The City of Hartsville is inviting the public to celebrate the creation of the region’s first-ever playground designed for children with physical disabilities.
The ribbon cutting for Garrison’s Place: A Handicapable Playground, will take place 10 a.m. Thursday, June 12 at Byerly Park, 700 Russell Road in Hartsville. The newly installed facility is located next to the Piratesville Splash Pad and near the park’s Fourteenth Street entrance.
This latest addition for the 93-acre recreation complex features a wheelchair platform swing, adaptive swings and an adaptive zip line all suited for children with physical disabilities. The project was funded in large part by a $25,000 grant from the Byerly Foundation.
Guest speakers for the ceremony will include Mayor Mel Pennington, Byerly Foundation Chairwoman Johnna Shirley, and local residents Melissa Shumate and Angela Murph, mother of five-year-old Garrison Murph, for whom the playground is named.
Shumate and Murph developed the idea for the playground before launching a “Special Play for Special Kids” campaign to make it a reality, collecting signatures and letters of support from the community for the project and then working with the City of Hartsville on the playground’s design.