The Pickens County 250 Committee will begin 2025 with a program, The Cherokees of the Carolinas, to be held at the Pickens County Museum of Art and History on Thursday, January 16 at 6:30 p.m., with speaker Dennis Chastain.

He and his wife, Jane, are residents of Pickens County, living on his family’s homeplace in the shadow of Table Rock, where his ancestors have been deeply rooted since 1796. He is a well known local historian and is an award-winning outdoor writer, tour guide, and interpretive naturalist. Once described as a “modern day Daniel Boone,” he has spent most of his adult life exploring, photographing, and writing about the South Carolina mountains.

Along the way, he has made a number of important discoveries, including wildflowers never recorded in Pickens County, the remnants of long forgotten roads and Native-American trails, and numerous prehistoric rock carvings on Pinnacle and Table Rock Mountains that he and archaeologist Tommy Charles first documented.

The Pickens County 250 Committee invites you to come and learn about the area we now know as Pickens County but which was once the home of the Cherokee.