NEW ENGLAND CLAIMS THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR and the South owns the Civil War, right? Well, it seems our high school history classes weren’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or maybe, like my sister swears, we were absent that day.
Cowpens National Battlefield Moore's Creek National Battlefield
Ninety-six King's Mountain National Battlefield
In our quest to visit every park, monument, battlefield, seashore and historic site in the National Park system, we ventured into some battlefields that were significant, not the War Between the States, but the War for Independence. And while the battles of Cowpens and King’s Mountain took less time to fight than to tell about, they helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Patriots. The fact that they were fighting their Loyalist neighbors may have presaged the conflict that would occur four score years later. The British won the battle for Guilford Courthouse in 1781 but sustained heavy losses, so bad that one comment said that another such victory would spell the end of the war for Britain. They were right; Yorktown soon followed.
Bald cypress, Congaree National Park
We always thought we had visited every National Park in the Lower 48 but it seems we missed Congaree. I guess it’s forgivable;Congaree didn’t receive official status until 2003 after a long campaign by environmentalists, and even then it came in stages. First a national preserve, then a monument and finally as a National Park. Hurricane Mathew did quite a number on the park but we enjoyed wandering the boardwalk through the cypress swamps.
