The Historic Saluda Committee will sponsor a Tour of Homes on Saturday, June 4 from 1 – 5 p.m., as part of Saluda’s 130th Anniversary Celebration and as a fundraiser for the renovation of City Hall. Historic Smith Hill has been chosen as the site of the tour. There will be six houses on the tour, all within walking distance of each other.

Tickets will be available at City Hall in Saluda. Parking is available at the First Baptist Church at the corner of Carolina and Henderson Streets and shuttle vans will be available to take you to Smith Hill for the tour.

In 1914, Dr. D. Lesesne Smith of Spartanburg started the Infants’ and Children’s Sanitarium in Saluda as a place where “anxious parents could get skilled attention, careful diet and treatment for their suffering children during the hot summer months.” Dr. Smith’s wife owned two houses in Saluda so he had a base from which to operate. Dr. Smith also had under his care the Spartanburg Baby Hospital, established in the same year.

From an original eight-room cottage, the Sanitarium grew to 12 cottages, a central dining room, a diet kitchen, an assembly hall, and examination and treatment rooms. Dr. Smith, along with Dr. Frank Howard Richardson of New York and Black Mountain, returning from a meeting of the Southern Medical Association, decided that general practitioners needed to be trained in childcare. From the hospital in Spartanburg and the Sanitarium in Saluda grew the idea of a Southern Pediatric Seminar, where from 1921 – 1959, it is estimated that between 3,000 – 4,000 doctors from all over the country and several foreign countries came to Smith Hill in Saluda to study the latest in pediatrics during two weeks every summer.

When the seminar closed in 1959, the property was divided among Dr. Smith’s four children. Some of the buildings were torn down, but the ones that remain are now permanent homes and all but one on the tour are still owned and now lived in by granddaughters and other relatives. The houses have all been restored in the last five years.

The Historic Saluda Committee was formed in May 2010. Its primary focus is “to preserve Saluda’s past to protect its future.” The committee is working on an Oral History Project and assisting with fundraising for the restoration of City Hall.

For more information, contact Lynn Cass at 828-749-1975.