How Charles Pinckney Started My Quest To See All 417 National Park Sites
For more than ten years, I’ve
been on a quest to travel to some of America’s most fascinating and least known
places—a quest inspired by an 18th century South Carolina statesman named
Charles Pinckney.
If you’re like I was a few years
ago, I know what you’re thinking: Who the heck is Charles Pinckney? I learned
the answer to that—which I’ll get to in a moment—at a national park site.
I’m no stranger to national parks.
In fact, I consider myself something of a park junkie. I worked at National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA)
for over 12 years before retiring in 2015, and in that time, I got to defend
the beauty and integrity of these special lands and, especially, their wildlife.
Since I first acquired my National Park Passport in 2005, I have visited over
140 national park sites, including all of the parks, preserves, monuments, and
historic sites in my home state of Alaska.
When I started working for NPCA I
thought of national parks as vast western landscapes full of mountains, rivers,
bears, geysers, and canyons. Those first park visits include most of the iconic
parks in the West, including Joshua Tree, Yellowstone, and other big name destinations.
It was a revelation to discover that most of what boasts the National Park
Service arrowhead are smaller, lesser-known sites that share stories about the
many cultures, historic events, archeological sites, and interesting people that
make this country so amazing.
That’s where Charles Pinckney
comes in.
My wife and I were escaping the Alaska winter in 2007
with a trip to coastal Georgia and South Carolina. We realized our park
passport could lead us to places we didn’t know a thing about, and when we saw Charles Pinckney National Historic Site on
the list of sites in the area, we were clueless about who he was. If it hadn’t
been for the passport stamp, we would not have visited, and that would have
been a huge mistake!
Charles Pinckney was a South
Carolina delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; his vision for the
U.S. Constitution became the framework for what we have today. We learned about
this “forgotten founder” of our country by visiting the home that serves as the
national historic site’s visitor center. It isn’t Pinckney’s original house,
but rather a home built sometime in the 1800s. Its displays not only guide you
through the history of our Constitution and Pinckney’s role in shaping it, but
also tells was it was like to live on a coastal South Carolina low country
plantation 230 years ago.
The original plantation was over
700 acres, of which 28 are left and included in the historic site. So when we
finished with the indoor educational part of our visit, we headed outdoors to
explore the region’s lowland forest on a well-maintained looped natural trail that
starts on an old road lined with cedar trees and passes by towering magnolia
trees, ancient live oaks, and lots of wax myrtle. The mulched trail skirted the
edge of a tidal wetland and took us through the archaeological remains of the
plantation’s slave community. The trail ends near a boardwalk that overlooks a
small tidal estuary, giving us good looks at great blue herons.
My visit to Pinckney’s former
home opened my eyes to the diversity in our National Park System. There’s so
much more to exploring the country than seeing the big parks in the West. It’s
these smaller parks and historic sites that really tell the story of America. That’s
when I decided I wanted to see them all. And because I want to encourage other
people to see them, too, I’m writing regular dispatches from a few of the
less-celebrated parks and hidden gems in the park system that inspire me along
the way.
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