As someone who, indeed, has visited Hardeeville three times in the past just to see the locomotive and the nearby Amtrak stop (one time while courting a history-minded lass whose parents had moved to nearby St. Helena Island), I approve--and fondly remember with wistful nostalgia.
But EVERY town in America is, or has been, scheming up ways to "attract tourists with the local history and charms." And too many of them are simply random collections of artifacts that happen to have (often tenuous) local ties. Come on, admit it--"if you've seen one local town museum in the old railroad station, you've seen them all."
Hardeeville's job will to be to highlight all of what made, and makes, "lowcountry South Carolina" unique, from the Argent Lumber Company (and #7) to Frogmore Stew and the Gullah dialect of the nearby Sea Islands. And that could be an uphill battle. The area runs the serious risk of becoming yet another of those over-developed "mainland" areas that just serves as a driveway to upscale developments that are running roughshod over some of the coastal lands down there, often by developers eager to repudiate and "bury" the decidedly downscale past heritage of plantations and lumbering in a rush to sell million-dollar waterfront properties on islands that until only 20-30 years ago were anthropological backwaters.
More: http://savannahnow.com/hardeeville/2014 ... train-no-7
