About Timrod Park Neighborhood

Timrod Park Neighborhood is a mixture of life-long residents and relative newcomers who were first drawn to the fine, old homes.  The quiet tree-lined streets are bound by Cherokee Avenue (South), Palmetto Street (North), Park Avenue (West) and Irby Street (East).  Click below to view a map of the neighborhood.  Timrod Park is one of Florence's oldest neighborhoods.  A large portion of the homes were built between 1910 and 1930, which makes it a living example of original Arts and Crafts architecture.  Who could resist the romance of homes with fireplaces, hardwood floors, sleeping porches and welcoming front porches?  Click HERE to learn more about the architecture of Timrod Park.

Location

We are bound by Cherokee Avenue (South), Palmetto Street (North), Park Avenue (West) and Irby Street (East).  

Timrod Park Neighborhood Map

History

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The Timrod Park neighborhood dates back to the early 1900s. The neighborhood takes its name from Henry Timrod.  Henry Timrod, born in 1867, was Poet Laureate of the Confederacy. He was born in Charleston in 1828.  In 1856, he accepted a post as a teacher at the plantation of Col. William Henry Cannon in Florence, SC.  A single room school building in which he taught is  preserved and located in the neighborhood of Timrod Park.   It was built to provide for the education of the plantation children.  Henry Timrod's impassioned war poems stirred the South to action in the Civil War and they were these that won him "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy."  Like so many of the talented members of his generation in the South, he was ultimately consumed, quite literally, by the effort to defend the Southern political and economic system which came to an abrupt end during the American Civil War.   Prior to the war he was highly regarded and encouraged by the emerging American literary elite which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and others. He died young leaving a small body of work that is often compared to Sidney Lanier, a Georgia poet similarly cut short, and John Greenleaf Whittier, whose work heralded modern American poetry in the second half of the 19th century. Timrod's literary contemporaries saw the poet's recognition of the war a waste of time, particularly on those who followed the Southern patriotic call in the name of honor and principal. He is buried in Trinity Churchyard in Columbia, he was not yet 39 years old.
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