Kalmia Gardens in Hartsville, SC

Donna and I recently made a day trip to the northeast corner of the state, an area we don't find ourselves in all that often. We first went through Hartsville and stopped to visit their city museum, which is housed in an old post office building. It contains lots of history of the area, including a great deal about Sonoco, a worldwide packaging company that calls Hartsville home. It features a beautiful stained glass skylight made up of several individual panels representative of SC plants and animals. It's a great free museum that is certainly worth visiting.

From there we headed over to Coker College's Kalmia Gardens, a beautiful 35-acre botanical garden. Also free and highly recommended.



















We then headed up Highway 401 through Society Hill to Bennetsville. En route we encountered the grave of Colonel Abel Kolb, a Revolutionary War Patriot who was murdered while surrendering to a group of Tory raiders on the night of April 27, 1781.


We then made it into the city of Bennettsville, which was our destination, but we ended up being less than impressed with what we found. There were a few cool old buildings, but we found navigation very frustrating due to many roads being closed for repairs, and eating options were very limited. We didn't stay long and continued on, finding ourselves at South of the Border at the SC / NC border, always a fun and interesting place to visit. Donna captured some good photos of their giraffe statues.






Gotta love their water tower! The acronym stands for "South of the Border" ... what'd you think it stood for? ;-)


Big honkin' spark plug ... hope they have it gapped properly.


We were pretty hungry by then and started looking for a good place to eat, when I realized that we really weren't all that far from Florence, home of our favorite steak house ever, Redbone Alley, so we were able to stave off our hunger a bit longer and were rewarded as always with a most excellent meal. Perfect end to a very good day of exploring!