A Metropolis of Pines ( Thanks to Malaria )

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Just before Christmas we rolled up the road and into the village of Pinopolis, SC. We were just getting around to posting this photo when the local paper came out with an interesting article on this very spot. Mr. Normal Walsh has written a book on the village entitled, PLANTATIONS, PINELAND VILLAGES AND ITs PEOPLE. We're parked at a charming old structure which is next to the existing post office at Pinopolis.

A photo by Walsh supplemented by those from P&C staff photographer, Wade Spees gives a view of this wonderful protected pocket village life in the upper reaches of the Cooper River's plantation district. As Rob Young's article points out, had malaria not been a scourge of the coastal swamp districts, there would have been no building in the pinelands which became Pinopolis. Many villages grew not so much out of what they had to offer, but for what they did not offer. Malaria was not on the menu at Pinopolis.

Had there been no tuberculosis, there would have been no Woodlands Resort and perhaps no Summerville either. Summerville was promoted at an international medical convention in Paris back in the early twentieth century as one of only two places in the United States where one might be cured of tuberculosis. It was thought that the ambient vapors given off by the pines played some role in the cure, a prospect which is on equally sound footing with today's aroma therapy's advances in medicine. Perhaps some early developers had slipped the keynote speaker a bag of Francs under the table to promote that fantasy. Some traditions endure through the ages.