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Joel Roberts Poinsett was considered by most to be Greenville County's most prominent summer visitor from the years before the Civil War. He was born in 1779. Now his name is remembered through a hotel, highway, private dining club, mill village, and perhaps most widely known is the Christmas flower that he domesticated and brought to the United States and named after him, the Poinsettia. He was considered one of the most sophisticated and widely traveled men in the USA by 1816. For the next few years he served in the South Carolina Legislature, and then he became the head of the Board of Public Works, where he worked for public improvements in Greenville. He represented South Carolina in Congress in 1820. Joel Roberts Poinsett died in 1851 in Stateburg, South Carolina on his way to visit Greenville for the last time. |
