Aiken & Hitchcock Woods Guide

Aiken is horse country in a way most of America forgot existed. In the 1890s, Northern industrial families named Whitney, Vanderbilt, Astor, and Hitchcock discovered the sandy soil and mild winters and built a “Winter Colony” of mansions to house their families, staff, and Thoroughbreds — and the horses never left. Come winter, nearly 350 racehorses stable here and train from dawn until late morning. At the town’s edge sits Hitchcock Woods, roughly 2,100 acres of urban forest laced with sand trails — two and a half times the size of Central Park — with no cars, just riders, walkers, and hoofprints. It’s a genuinely strange and beautiful thing: a small South Carolina town that runs on horses.