9 South Carolina Small Towns Worth the Detour

The most interesting hour in South Carolina rarely happens where the tour buses park.

It happens down a two-lane road, in a town of 300 or 3,000.

These are the South Carolina towns worth turning off the highway for.

1. Abbeville

The brick square in Abbeville, up in the Old 96 District, earns the drive on history alone.

Locals call it the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy.

The secession movement caught fire on the town’s Secession Hill in 1860, and five years later Jefferson Davis held his last war council at the Burt-Stark Mansion just up the street.

Full circle.

Off the same square, the Abbeville Opera House has staged shows since 1908, back when vaudeville acts rode the rail line into town.

Two hinge points of the Civil War sit within a few blocks of each other on that square.

2. Bishopville

Bishopville turns folk art into a reason to exit off I-20 in the Pee Dee.

Pearl Fryar taught himself topiary in 1981 with no training, then shaped more than 400 plants he rescued from a nursery compost pile into a three-acre garden.

People flew in for it.

Across town, the Button Museum keeps the work of Dalton Stevens, the Button King, including a denim suit he covered in 16,333 buttons to pass sleepless nights.

He glued buttons to a hearse, too.

Add the South Carolina Cotton Museum and the local Lizard Man legend out of Scape Ore Swamp, and one small town covers stranger ground than cities ten times its size.

3. Walhalla

German settlers built Walhalla along a mountain highway in the far northwest corner of the state, and named it after the Norse hall of the gods.

The payoff sits a few miles out of town.

Stumphouse Tunnel is a 1,600-foot railroad tunnel that crews blasted into the Blue Ridge in the 1850s and never finished.

Clemson later aged blue cheese in the cold, damp dark.

It stays cold inside.

Right next door, Issaqueena Falls drops as much as 200 feet in total cascade, named for a Cherokee woman who, the story goes, warned a settlement of a coming attack.

4. McClellanville

About 600 people live in McClellanville, a shrimping village tucked between Charleston and Georgetown.

Shrimp boats still unload at the town docks.

The Deerhead Oak spreads over the village with a trunk more than 30 feet around, wider than the famous Angel Oak near Charleston.

The oak predates the town.

Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge starts right at the water’s edge, thousands of acres of salt marsh and barrier islands where loggerhead turtles come ashore to nest.

Hurricane Hugo made landfall over the village in 1989, and McClellanville rebuilt without losing its Lowcountry feel.

5. Cheraw

Cheraw calls itself the prettiest town in Dixie. The historic district along the Pee Dee River makes that easy to believe.

You get green squares, old churches, and brick storefronts.

Cheraw State Park, a few miles south, opened in 1934 as the first state park in South Carolina, built by Depression-era crews around Lake Juniper.

Pennies bought that park.

Town kids collected coins to buy the first parcel before the work crews ever arrived.

Cheraw also gave the world Dizzy Gillespie, the bebop trumpeter born in town in 1917, honored now with a bronze statue on the town green.

6. Edgefield

Clay and politics made Edgefield's name, and both are worth a stop in the western Piedmont.

The town's rich soil fed a stoneware tradition in the 1800s, and an enslaved potter known as Dave the Potter threw huge storage jars and signed them with his own verses.

Poetry on a jar.

His work hangs in major museums now.

Edgefield County has sent ten governors to the South Carolina statehouse over the years.

Just outside town, the National Wild Turkey Federation runs its headquarters and museum, with a giant bronze turkey standing guard out front.

It all comes from one small town.

7. Ninety Six

Ninety Six owns the strangest name of any town in South Carolina.

Nobody knows why.

One old story says traders figured the spot lay 96 miles from a Cherokee town called Keowee, though nobody can prove it.

Ninety Six National Historic Site preserves the earthen Star Fort and the ground where the first land battle of the Revolution south of New England played out in November 1775.

Nathanael Greene laid a 28-day siege on the fort in 1781.

The siege even wounded Greene's chief engineer, the Polish officer Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

8. Pendleton

A few minutes from Clemson's football crowds, Pendleton spreads a historic district across more than 6,300 acres.

Old money and old oaks line the streets.

The village green anchors it, ringed by antique shops, cafes, and Farmers Hall, a columned meeting hall in use since 1826.

Older than the football program.

John C. Calhoun and Thomas Clemson both kept homes nearby, and their plantation land eventually grew into the university up the road.

On a Clemson game day, the crowds roar up the road while the green stays calm.

9. Ridgeway

Ridgeway is a railroad town of about 300 people north of Columbia, and it owns a genuine world record.

The World's Smallest Police Station is a brick box measuring just ten by twelve feet, put to work in 1940 and staffed until 1990.

One officer, one desk.

The rest of Main Street looks frozen around 1900, lined with antique stores in old cotton-era brick buildings.