And in 1969, when I would have been a freshman in college, the state of South Carolina created something called the Rich-Lex Riverbanks Parks Special Purpose District. The Rich-Lex are abbreviations for Richland County and Lexington County. Now the two counties are divided by a river, and those two counties, even to this very day, don’t really get along very well. But anyway, so that was the Rich-Lex part. The Special Purpose District part also was kind of interesting, and this goes back really to the Civil War, when the legislature lost a lot of authority and municipalities lost a lot of authority during Reconstruction. And as the state’s constitution was rewritten and redrafted, the legislature was given the authority to create mini governments, M-I-N-I, mini little governments called special purpose districts. And they created, believe it or not, 465 little mini governments around the state, each with a special purpose. That’s the name.
