The High Hills of Santee are not really mountains, though they look like it. They stretch nearly twenty-five miles north along the east side of the upper Santee River, hills sometimes five miles wide, rising in soft folds above the surrounding lowlands. Their secret is age. The hills were carved from the erosion of an ancient seashore - sediments laid down when the Atlantic reached far inland, then sculpted by water and time into the only relief for many miles. The Santee, Wateree, and Catawba peoples - all Siouan-speaking - hunted these uplands long before European settlement, and the non-Siouan Congaree lived nearby. When the Dargan brothers bought several hundred acres here in the 1740s, they were entering a landscape Indigenous nations had used and known for generations.

By the late 1760s, Matthew Singleton had built Melrose Plantation on land that would become the park. The Singleton family expanded their holdings into the early nineteenth century, accumulating property across Sumter County the way wealthy planter families did - on the backs of enslaved labor that the official histories rarely name. In April 1865, near the war's end, Union General Edward E. Potter led a three-week destructive sweep through the region. Potter's Raid burned the Melrose plantation house to the ground, along with much of the area's industrial and rail infrastructure. When the smoke cleared, only the graveyard remained on the property, a row of stones marking what could not be carried away or burned. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the Williman, Belser, Manning, Wells, and Levi families held land in these hills.

In the early 1930s, Sumter County bought 1,000 acres of this land and donated it to the South Carolina Forestry Commission. It became Poinsett, the second state park in South Carolina and the first built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the state. Company 421 arrived first in October 1934 and built the roads, installed utilities, and began the caretaker's house and bathhouse. On August 19, 1935, about 200 African American CCC enrollees from Greenwood, Clinton, and Orangeburg arrived as Company 4475. The South in 1933 was overwhelmingly Black in many counties - South Carolina's population was over fifty percent African American - yet Mississippi enrolled fewer than two percent Black men in the CCC. South Carolina enrolled thirty-six percent, the highest proportion in the South. Company 4475 continued the construction work, but in November 1935 racial intolerance forced their reassignment to Chester, South Carolina, halting work on the park. In February 1936, Company 2413 arrived from Givhans Ferry: about 200 white World War I veterans, average age forty-one, who finished the park - a recreation building, cabins, and gatehouse. They completed what the others had started, separately. Many of those veterans had not finished grade school. The CCC paid them, fed them, taught them to read.

Poinsett opened to a segregated South. In 1963, every state park in South Carolina closed for a year rather than comply with a federal court order to desegregate. Poinsett was among them. The facilities did not all reopen until 1966. The park the African American Company 4475 had helped build was, for nearly thirty years, mostly closed to the people who built it. That history is part of this ground now, alongside the trees and the still water. Walk the trails today and you will pass white oak, black oak, turkey oak, water oak, pignut hickory, loblolly pine, longleaf pine, flowering dogwood, baldcypress, swamp gum, and tupelo. Copperheads and cottonmouths live in the brush, alligators in the wetter places, bobcats almost never seen. What visitors actually encounter are golden silk orb-weaver spiders strung across paths, prothonotary warblers gold against the gloom, and the mountain laurel that should not, by all rights of geography, be growing here at all.