What, or where, is Ninety Six?

Watching CBS this morning, January 2, 2017, I found Conor Knighton’s clip on “Visiting all of the National Parks” interesting.  (http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/on-the-trail-years-end/  If you choose to call up this address, sorry about the leading commercial—guess CBS has to pay their bills some way.)  In any case, Ric Nipper, a friend of mine from Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and I have been taking annual trips to various Georgia and South Carolina sites for several years.  This year, we ended up in Ninety Six.

I had a dear French teacher in High School, who told her students she had grown up in Ninety Six.  Now, I have had occasion, over the past quite a few years, to drive down one or more of our state roads near Ninety Six, and I had noticed highway signs pointing “To Ninety Six,” but, until Ric and I set out on our annual pilgrimage to wherever, I had never even given consideration to visiting Mme. Butler’s home town.  Nor did Ric, or I, give any consideration to going there when we left Aiken this year just before Thanksgiving.   Guess we just gravitated in that direction.  So, you say, why bring this up now?  Well, it seems this year, we inadvertently went to a South Carolina National Park Service site—the one in Ninety Six.

And, should you need a reason to try this site, maybe the fact that it is one National Park site you might be able to visit and see in just one day might provide that reason: https://www.nps.gov/nisi/index.htm.  Now, before I go any further, let me quibble just a bit.  The National Park Service calls the Ninety Six site a “National Historic Site,” making it one of nine sites in the state on its list of places you might like to visit:  (https://www.nps.gov/state/sc/index.htm) .   In any case, if you are anywhere near it (it is close to Greenwood, SC,) I recommend it to you, whether or not it qualifies as a “National Park,” proper.

I would also recommend the other eight sites on the NPS’s above list (most of which I have had the pleasure to visit in the past) as being worth your time.  Maybe, next Thanksgiving, I might be able to convince my friend Ric to come a day or so early so we can show our wives this little bit of history, just down the road from Aiken, in Ninety Six, South Carolina.  As road trips go, this is a “good 'un.”