Manchester State Forest keeps five red-cockaded woodpecker clusters alive with prescribed fire and cavities cut into living pines. The species left the endangered list in 2024, after active clusters grew from as few as 1,500 to about 7,800. But none of the criteria for full delisting have been met those require pines more than 80 years old.
In 1867, more than a hundred Black members of Sumter County's Salem Black River Presbyterian Church applied for dismissal to form a church of their own. Goodwill was theirs. The school that followed was not and the figure of 350 students that a National Register nomination and a 2019 marker both carry traces to a 1977 book, not to the 1872 church report the marker credits.
Swan Lake Iris Gardens is known for a happy accident iris dumped in a swamp that bloomed the next spring. But the oldest account of the site describes Hamilton Carr Bland planting deliberately, and the city's own records give three different dates for when the gardens became public.