Tobacco Road
May 31, 2013
By Temple Ligon
May 31, 2013
South Carolina has competent and accomplished marketing representatives in Europe and Asia to hustle industrialists interested in cheap land and right-to-work labor. And back in the Lower 48 we have productive connections at work on the cream of American industry – Boeing, for a grand and recent example.
But where do we have marketing representatives out in the world encouraging foreign tourists to come to South Carolina? Is that too expensive?
We do have an expensive advertising budget, presumably, as do our neighbors North Carolina and Georgia. Is there a coordinated advertising campaign among North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia? After all, people who visit Charleston probably get to Savannah. Charlotte and Greenville put people back onto I-85 for Atlanta. The North Georgia hills have much in common with South Carolina’s Saluda Mountains and North Carolina’s McDowell County, home to Mt. Mitchell. Myrtle Beach appears to be growing faster than any other urban concentration of people in South Carolina. How’s the coastal development near Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach?
The rest of the world sees the Carolinas and Georgia as home to Tobacco Road. The basketball powerhouses in North Carolina compose what’s called just that, Tobacco Road. But Tobacco Road, the play, is a few miles inside Georgia west of the Savannah River, near Augusta. Tobacco is no longer the dominant crop of the Pee Dee, but the history of the Pee Dee is dominated by tobacco.
So maybe, if the Carolinas and Georgia can be collected as one, Tobacco Road might work as a descriptive that piques the interest of the foreign tourist. To say anything is Southern is to include the full former Confederacy. No, Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana together have their own image. And Virginia is just too far along and too close to the District of Columbia to retain much charm or claim anything exotic.
Europeans and Asians call the Carolinas and Georgia exotic. Family picnics with hundreds of cousins, all with the same teeth and the same hair crown, are part of the act. The home to NASCAR, which began with big-mill moonshine runners outdriving under-powered IRS agents, is in Darlington. Formula One it ain’t, but foreigners are fascinated with the infield crowd.
Most exotic, though, is the fact Tobacco Road is where the Civil War began and where the South had the easiest time recruiting. Ever been to Basque Country, Spain, where they run the bulls at Pamplona the second week of July? The bars in Pamplona and San Sebastian on the coast near Bilbao all have regulars who buy drinks for the South Carolinians. It might have been for the wrong reason. It might have been just plain stupid. It might have been a lost cause from the outset. But South Carolina led the secession from the Union, something every Basque separatist has always wanted to do. Even on the other side of Spain in Barcelona, there are Catalans who would rather not be told what to do by Madrid.
Elsewhere there are separatists in the world who would love to come through where they really damn did it.
Marketing Tobacco Road would be a whole lot more successful if a passenger rail network pulled it together. This opinion page has produced a series of articles on the subject of the potential, and the history, of a passenger rail system connecting North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. To start, two routes: (1) Myrtle Beach, Florence, Camden, Columbia, Aiken, Augusta, and Atlanta and back; (2) Savannah, Charleston, Orangeburg, Columbia, Newberry, Spartanburg, Hendersonville, and Asheville and back. Do note, Midlands residents, how Columbia works as the hub for the two routes. Going east or west, all trains come through Columbia around 11:00 a.m.
Foreign tourists would love package deals that include passenger rail, just like home.
A good illustration of government cooperation in a common compound is the placement of the five Nordic embassies in Berlin. The five Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. – come together with five embassies on the same site and share an administration building, where they carry the common costs of security, an auditorium, an art gallery and a few other functions. Point being, every Nordic country saved lots of money and every one of the five shares an architecturally stunning compound.
Tobacco Road can put up a similarly sophisticated tourism marketing compound in four world cities: Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, and London. Paris could be the fifth.
Now don’t take yourself too seriously, Tobacco Road; hence, the name. Certainly, the culinary and cultural offerings in Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin, and London are some of the best in the world. Tobacco Road, then, has to offer something different, far different. Think exotic. Or the foreign elites will go the elite route every time.
Sign up here to receive MidlandsLife weekly email magazine.
