By Scott Grooms
This Month’s Daytrippin’ is a trip to Aiken, South Carolina. The trip takes about 90 minutes and is a pleasant ride through rural South Carolina and takes you through a number of small towns. The trip itself is a great way to see classic architecture of days gone by.
Aiken is a city of 33,216 and is located near Augusta, SC. The region is known as the Central Savannah River Area. Aiken is known as horse country, giving a nod to the horse farms, stables, show fields, and tracks located just blocks from Downtown. You can travel the treelined streets that turn in to dirt roads within the city limits and see the pageantry of the equestrian area of Aiken. The city has horse statues dotting the area painted in different schemes by local groups as street art. We found ourselves looking for the horses as a seek find game. It was a nice addition to encourage people to explore the city.
Aiken also has a deep railroad heritage; Aiken has roots going all the way back to 1827 when the South Carolina General Assembly chartered the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company. This was one of the first railroads in the United States and at its inception was the longest railroad in the world at 136 miles running from Charleston to Hamberg, which is a ghost town in Aiken County founded by Henry Shultz in 1821 and named after his hometown in Germany. The railroad ran through Aiken on its way to Hamberg on the banks of the Savannah River. The Aiken Visitors Center and Train Museum is a great place to start your tour, the building is a recreation of the station building as it looked between 1899 and 1954. The have a gift shop and literature from the area, a few old passenger car are in the boarding area with the second floor having a very nice model railroad display to view. This is a great place to take children to enjoy the train displays.
Aiken’s Main Street is Lauren’s Street SW. This street is a very wide street with storefront parking and center street parking for patrons of the businesses in the area. There are numerous restaurants, with menus ranging from breakfast and lunch lite menus, to bars and restaurants offering burgers to more extravagant meals. There are also antiques and specialty stores to shop and browse. The street is very well maintained with fountains on each end, sidewalk dining, and parks located throughout the area.
One of the more interesting museums in Aiken is the Savannah River Site Museum, this museum tells the story of the Savannah River Site also known as “The Bomb Plant”. The mysterious site built along the Savannah River, the site was built in the 1950’s to refine nuclear materials. The site comprises 310 miles in Aiken, Allendale, and Barnwell counties and employed around 10,000 people, with a number of them living in Aiken. During construction the entire town of Ellington was moved to a new location now called New Ellington. The site was so secret that the employees could not even discuss their job with their families. The museum offers displays of various pieces of equipment and helps take a little mystery out of the site.
Some notable people for Aiken include actress Anna Camp from Pitch Perfect and True Blood, Jazz Vocalist Etta Jones, Lee Atwater who served as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, and Matilda Evans who is the first African-American woman licensed to practice medicine in South Carolina.
Aiken is located close to Augusta, but they have a large assortment of chain restaurants in the area. If you are looking for a day trip, you might consider Aiken as a possibility.
