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Bennettsville Florence Hartsville |
Latta Marion |
"Way down upon the Pee Dee River?" That's the way the song began, we're
told, before Stephen Foster's head was turned by the Suwanee, way down upon
the map of Southern rivers.
Jilted or not, the Pee Dee carries a lot of romance in its course and
history. One of the South's great river systems, a big, hard-working stream
that gives its name to a major agricultural region, Pee Dee begins and
ends in exceptional beauty.
Its birth is a geographic curiosity. High on the Eastern Continental
Divide, two notable springs rise just a few yards apart. One flows north,
as the New River, to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. The other,
heading ultimately south toward the Atlantic, is the Yadkin, which becomes
the Pee Dee. Dammed repeatedly for recreation and electric power, it is a
mighty stream as it cuts through vast timberlands and farms on its way to
Georgetown and Winyah Bay.
The earliest explorers met Indians of the Pee Dee tribe who lived
and hunted in its broad valley. Unspoiled groves of tall trees flanked its
passage. So clear of underbrush was the forest floor that a man could be
seen half a mile away, wrote one adventurer. Natural, meadow-like
clearings bloomed with exotic species of wildflowers. Big game abounded.
The river was named for its native people. And of course the word of such
a place spread quickly. English gentry, encouraged by the Lords Proprieters,
came early to Winyah Bay, to the mouth of the Pee Dee. Early also came
creative and industrious French Huguenots. Soon after the English Crown
assumed the land in 1729, settlement swelled.
Plantations neaar the Pee Dee's mouth grew rice; upriver grew indigo and
later tobacco. At the end of the 18th century King Cotton was displacing
the rice culture to command, for several generations, much of the Pee Dee
basin's splendid cropland. Today soybeans grow here, and pecan groves
supply nuts for far-flung confectioneries. Corn is a money crop, not only
for feed but for ethanol, a gasoline alternative which is manufactured
near Kingstree.
While tobacco and cotton remain major commercial crops today, indigo left
a whimsical mark: it provided the blue dye used to paint around doors and
windows of cabins to keep "Ol' Plat-Eye", the coastal boogie-man, from
entering. A similar tradition lay behind the blue trim on some "Dutch"
(German) houses up the Savannah and the Congaree, and perhaps unconsciously
lives on in a decorative trait that still turns up today. Happily, "Ol
Plat-Eye" still lives and lurks in some of the state's best folk tales.
Florence, born with the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, is a bustling
modern city, a center of commerce and burgeoning mecca of the performing
arts. Hartsville, home of Coker College, thrives on culture. Tobacco
spurred the growth of Mullins, Lake City, Hemingway, Pamplico and
Timmonsville.
And then there is Darlington, home of the roar of the stock car engine and
the thunder of the crowd. Who could imagine stock car racing without
Darlington?
Through this land of vigorous small cities, retirement communities,sprawling
farms, quiet villages, excellent golf courses, and record-breaking race cars,
the leisurely dark waters of the Pee Dee still roll, an Upcountry river
on the move.
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