Croft State Park near Spartanburg occupies part of the former Camp Croft military reservation, where South Carolina’s rural, wartime, and recreational history meet. The land began as late-18th-century farm country, and old farmsteads, family cemeteries, and church cemeteries still remain. It also includes a Revolutionary War skirmish site and traces of Whitestone Springs, a late-19th-century resort whose hotel burned in 1930. The area changed most dramatically during World War II, when Camp Croft trained about a quarter of a million troops and later held nearly a thousand German prisoners of war. After the base closed in 1945, part of the land became a state park, which opened in 1949.