NEWBERRY — If you walk into the Newberry County Chamber of Commerce you may have noticed two large maps covered in push pins.
Each pin represents a visitor who stopped by the Chamber in 2016, some of which have come as far as New Zealand.
“For years, there has been a record book, a ledger where the visitors would record the date, their names and address,” said Michelle Long, executive director of the Chamber.
About three years ago Long and Liz MacDonald, Chamber administrator, decided they wanted to have something a little more visual for visitors to see. So they purchased a world map, which allowed visitors to mark where they were visiting form.
“We realized we needed a map of the United States because we had so many visitors from the U.S. that we could not fit them all on the smaller United States on the world map,” MacDonald said.
When they started with the maps, they had a lot of visitors from Australia, typically parents of Newberry College students, as well as visitors from England. Long said they often hear that Newberry is a good halfway point where they can stop and eat, shop and spend the night.
“Another message we hear is that they saw the historical markers on the interstate,” she said.
This year the Chamber has received visitors from places like Makhachkala, Russia, Kraków, Poland and Lanzarote, Canary Islands.
In fact they have had a visitor from every continent, excluding Antarctica. The most foreign visitors they receive are from Europe, something Long said they have noticed over the last three years they have done this.
The most common area they receive visitors from in the United States is the southeast — South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia specifically.
This has also been a year of firsts, this year the Chamber received its first visitor from Hawaii, Holland and Tanzania.
The visitor from Tanzania was a graduate student at Clemson who came by to attend one of the Ag and Art Tour meetings, and his coming back for the actual tour. The visitors from Holland gave the Chamber a Clog magnet.
On average, they have received around 3,000 visitors, the most of which come in June. Both Long and MacDonald have recalled some of their most memorable stories from the past year.
“This guy came in and he started telling me about book he has read, we we were talking he tells me about his aunt who won the Noble Prize for Children’s Literature. That same night I want home and watched a special on PBS that was actually about his aunt, it was really weird,” MacDonald said.
“There was a guy, Trahern Cook and he was painting, I left one day and he was painting, set up on the coroner facing the Opera House. The next day he came in here and asked if it was okay if he could set up out front, and if he would be okay. I said it was okay and we started talking, he travels around painting different places,” Long said.
Long also recalled a little girl from North Carolina he was doing a project. She was researching South Carolina for this project, and was staying here for a few days with her family. Everyone she talked to she would give them a little compass, because she was finding her way around South Carolina.
