especially to archaeologist is hockey island at botany bay this is dark side on Edisto island is home to an amazing collection of cell tools jewelry Tom's big pottery and intricately decorated bone pins.

In 2016 Hurricane Matthew hit South Carolina reshaping its coastline.

In the process of re-mapping using satellite imagery called Lidar two shell rings were discovered on Pockoy Island located in the Botany Bay Heritage Preserve.

Archaeologists chose to focus on the ring closest to the beach first.

Due to sea level change and rising oceans you know we're losing this site at a pretty fast rate.

We're losing nine, nine and a half meters of this site every single year at best case scenario.

If current rates hold and we do not get hit by another major hurricane, we will lose the site by the year 2024.

We're doing what most people would call salvage archaeology, trying to get as much as we can before it's gone.

Excavation began in 2017 and has continued for four seasons.

In the summer of 2019 the site welcomed nearly 1400 visitors and over 400 volunteers who could participate in tours or help sift for artifacts.

Individuals all over South Carolina came to visit us and help us screen.

Participate in the cleaning of artifacts and cataloging of stuff, we take volunteers and visitors of any age and experience level and teach them about archaeology and South Carolina history and heritage.

So just the other day, we had a toddler up at the screen on a stool sifting for artifacts and we were teaching her how to ID things Visitors could also watch live demonstrations of shell tools.

Archaeologists were also aided by Mississippi State University students were asked to dig shovel test pits every twenty meters.

They're surveying the entire island for us.

So we'll know where other locales are on this island that are producing either period artifacts from the late archaic shell ring people or later or maybe even before.

Colleagues from the National Park Service out of Tallahassee, Florida also assisted with metal probing of the rings, confirming the LIDAR imagery was true.

Dating the rings is contemporary with the first great pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge.

That's approximately 4300 years ago.

There are about 25 known shell rings in South Carolina and 60 on the east coast.

Typical shell rings or middens tend to be horizontal.

But during the late archaic period for some puzzling reason there are these donut shaped rings the diameter of the rings of Pockoy island measure about sixty to seventy meters across with the centers being between twenty and thirty meters.

Mounds of shell make up the outside with the center of the rings almost void of shell.

We refer to these as shell free interiors as plazas which implies some sort of maintenance of the area.

You keep it clean but in fact this was not an area that's kept clean.

This is an area that shows that the a lot of activity took place.

We've got pits and posts and shell piles and things like that.

The archaeologists determined the first six to eight inches of soil was overburdened from the ocean.

So what we decided to do in order to make this project though quicker and get down below the plaza where we can find features is to bring some heavy equipment and take that material off.

Another use has been to remove dirt piles out from under the screens.

We're very careful with how we excavate with those machines and we're slowly trying in all of our staff the use them.

Some artifacts come out of the midden while others wash up on the beach that had been washed out of the site.

Items believed to be tools made from Whelk shells are one example of this.

So what it looks like their doing is using large whelks in a similar way you would return a rock into an axe.

They're breaking it by striking it with probably another whelk, knocking a hole in it so that they could put a stick into.

The archaeologists suspect they were sharpened by using small pebbles for possibly a juniper log with some wet sand, then used to chop down trees and hollow out dug out canoes.

Some of the shells had two holes suggesting there were used as both an adz and an axe.

Another significant find has been the large amount of Tom's creek pottery which is the earliest known form of pottery in North America.

These were applied with the Marsh Perrywinkle.

Some students may even choose to do their master's and dissertation work on these objects.

Jones also believes the pottery was used as hones or wets for sharpening bone tools used to stitch leather together.

The archaeologists also found an exciting item made of deer bone in about the size of a pencil.

It was decorated with concentric circles nested diamonds and cross hatching.

You know these are my examples currently of being grave bone pins.

The carvings tend to be located in the rear half of the pins and the archeologists have noted the special skill needed to achieve them.

Finding them difficult to replicate themselves.

They appear to be ornate enough where they were some sort of a special item or maybe a status item of some sort.

Whether they were eating utensils hair pens, garment closures, net making devices, we aren't really sure.

The pointy end is sharpened often times and highly polished and my speculation is that they're used in the in the making of basketry.

Figuring it out seems like half the fun.

Something like this came off the beach the other day.

Finally a shelled pendant was found, probably made from the interior spiral of a whelk and some shell beads most likely made from the small shiny muscles that live in the marshes.

A hole may have been drilled in the pendant and secured with a shelby.

I've got a fancy version of my stone drill here.

It's called a combo.

We don't know that Native Americans used these but we do know that they used a small stone drill.

Colunela in the area also has a lot of mother of pearl inside and a glitter like exterior.

Jones thinks that beads would be for more than just a dormant, but also used as currency like the Native Americans wampum with purple or shiny beads being worth more than white.

The artifacts are first processed by sorting them into paper bags in the field before being sent to the lab.

There they are washed toothbrushes dried, labeled and placed in archival quality plastic bags.

Artifacts are also entered into a database sorted counted, weighed and studied by different specialists.

We'll photograph a lot of particularly the pottery and the bone pens.

We'll have a final specialists.

This is a person who studies animal bones.

The specialist return information on the diet the people were eating here.

For example, shellfish, turtle, dear and hickory nuts.

We're not out here for the artifacts per se.

We're out here to recover artifacts and then learn from those artifacts.

What are people doing with them.

And therefore what were their lives like.

The archaeologist still have many unanswered questions.

And perhaps their biggest question, how did they deal with sea level change?

This year we're having those problem to solve today so that we don't lose our way of life.

The information they collect may help answer these lingering questions and help solve these unwritten pieces of history.

For more stories about our state and more details on those you've just seen please visit our website at palmettoscene.org and of course don't forget to follow us on social media Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at SCETV #PalmettoScene.

We leave you now with tonight's Palmetto Postcard from our online digital series Our Town.

For ETV and Palmetto Scene and the swans at Swan Lake I'm Beryl Dakers.

Good night and thanks for watching.

♪ Edgefield is like family.

We're a little small in numbers but we have the largest welcome mat.

We have great things to do.

We have a lot of outdoor activities.

You can fish.

You could bike, walk.

Around town you have a very laid back lifestyle, slow pace and then we also have the great specialty shops right little locally owned restaurants.

So we have great things going on in Edgefield.

Where full of history, hospitality and fun things to do.

Moonshining and spirits I think it blends right in with Edgefield whether people want to admit it or not it's part of our texture.

The history of Edgefield has been somewhat of colorful.

We got our share characters.

And Edgefield was also at one time known as kind of a rough and tumble place.

We have people coming here as early as the 1750's and 60's settling here, coming down the wagon road.

It has such a diverse and rich history.

And not only that but it's so celebrated.

This is Edgefield This is our town.

This is Edgefield, South Carolina.

It's our town.

Come see our town.

♪