♪ ♪ Oh, I have found the sweetest place ♪ ♪ where people smile and know my name.

♪ ♪ Oh, I have found the sweetest land ♪ ♪ as warm as sun and cool as rain.

♪ ♪ A place so faaarrr... from all we had, ♪ ♪ a place so far from all we've known, ♪ ♪ a quiet place that we can love ♪ ♪ and call our home.

♪♪♪ ♪ ♪ (Joanna Angle) Welcome to "Palmetto Places," a series that explores and celebrates South Carolina's small towns and countryside.

I'm Joanna Angle.

This magnificent opera house was built in 1893.

It is a textbook example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, with round arches and rock-faced masonry.

This square tower has a pyramid-shaped roof and soars 100 feet high.

Within the tower, a four-faced, antique clock is driven by weights.

This massive structure is the enduring symbol of Sumter, South Carolina.

Sumter, originally called Sumterville, was laid out in 1800.

It was named for General Thomas Sumter, famed hero of the American Revolution and representative to the first United States Congress.

General Sumter's nickname, Gamecock, was long ago adopted by the University of South Carolina.

In 1912, the town of Sumter made history when it became the first municipality in the world to adopt the council-manager form of government.

Just a few blocks down this street is the Sumter Gallery of Art.

[footfalls on pavement] The late Elizabeth White was a Sumter artist known for her paintings and her etchings.

Her cottage, which dates to 1850, is now the Sumter Gallery of Art.

The work of local, regional, and nationally known artists is displayed here.

[footfalls on porch] [door creaking] [latch catching] This is a portrait of Elizabeth White by Sumter artist Mildred Moffitt White...no relation.

Elizabeth White grew up in this house.

She spent most of her life here.

It had been her grandfather's, and when she was orphaned at an early age she was reared by two maiden aunts.

She traveled widely, and in 1927, on a trip to Europe, hit upon the idea of using her etchings as postcards.

These landscapes and scenes of architecture became part of a movement known as regionalism, which depicted local scenes with nostalgia.

Elizabeth White's work was displayed at the Smithsonian and at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

[door creaking] [latch catching] Across town, another vintage house is home to the Sumter County Museum and archives.

This is the Williams-Brice House, built in 1845 by Andrew Jackson Moses, a merchant.

Here he and his wife Octavia reared 14 children.

Throughout the years, the house has undergone many renovations.

Embellishments include crystal chandeliers and beveled glass.

Three rooms, including the dining room, are furnished in period style.

The remainder has exhibits, a favorite of which is the children's room.

During Victorian era, childhood was regarded as a very special time, one to be treasured.

There was an emphasis on children's furniture, toys, and clothing.

Included in this exhibit is a collection of antique dolls.

Several are made of porcelain.

This stuffed horse was made in 1898 and rests on a Victorian crib.

♪ [soft instrumental music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [no audio] This oil portrait of General Thomas Sumter was painted from life by the renowned artist Rembrandt Peale.

It hung in the homes of General Sumter and his descendants continuously for a century and a half.

Born and educated in Virginia, General Thomas Sumter served his country under four Presidents... Washington, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson.

He was the last surviving general of the American Revolution.

[wind noise] [grass crunching underfoot] Proud though it is of its history, Sumter's crown jewel is like something out of a fairy tale.

The 150 acres of Iris Gardens with a 45-acre, inky black lake, are enchanting.

The gardens are exotic, with pathways shaded by ancient oaks and cypress.

Here you will find one of the most abundant plantings of Japanese iris in America.

Twenty-five varieties bloom in a rainbow of colors.

The lake is ruled by elegant swans.

Collected from all over the world, these are the aristocrats, the royalty of waterfowl.

[wind noise] Mark Towery is the resident horticulturist and our guide.

(Mark Towery) Joanna, let me tell you a story.

a story of how an accident turned into one of the finest water gardens anywhere.

In the early 1920s, Mr.

Bland, who owned the Ford dealership in Sumter, bought this tract of land for his own private fishpond.

He liked to grow things, and he was a very avid gardener.

He saw Japanese iris in a "wish book" that I call a- Joanna> -a catalog.

Mark> A catalog.

He says, "I would like to have some of these in my yard."

Joanna> They're so beautiful on the page.

Mark> So he says.

He orders them, and they come, but no instructions come with them.

So he says, "I'm a gardener, and they're iris.

I'll treat them like iris."

Joanna> How hard can this be?

Mark> So he planted them in the yard, and they didn't do so good.

Joanna> Did they die?

Mark> Many did.

It turns out that Japanese iris like very acid, very wet, very peaty soils, which is just what this area is here.

And his yard was dry, and it just didn't work.

This area was a dump here.

He took the trash that was around.

He wanted to make some islands in his lake.

Joanna> Kind of like a little landfill sort of.

Mark> So he took all that trash and piled them up out here.

In some of the trash that he threw out here were the Japanese iris.

It's like the rabbit into the briar patch... came back that May when the Japanese iris bloomed, and he saw these huge blooms.

He wanted to know what did he do right by accident that he couldn't do on purpose.

(Joanna laughs) (footfalls) Joanna> Mark, a lot of people are familiar with the old bearded iris.

How do the Japanese iris look different?

Mark> Well, the size of the bloom is the main thing and the way that the falls are situated.

The Japanese iris has three falls and three standards, but the blooms get as large, some of them, as dinner plates.

They are truly spectacular in hues of light blues to dark blues to purples to a roan red to the deep, dark purple to a pure white to a white with deep purple veins running through them.

They are spectacular in bloom.

Joanna> What is the botanical name you're telling me?

Mark> Kaempferi is the Japanese iris.

Joanna> Kaempferi, right.

(animal sounds) Tell me about this part of the park.

Mark> Joanna, in 1938 Mr. Heath, who owned the Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Sumter, bought this tract of land.

It was known then as First Mill Pond-- gave it to the city if Mr.

Bland would develop it the same way he developed the north side.

Joanna> So, it was going to be a public park?

Mark> Yeah, it's a public park.

Everything in the park is free.

There's no admission to anything.

It's first come, first serve.

Joanna> Who were the first swans to come... which swans came first?

Where did they come from?

Mark> A pair of mute swans Mr.

Bland ordered from New York State.

A pair of Australian black swans came by boat from Australia.

Joanna> He bought them a boat ticket.

Mark> It was a long trip.

You have to remember, in '27 when there was no airline service.

Joanna> He loved mail order, didn't he?

Mark> He did love mail order.

(both laugh) Joanna> Iris, swans... how many varieties do you have here now?

Mark> We have seven of the eight swans of the world.

Joanna> They are what... tell me about them.

Mark> The mute swan from northern Europe and the Australian black swan are the original.

Some of the swans, we have here in the gardens are from the original swans that were bought and brought here.

To that we have added the whooper swan from North America, the whistler swan from North America, the trumpeter swan from North America, The trumpeter is a large black-- [swan honking] That was just him there!

A large, white swan with a black-- Joanna> He sounds like a trumpet!

Mark> He does sound like a trumpet.

The whooper swan is white with a yellow bill.

The whistler swan is white with a black bill with the little yellow dot below the eye.

Joanna> The great big white one that we see in the fairy tale books... which is that one?

Mark> That's the mute, one of the ones Mr.

Bland bought to start with.

From South America we have the black-necked swan, which is a white swan with a black neck.

The coscoroba swan which is white swan with pink lips and pink legs.

Joanna> Pink lips...

I love it!

The only one you lack is a Russian swan.

Mark> The Russian bewick.

Joanna>I'm sure you'll have one of those when we come back.

Mark> We're trying hard to get one.

Joanna> The park is open every day?

Mark> The park is open every day of the year from 8 o'clock in the morning until sundown.

Joanna> All of this wonderfulness is free!

Mark> It's free.

Joanna> Thank you so much.

I can't wait to come back.

Mark> Thank y'all for coming.

♪ [slow instrumental music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [no audio] Joanna> Inspired by waterfowl and birds of the air, Grainger McCoy's sculptures achieve suspended flight... fluttering wings frozen in space and time.

Grainger McCoy> I think wood is the best canvas in which to work, because the paintings that have lasted the longest, the ones that you see in museums around the world, are ones that are painted on panel...on wood.

Therefore, to carve-- to create in wood and to paint wood.

Wood is such a unique material to receive pigment, paint, especially when you consider turpentine is a wood byproduct, and you put turpentine, linseed oil on wood.

They are so compatible.

It's difficult for many people to think of wood as a classical material, because most people think wood is something you build with and you live beneath or you walk on... not something that you should observe and appreciate and represent something else other than what it is.

Actually, the first thing that happens is an idea.

My first impulse is to sketch it, but I'm never satisfied.

My sketch is always very crude and rough because that's only two dimension.

What I enjoy most about sculpture is the fact that you can walk around it 360 degrees, that you need to be able to turn it to observe it.

Just observing it from one angle has never satisfied me, so very quickly I move into a three dimension, which usually is model form.

From that point I fine-tune the design, which I don't stay there very long.

Then very quickly I move into the life size.

I always work life-size on the final subject.

Birds are so unique in that they are such a handy size.

I mean, if you want to work large, you just choose a larger bird.

If you want to work smaller, you just choose a smaller bird.

The wood that I primarily have used over the years is basswood.

It's a linden.

It grows up in the mountains, elevation of 2,000 feet or above.

It's a very unique wood... in fact, this feather right here is made of basswood.

Most people are familiar with basswood in that strawberries used to come packaged in basswood.

Cheese, in the dry cooperage, used to be basswood.

It's quite inert, meaning it doesn't check and splinter very well.

It's a nice, gentle wood to work with.

Trying to represent birds in flight was always the...goal.

How to make birds look like they are suspended or flying and not bound by the earth.

Thirteen Bobwhite Quail... that was a result of a quail-hunting trip that I went on with my brother.

My brother and I love to hunt quail.

It was one of these gray, wet days in which, if viewers know... if there are any quail hunters out there, they know that sometimes that quail will stay in their covey, stay bunched up long into the day until better weather comes along.

Our dogs pointed one morning, but the problem was that all that particular morning our dogs were pointing everything but quail.

They were pointing sparrows and rats and one another.

All of a sudden our dogs were pointing, and it looked like they were pointing one another.

We went up, and approached them, not expecting any quail to be there.

We had our guns cradled in our arms, and we were just joking, and we were making comments about the other one's dog.

All of a sudden this explosion occurred.

We weren't two feet apart, and this covey rise occurred between us.

At that point I knew.

I told my brother at that point that I was going to carve that someday, because that was the first time I had ever been part, truly part of a covey rise.

The Least Bittern carving that I made was quite interesting.

I had a idea of birds, uh, uh... looking at their reflection in the water, and what I saw when that occurred were two birds.

As I was sculpting The Least Bittern, quite a unique thing happened.

I could not get these two birds to line up.

Finally, just out of desperation, I went in and woke my wife up.

And my wife is not a morning person, and I said, "Sweetheart... "I'm at the end of my rope with these birds, and this is serious."

She sat up in bed and she threw one arm around my shoulder, and she bowed her head and said, "God, help him."

And she went back to sleep.

I walked out of that room just... (silence) thinking, well, why did I waste my time to go do that?

But just within a couple of hours things turned.

All of a sudden, the birds lined up, and I walked around it, and they worked from all... all 360 degrees.

And I heard something.

I can't say that I heard my name called, but I heard a... what I heard was... "Grainger, you're the lower bird."

(silence) And I said... "What does that mean?

That must mean...that you're the upper bird."

And the voice said... "You're right."

All I can say is this piece represents a self-portrait for me, in that I'm the lower bird.

I'm the walnut image of...of my God.

It dawned on me that, that's the only existence I really have.

Is that I can make birds and I can sculpt in wood or bronze or whatever, but really, my only true existence occurs when I reflect, my God.

♪ ♪ Joanna> Outside of Sumter, near the old community of Stateburg, stands the Church of the Holy Cross.

It was built between 1850 and 1852 on the site of an earlier Episcopal Church.

It is unusual because of its rammed earth, or pisé de terre, construction.

The vestry was persuaded to use this particular building technique by Dr. William Wallace Anderson, a church member whose plantation house and several outbuildings had been built of rammed earth 30 years earlier.

Dr. Anderson convinced the vestrymen that this inexpensive method produced a durable, fireproof structure.

Pisé de terre is an ancient building method dating back to Mesopotamia.

Unlike tabby or adobe construction, it is simply the pounding of successive thin layers of red clay between wooden forms until walls of a desired height and configuration are in place.

Here the work was accomplished by Dr. Anderson's slaves.

The outside was then coated with a stuccolike slurry of lime, sand, molasses, and pebbles called pebble-dash.

This mixture was slung onto the rammed earth with brooms.

The Church of the Holy Cross is Gothic Revival in style, with corner towers and pointed arches.

It was modeled on an English country parish church.

The outside is very simple.

Its beauty resides in exquisite proportions and clean lines.

(silence) In the cemetery at the Church of the Holy Cross rest many distinguished South Carolinians.

This is the grave of Joel Roberts Poinsett, statesman, diplomat, and botanist.

While serving as first U.S. minister to Mexico, he brought home a plant that has become a Christmas favorite... the poinsettia.

(bird chirping) North of Stateburg in the tiny village of Horatio, there is a place part mercantile, part museum, a family-run business for eight generations.

(bird chirping) (wind noise) Typical of a rapidly disappearing rural scene, the Lenoir general store was established in the late 1700s by Isaac Lenoir, who came here from North Carolina.

He later signed the South Carolina Declaration of Independence and together with his brothers, Thomas and John, served in the Revolutionary Army under Generals Sumter and Marion.

The post office was added in 1900, and the postmark is Horatio, after Horatio Lenoir, a descendant of Isaac.

The little town was not called Lenoir because that name was already given to Lenoir, North Carolina, in honor of Isaac's younger brother William.

(bird chirping) Today, more than 200 years after it was established, the store is still operated by Lenoir family members.

A variety of goods including penny candy, smoked hog jowls and slabs of fatback, liniment, stovepipe, pump washers, and plow points line the shelves.

♪ We're glad that you could be with us for this trip to Sumter and Sumter County, and hope that you'll join us again on "Palmetto Places."

Until then, I'm Joanna Angle, inviting you to discover South Carolina... smiling faces, beautiful places.

♪ ♪ ♪ (female singer) ♪ And here we live, ♪ ♪ within this land ♪ ♪ of mountains' edge and ocean shore.

♪ ♪ A land of strength... a land of grace... ♪ ♪ of men and women gone before.

♪ ♪ So many smiling faces here, ♪ ♪ so many memories still to come.

♪ ♪ Beautiful places we hold dear ♪ ♪ in this our home.

♪ (choir joins) ♪ South Carolina, always near... ♪ ♪ and always hoooommmme.... ♪♪♪ ♪