Mary Anne Hamblen

Darlington County (Images of America) Mary Anne Hamblen

To lure settlers into the wild backcountry of Darlington, the British colonial government offered two large tracts of land to a group of Welsh Baptists from Delaware in 1736. The land of dense pine forests still bearing the footprints of the Cheraw tribe of Native Americans welcomed the Welshmen, and they located on a bend in the Pee Dee River that came to be known as Welsh Neck. Eventually, German, Swedish, Scotch Irish, English, and French Huguenot settlers came too, creating more communities and towns, and a few entrepreneurs made their fortunes on the fertile land along the river's banks. The railroads came in the 1850s, and industry joined agriculture as a way of life. In 1950, the new Darlington Raceway celebrated America's love affair with the automobile. Today Darlington County presents a mingling of vintage architecture with the contemporary. This is Darlington County, at once historic and thoroughly modern.