Family Farm Turned Family Playground: Old Towne Creek County Park

Unlike urban pocket parks like Allan and Theodora, Old Towne Creek County Park is an expansive, 67-acre open-space indulgence. Live oaks grace boardwalks along West Ashley’s Old Towne Creek—the waterway that welcomed Charleston’s first settlers at neighboring Charles Towne Landing. Visitors wander through an arboretum or down miles of trails; kids swing and climb on an oak-shaded playground. This newest addition to the extensive Charleston County Parks & Recreation Commission (CCPRC) portfolio, however, shares a similar family-history provenance as its smaller, more intimate urban park cousins, thanks to a generous gift from Emily Ravenel Farrow.

Farrow grew up riding horses and gardening alongside her mother, Emily Simmons Ravenel, on her family’s “country” retreat from their town abode, the William Gibbes house at 64 South Battery. Farrow was born on the farm in 1915, which she later inherited from her parents. During the years around the Great Depression, “Miss Em” founded and taught at St. Andrew’s Parish Riding Academy on the property that she and her husband, John Ashby Farrow, would rename “Ashem Farm” (a mash-up of their names) after they married in 1947. A lover of history, nature, and preservation, Farrow, who served on Historic Charleston Foundation’s board, put both her downtown home and her beloved farm under conservation easement and willed the acreage to Lowcountry Land Trust upon her death in 2011.

Farrow’s goal was to protect the farm from development, yet her foresight created the conservation framework that ultimately allowed the land to become a public park. Lowcountry Land Trust retained a few acres of that original gift and opened its new headquarters, the Lowcountry Center for Conservation, there in August 2025. They sold the remaining acreage to CCPRC, with Farrow’s blessing, to be used as she intended: a protected place for people to enjoy the peacefulness and beauty of nature. “Mrs. Farrow’s legacy is a testament to the profound impact one’s commitment to conservation can have on an entire community,” said Matt Williams, president and executive director of Lowcountry Land Trust, at the park’s grand opening in June. With a welcome center fashioned out of the former “rain hut” from Miss Em’s riding school and many of the ornamental plantings stemming from ones she and her mother originally planted, Old Towne Creek County Park pays homage to one family’s deeply rooted sense of place. 

Old Towne Creek County Park

1400 Old Towne Rd., West Ashley
Hours: Daily, 8 a.m. to sunset
www.ccprc.com/listing/old-towne-creek-county-park/22/