The Rock Hill Herald reported on Nov. 30, 1882 – “The Kershaw Gazette announces the strong possibility that a stock company will soon be organized for the purpose of opening a hotel in Kirkwood, Camden’s beautiful suburb for the accommodation for Northern winter visitors.”
City Directories and History: The handsome Kirkwood Inn – Hotel was one of Camden’s largest winter tourist hotels and operated successfully for decades as Northerners flocked to the Carolinas to enjoy golf, tennis and horsemanship. As Florida was opened for tourism, the Carolinas saw a steady decline in business until after WW II when most of these resorts closed and were often later demolished.
“In the tourist season of early 1943 the Kirkwood Hotel, the Court Inn, the Camden Hotel, and the smaller tourist homes such as Magnolia Inn and the Park View were reported to be filled to “overflowing,” but many of those guests were war-related, not free-spending persons of leisure. Karl Abbot, a former Kirkwood owner whose chain took over the old hotel again in fall 1942 after a trustees’ sale, had predicted that fuel shortages in the North would send many visitors southward for the season. In winter 1943, however, well-to-do tourists who were able to seek out pleasure spots went instead in overwhelming numbers to newer resorts in Florida. In Camden the national ban on “pleasure driving” stymied many social events, for example, postponing the annual winter-time hospital ball at the Kirkwood. In April two hundred to three hundred couples waltzed and jitterbugged at the rescheduled ball, some of the guests having walked or bicycled there in formal finery. The ball proved to be the last great event of the grand hotel, which was sold off in various stages in the following months. Sold again in September 1943, the two-hundred-room Kirkwood went to a Columbia real estate man, Simon Faust, who two decades earlier had been a Camden grocer. Faust arranged a widely attended December auction of the hotel fixtures and furnishings. Many of the items were said to have been purchased for sentimental reasons, which brought prices wildly higher than market worth. A newspaper man visiting the empty, dilapidated building described it as a “veritable fire trap” with cracked plaster and damage still evident from its use during army maneuvers. Faust then stripped and sold off its salvageable metal, stating that he hoped to see a remaining portion of the former hotel safely restored and expanded as a modern resort.” (Information courtesy of A History of Kershaw County, S.C. by Joan A. Inabinet and L. Glenn Inabinet, 2001 – The Un. of S.C. Press)
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Ben Schreiner says
The Jell-O Museum in LeRoy NY has a photo album put together by the Woodward family that has dozens and dozens of photos taken
in the 1910s of the Kirkwood Hotel and its guests.