Cheraw — South Carolina | Shared Latitude

A Pee Dee River town built around a colonial green, best known as the birthplace of Dizzy Gillespie, whose bent-bell trumpet still shows up in bronze on Market Street. Lia hummed bebop the rest of the drive and I couldn't get it out of my head either.

Cheraw sits on a bluff above the Pee Dee River in the state’s northeastern corner, laid out around a town green in 1768 that’s still ringed by some of the oldest buildings in South Carolina — a scale of preserved colonial architecture we hadn’t expected to find this far from Charleston. Lia had read that the whole downtown, more than two hundred structures, sits on the National Register of Historic Places, and walking it felt less like a museum and more like a town that simply never got around to tearing anything down.

Dizzy Gillespie and Market Street

Cheraw’s proudest claim is John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, born here in 1917 in a house that’s long gone but commemorated now with a bronze statue on Market Street — Gillespie mid-solo, cheeks puffed, his signature bent-bell trumpet aimed skyward — and a sidewalk piano set into the pavement nearby that anyone can play. The town runs a small jazz festival in his honor every fall, and even off-season, the local library keeps a modest exhibit of his instruments and letters that the librarian was happy to walk us through unprompted.

Bronze statue of Dizzy Gillespie playing his bent-bell trumpet on Market Street in Cheraw, South Carolina

The Town Green and Old St. David’s

The Town Green itself, one of the oldest planned commons in the state, is bordered by the Lyceum Museum and the 1858 St. David’s Episcopal Church, though the older ruin we found more affecting was Old St. David’s, a shell of a colonial-era church whose graveyard holds soldiers from three different wars — Revolutionary, Confederate, and Union dead buried within sight of each other. Cheraw changed hands repeatedly during the Revolution and later served briefly as Sherman’s headquarters during his march north, and that layered military history is written plainly across the headstones.

Getting There

Cheraw doesn’t have its own commercial airport; Florence Regional Airport (FLO) is the closest, about 40 minutes south, though Charlotte Douglas International (CLT) offers more flight options and is roughly an hour and a half northwest. A car is essential for reaching Cheraw and its surrounding state park and forest.