French Huguenots settled the region in the early 1700s and brought the name Abbeville with them from a small town in the home country about 20 miles from the Atlantic coastline. The county was formed in 1758 and stretches from the Savannah River to the Saluda River across the upstate; its namesake town has been county seat since it was formed in the late 18th century.
Abbeville is often referred to as the “birthplace and the deathbed of the Confederacy.” The first meeting to discuss a possible secession from the United States of America was held here on November 22, 1860. Scheduled for Court Square, the meeting was moved to a nearby hillside, known since as Secession Hill, as the crowd grew to thousands. Five years later, on the night of May 2, 1865 Confederate President Jefferson Davis arrived in Abbeville at about 10 a.m., six days after General Robert E. Lee had urged the evaluation of the disbanding capital of Richmond and General Joseph E. Johnston had surrendered to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman at Greensboro, N.C. While in town he would meet with Confederate Secretary of War Generals John C. Breckinridge, Braxton Bragg and five brigade generals at the Burt home. Captured eight days later, it would be the last ever war council held by the leaders of the Southern Rebellion.
Downtown Abbeville, little touched by incursions of manufacturing and commercial growth, has always centered around its Court Square and that is where we begin our exploration, with a trio of monuments...
Aiken, got its start when William Moseley established a trading post in the area in 1790. In 1830, William Aiken, Sr., president of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, built a line to connect Charleston with Hamburg, South Carolina, that ran through what would become Aiken. In 1833, the first train arrived in the newly established town of Aiken, and the city was incorporated in 1835.
After the Civil War, Aiken began to attract wealthy northerners, who were lured to the area by equestrian sports. Aiken’s celebrated “Winter Colony” included such eminent visitors as Elizabeth Arden, Thomas Hitchcock, William C. Whitney, and Harold Vanderbilt.
Aiken is rich in historic homes and buildings from the Winter Colony years and our walking tour will start in the center of town...
Anderson is named for General Robert Anderson, a Revolutionary War soldier, who came to South Carolina to assist his good friend, Andrew Pickens, in surveying land that had been given previously to the English Colony by Cherokee Indians. The City was founded in December 1826 along the “General’s Road,” the dirt highway used by Pickens when traveling from Abbeville County to his “Tamassee” home in Oconee County. Anderson was incorporated by an Act of Legislature in 1833.
With a trading area extending over South Carolina’s Piedmont section and into Georgia, commercial and manufacturing enterprises in Anderson developed rapidly from the time of its founding until the Civil War. The majority of the early commercial structures were wooden, several of which were destroyed or damaged by fire in 1845. Following Reconstruction after the Civil War, Anderson’s textile-based commerce and industry once again began to prosper. Growth continued throughout the 19th Century into the 20th, climaxing between 1898 and 1907, with one of the greatest periods of building activity in the town’s history. It was during this era of prosperity that a large number of the structures comprising the downtown district were built. Store buildings and hotels were rebuilt, but it was following the period of Reconstruction that Anderson experienced a period of major construction.
Anderson’s greatest notoriety came during that time, in the 1890s, when a bold engineer, an Anderson native named William Church Winter created one of America’s first hydroelectric power plants on the Seneca River. His new plant transmitted electricity 11 miles, the longest line in the country at the time. Flooded with the new “white fire,” Anderson was dubbed “The Electric City.”
Present-day Anderson, still a trade center for the county and surrounding area, in many ways resembles its appearance during the early 20th Century. Although new structures have been built and facades have been altered, the town retains much architectural integrity. Our exploration will start at one of the main buildings from a century ago and our walking tour will take in civic buildings, churches, glorious homes and even one of those old generators...
Spaniards first sailed into Port Royal’s harbor more than 400 years ago and by 1700, four national flags had flown over the area: Spanish, French, Scots, and English. In 1710 the Lords Proprietors decided to establish “a fort upon the river called Port Royal” for ships of Great Britain to take in masts, pitch, tar, turpentine and other naval stores. Accordingly, Beaufort Town was laid out in December 1710 and named in honor of one of the proprietors, Henry, Duke of Beaufort.
In 1715, as the settlers pushed the Indians farther inland, the Yemassee War erupted. Rampaging Yemassee Indians ravaged the settlement of Beaufort, ransacking and burning homes and slaughtering the cattle in the fields. Survivors took refuge on a ship anchored in the harbor and it would not be until 1719 that the King of England was again fully in charge of the province. The years of royal government would be stable and prosperous ones, with the export of rice and indigo to England bringing great profit. As their prosperity increased, the area planters built beautiful homes in Beaufort, entertained lavishly, and educated their sons abroad and in the colleges of New England. Shipbuilding flourished and Beaufort became known as the “wealthiest town of its size in America” during this time.
The town was occupied by the British during the American Revolution and was quickly occupied by Union forces during the War Between the States in 1861. Many of the homes were used for officer’s quarters and hospitals, and because of this, were saved from destruction. Beaufort prospered during the reconstruction era when rice and cotton were planted and exported.
Much of the current streetscape in Beaufort today was influenced by cataclysmic events that bookended the arrival of the 20th century. A great hurricane scored a direct hit on town in 1893 and in 1907 a devastating fire swept through downtown streets. Fishing and truck farming carried the local economy until two military bases were constructed during the build-up to World War II. To this day the military remains the economic backbone of the collection of islands.
The original settlement of Beaufort can be found in the downtown historic area, 304 acres that have been designated a National Historic Landmark. Our walking tour of the town on the eve of its 300th birthday will begin at water’s edge and never stray more than a few blocks from defining sea...
The county of Marlboro was established on March 2, 1785 and named for John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, who resided in Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England after one of the greatest military careers in British history. The site chosen for Marlboro’s first courthouse was on the banks of the Great Pee Dee River near Gardner’s Bluff. A few years later, it was moved a short distance inland and near the north bank of Crooked Creek where it crossed the old River Road. Its existence today has been wiped away, save for a granite marker.
As the county’s population grew away from the river, Welsh Baptist settlers in the region requested that a more central location for the courthouse and jail, a common early American tale. In December of 1819, the state General Assembly authorized the removal of the courthouse from the river to that requested more-handy location, along an old stagecoach road. This was on a high bluff above Crooked Creek. The town was named for South Carolina Governor Thomas Bennett, although it is certain he had never been in the village and likely that no one there knew him. Just the way things were done in those days; the new town would become a center of trade dependent upon the production of cotton.
As the Civil War was waning, Marlboro County was host to every unit of General William T. Sherman’s Union Army when it left Cheraw, crossed the Great Pee Dee River, and made its way to a final engagement in North Carolina. Bennettsville was captured March 6, 1865, by Major General Frank P. Blair, commanding general of the Union Army’s 17th Corps. Although some frame buildings, warehouses, and a few downtown structures were burned, Marlboro County’s courthouse was spared, giving this county one of the state’s oldest complete set of county records.
A core of town businessmen, their names still seen on street signs and buildings throughout Bennettsville, guided the town to prosperity in the coming years following Reconstruction. The arrival of the railroad did a great deal to lead development of the county as it made it possible to transport Marlboro-grown cotton to markets and mills far from her borders. By the 1890s, Marlboro County produced record harvests of cotton, corn and other grains. Timber brought additional revenue, and textile mills sprang up in the county. It was declared that Marlboro, boasted the “highest yields of cotton, the highest priced lands and as prosperous farmers as any part of the whole Cotton Belt.”
Much of the building stock around Bennettsville traces its history to those heady times around the coming of the 20th century. Noted professional architects called the town home and graced it with a variety of buildings not often seen in a South Carolina town of its size. Our walking tour will begin outside a pair of residences of the man who did more than any other to lay the groundwork for that prosperity...
Camden is the oldest existing inland town in South Carolina. The frontier settlement, once called Pine Tree HIll, was part of a township plan ordered by King George II in 1730. Quakers and Scots-Irish migrated down from Virginia to settle here. One newcomer was Joseph Kershaw, a native of Yorkshire, England, who arrived in 1758 and established a store for a Charleston mercantile firm. At his suggestion, the town became Camden, in honor of Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, champion of colonial rights. Kershaw prospered and by 1768 the town, situated at the head of the Wateree River near major Indian trails, was the inland trade center in the colony. Kershaw was engaged in milling “Carolina flour” and had his hands in sawmills, indigo works, a tobacco warehouse and a distillery. In 1774 wide streets were laid off in a grid pattern.
In the spring of 1780, after Charleston fell to the British, the Revolutionary War came to Camden, one of several military posts established in the interior of South Carolina. General Lord Charles Cornwallis entered Camden on June 1, 1780 and made his headquarters here for nearly a year. Fourteen battles would be fought in that time, including the Battle of Camden that was the worst American defeat of the War, before the British evacuated and burned the town. With the occupation over, the townsfolk set about to rebuilding and the town was incorporated in 1791 when Kershaw County was created and it became the county seat.
In the 1800s, as the town went about its business, the area of began attracting the attention of wealthy Midwesterners and Northerners seeking a milder winter climate. Camden developed as a resort town and winter training center for thoroughbred racing as the sandy soil provided non-slip footing for the steeds and the ideal yearlong climate was a perfect combination for breeding, training and racing horses not just in the cold months, but all year long. Other horsing disciplines soon followed.
In the 1890s Rogers L. Barstow, Jr., only 23 years of age, stepped off his private Pullman car in Camden with “a bag of gold in one hand and a Polo mallet in the other.” A skilled polo player, Barstow immediately organized, trained and outfitted a local polo team. He laid out and developed the polo field that is the third oldest in the country and still in use. In 1925, after coming to Camden to see polo, Harry D. Kirkover was so impressed he relocated to town. His game was steeplechase and he soon purchased land and laid out what is now considered to be one of the finest steeplechase track in the United States. The Carolina Cup was organized in 1930 and has been held every year since then, except for 1943 and 1945, enabling Kershaw County to fancy itself “the Steeplechase Capital of the World.”
Most of the original town of Camden was destroyed by fire in 1813. As it rebuilt the center of town gradually crept uphill from its swampy lowlands to the piney sandhills. Our walking tour will begin in the older section where handsome mansions were constructed around the core of former cottages and work downhill towards the beginnings of town where stands a prototypical work of “South Carolina’s Architect,” Robert Mills...
The nascent city of Charles Town was enclosed by a protective wall from 1690 to 1720 which extended down to today’s Water Street. Water Street itself was Vanderhorst Creek which was later filled in. Outside the wall, at the entrance to the harbor an earth wall was held together with sticks and topped with grass along the water. Wooden boards were laid across the wall and guns aimed out across the mouth of the harbor.
In 1787, after the British had departed the city, work was begun to improve the wall. Ricks used as ballast in ships were piled into the wall. By 1820 a granite wall was completed. At this time the city’s richest merchants and bankers began building Charleston’s finest mansions with views of the water. The open space at the tip was used as a public park beginning in 1837.
After the Civil War began on Fort Sumter in the Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861 the bombardment of the Battery ensued. Only one house, at the corner of Atlantic Street and East Battery was destroyed. Eventually the park became known as White Point Gardens because of the piles of bleached oyster shells on the point.
This walking tour will visit Charleston’s oldest and finest homes in the Battery below Broad Street, an area that is virtually completely residential...
Charleston - Business District
Charleston sits on a narrow peninsula where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet as they flow into the Atlantic Ocean. The community named for King Charles of England was established in 1670, became the center of the Carolina colony, the eighth state to join the Union, and the cultural center of the antebellum South. Charleston was the destination for peoples throughout Europe, Africa, and the Carribean, who have collectively shaped this unique region.
The new city was originally contained inside a wall, located south and east of today’s business district, until 1720 but was soon bursting out of its protective cocoon as it grew into the fourth largest city in the American colonies. The peninsula soon filled with businesses, churches, schools and some of the most impressive residences thus seen on these shores.
This walking tour will begin at the intersection of th eprimary north-south street in Charleston, Meeting Street and the commercial axis along Market Street where a bustling market operates much as it did more than 200 years ago...
Charleston was a walled fortress city between the years of 1690 and 1720, a period of constant danger from hostile French and Spanish invaders, Native American tribes, and pirates. In all drawings from that time, the walls are depicted as straight and sharply angular, with no evidence of haphazard construction. While the bastions may have begun as crude earthworks, it seems clear that by the early 18th century they had been engineered and refined to a fairly high degree of sophistication.
The outer wall was in a shape of a trapezoid anchored at the corners by four bastions: Granville Bastion and Craven Bastion on the wide side of the trapezoid along the waterfront, and Carteret Bastion and Colleton Bastion anchoring the narrow inland side. Midway between Granville and Craven bastions was a semicircular waterfront projection called the Half-Moon Battery, above which stood the original Court of Guard. TheOld Exchange building was constructed upon this spot in the mid-18th century.
The waterfront wall was a single structure, but the inland walls consisted of double barriers separated by a moat. Little is known about the nature of the moat. It may have simply been an open space between the inner and outer walls, or it may have been a trench. There is no indication whether water from the Cooper River was channeled into this moat, but given Charleston’s water table and climate, it seems likely that it collected standing water for at least portions of the year.
This walking tour will begin at the intersection of present-day Broad and Meeting streets, known today as the Four Corners of the Law. In the days of the Walled City this is where entrance to the fortress was gained by two drawbridges...
Sitting at the head of navigation on the Pee Dee River, this has long been a place of desirable habitation. The first residents were the Cheraw and Pee Dee Indians whose numbers were greatly reduced by disease by the 1730s. European settlers - mostly English, Scots, French or Irish - were populating the region by that time and in 1750 Cheraw was one of six places in South Carolina that appeared on English maps.
Joseph and Eli Kershaw came to the area in the 1760s and obtained a land grant for much of present-day Cheraw. They formally laid out the street system with broad thoroughfares and a town green. They called the town “Chatham” after William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, but the name never seemed to take and was just as often referred to as “Cheraw,” the dominant tribe along the upper Pee Dee River who maintained a well-fortified village here. When the town was officially incorporated in 1820, Cheraw became the official name.
By that time steamships began to ply the Pee Dee River and the town was launched into a golden age. Corn, tobacco, rice and indigo passed across the wharves. The cotton market in Cheraw was the largest between Georgetown and Wilmington. Many of the town’s landmark buildings today date to that era, despite a fire that swept through the business district in 1835. By the time of the Civil War Cheraw was a prosperous river town that served as the regional center of business, education, culture and religion. During the war the town became a haven for refugees and a storage place for valuables and military stores. In the last months of the conflict, with William Tecumseh Sherman marching north from Savannah to join Union troops in North Carolina, more federal troops occupied Cheraw than any other South Carolina town. Aside from an accidental explosion, however, no public buildings or dwellings were destroyed.
Today’s Cheraw streetscape blends antebellum housing stock with Victorian and Revival buildings from the beginning of the 20th century. Our walking tour will begin on the original town green from two-and-one-half centuries ago, at the statue of Cheraw’s most illustrious citizen. Few towns have ever sent such an enthusiastic and recognizable emissary into the world...
In 1786 the South Carolina General Assembly convened in Charleston to pass legislation for a new capital city, one that would be more convenient for the growing number of residents leaving the coast and settling in the backcountry. The site selected for the new city, one of the first planned cities in the United States, had several advantages. First, it was located nearly in the center of the state and second, it was at the head of navigation on the Congaree River. The name for the new capital came from Christopher Columbus who was riding a crest in popularity for his travels to the West Indies in 1492.
The new capital was a success not just as a seat of government but as a center for education, commerce and transportation. A canal system was in places by the 1820s and rail service arrived in 1842. By the mid-1800s Columbia was the largest inland town in the Carolinas - twice as big as the next most populous town, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Columbia’s role in the Civil War was brief but lasting. America’s first convention to draw up an Ordinance of Secession met here in December 1860 but quickly departed for Charleston when word spread of a smallpox outbreak in town. Union leaders would not forget. After surviving four years of war unscathed, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops arrived in town on February 17, 1865 and with barely six weeks of conflict remaining, destroyed about one-third of the city, including the commercial and governmental district and every house on Main Street, save one. Ironically, one of the buildings to survive was the First Baptist Church where the Secession Convention was held - because Union troops had bad information as to where the actual location of the meeting took place.
Columbia would rebound slowly but steadily - the South Carolina State House would not be completely finished until the early 1900s. With the rise to prominence of the University of South Carolina, established in town in 1801, and the establishment of Fort Jackson, the nation’s largest U.S. Army training facility, in 1917, however, Columbia would emerge again into the nation’s consciousness.
Our walking tour of the capital city will cover much ground and take in the greatest diversity of architecture of any South Carolina town but will begin outside of its two most historic houses where, conveniently, the closest non-metered parking spaces to downtown are located...
Robert Johnson, Royal Governor of South Carolina in 1730, hatched a plan to develop this area that included the site of Kingston on a river bluff. By 1735 the first settlers had arrived. When the American Revolution exploded, numerous residents took up the cause of independence including Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” who had an encampment near Kingston just across the Waccamaw River.
After the war new political boundaries were drawn and in 1785 Kingston County was created. The county name was changed in 1801 to honor Peter Horry who had stood alone from King George in the battle for freedom. Kingston’s name was soon to change as well - it became Conwayborough for General Robert Conway. It was designated the county seat and a courthouse constructed. Regardless, growth came slowly. The town greeted the new 19th century with about 100 inhabitants and an 1832 state geographical survey identified only 200 townsfolk.
Real growth didn’t come to Conway (the town’s name was shortened in 1883) until after the Civil War when lumber and naval stores were developed along the Waccamaw River. Riverboats plied the waters swapping passengers and goods between the town and Georgetown on the coast. In 1887 the railroad reached Conway.
Most of the early frame buildings in town were burned and destroyed by a major fire in the 1890s. These were gradually replaced by brick buildings erected until 1940, most of which exist today. The Conway Downtown Historic District has not changed significantly since 1940. Our walking tour of South Carolina’s Rivertown, draped in ancient oak trees, begins at the black water of the Waccamaw River...
Like many towns, the fact that there is a Florence today, is due to decisions made 150 years ago about whether a railroad would be placed here or, maybe, over there. In the 1850s in this area the main town was Mars Bluff and the largest store was owned by Colonel Eli Gregg. Gregg apparently was not overly fond of railroad workers and refused to allow the new Wilmington and Manchester Railroad to build their depot in his neighborhood. The depot instead was placed seven miles to the west in virgin pines. It became an important railroad junction in 1853 when the Northwestern Railroad arrived. A third line, the Cheraw and Darlington, entered and established shops in 1859.
A surveyor, S.J. Solornens was then hired to lay out streets and lots of what now constitute the core of Downtown Florence. Seven streets shown on the plat dated 1858 and 1860 are as follows: Evans, Dargan, and Cheves named for judges; Coit, Irby and McQueen named for notable citizens chiefly from the upper Pee Dee; and, Front Street, which was changed to honor N.B. Baroody. Florence was named after the baby daughter of General William Harllee, head of the Wilmington and Manchester Line, who was instrumental in the town’s development. And Mars Bluff? It remains an unincorporated community best remembered for the dubious distinction of having been inadvertently bombed with a nuclear weapon by the United States Air Force in 1958.
During the Civil War Florence developed into a shipping center and later a hospital town. Three miles south of town a “prison pen” was constructed in September 1864 and eventually held as many as 12,000 Union soldiers. Before the stockade was complete the incoming stream of prisoners was herded into an improvised camp and unsanitary conditions led to an outbreak of typhoid fever. The daily procession of wagons hauling the dead, piled with 100 bodies at a time, overwhelmed local coffinmakers and many corpses were simply wrapped in blankets and buried. The prisoner cemetery became the nucleus of the Florence National Cemetery; a six-acre shrine often referred to as South Carolina’s “Little Arlington.”
Florence experienced continued growth after the Civil War, in large part because of its status as a major regional railroad junction. While the railroad remained the most important economic factor in town, the 1880s represented a shift in mercantile history as the center of trade began to move toward the intersection ofDargan and Evans streets. During the decade of the 1890s the city suffered four devastating fires. For this reason, many of the buildings on Evans and Dargan streets were built after the last major fire in 1899. Dubbed the “Gate City” of the Carolinas, annual railroad passenger traffic climbed in excess of 500,000 and by the 1940s Florence was the largest rail station in South Carolina with 14 passenger and 48 freight trains passing through the city each day.
The hustle and bustle of the railroad days has disappeared and so have some of the key buildings associated with them - the old city hall, the old courthouse. Our walking tour to see what’s left will cover the ground of the original town and begin where the goods first rolled into town along old Front Street...
Georgetown was South Carolina’s third city, following Charleston and Beaufort. The first permanent settlers to the area were the English who were actively involved in the Indian trade. The settlement was founded in 1729 and declared an official port of entry in 1732. This meant that all foreign imports and exports no longer had to pass through Charleston andthe area’s merchants and planters could deal directly with all ports.
Georgetown quickly flourished on the back of its indigo and rice crops. In the early days indigo, used in dyes, was the big money crop but it was not grown after the Revolutionary War. Rice, which had been grown in the area as far back as 1690, picked up the slack. By the 1840s more rice moved across Georgetown’s docks than any seaport in the world. Every other grain of rice consumed in the United States was the local variety called Carolina Gold.”
The Civil War changed the whole way of life for this region. The reconstruction period that followed was a social, political and economic upheaval. The rice crops following the war were failures, and rice could no longer support the economy of Georgetown. The combination of the disruption of the work patterns, competition from Southwestern rice growers, and several devastating hurricanes spelled the end of the once fabulous rice culture by the dawn of the twentieth century.
Into the economic void stepped the region’s virgin forests that had once shielded Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Revolutionary War fame, in his skirmishes against the British. By 1905 there were five lumber companies in Georgetown producing over 300,000 tons of milled lumber. The Atlantic Coast Lumber Company was incorporated in 1903 and within a decade was the largest lumber producing plant on the East Coast. However, the company could not survive the Depression and Georgetown entered a period of immense economic decline.
In recent years the paper industry and specialty steel and commercial fishing and, of course, tourism, have assumed the reins of Georgetown’s economic engine. Most of the downtown grid, laid out by Elisha Screven when he founded the town in 1729, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Along the streets are scores of structures that reach back to the 1700s and early 1800s and our walking tour to investigate them will begin at one of the grandest, on a conspicuous bluff overlooking the languid Sampit River...
Between 1760 and 1770, Richard Pearis, the first European settler in what would become Greenville County, established a trading post and grist mill on the banks of the Reedy River. He married a Cherokee woman and records indicate that the Cherokee tribe thought so highly of him that he was given several tracts of land by the Cherokee Indian tribe. Following the defeat of the Cherokees and the British during the Revolutionary War, Pearis lost all his property and South Carolina made available to Revolutionary soldiers for first occupancy all of the land which composes Greenville County, established in 1786 and named for an early resident, Isaac Green or Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene.
In 1797 Lemuel J. Alston, a prominent resident, offered a site for the courthouse in Greenville County. Alston marked off four hundred acres around the courthouse plat, laying out the village of Pleasantburg. His real estate speculation did not pan out, however, and Alston, disappointed in his real estate endeavor and embarrassed over a political defeat, sold 11,000 acres to Vardry McBee in 1815 and left Greenville.
McBee would come to be regarded as the “Father of Greenville”. He was instrumental in moving Furman University from Edgefield to Greenville in 1851 and in securing Greenville’s first railroad in 1853. McBee encouraged the construction of mills to take advantage of Greenville’s proximity to fast-flowing water, the Reedy River. Soon the town was the home to a number of grist, textile and paper mills and the largest carriage factory east of the Mississippi. By the end of the 19th century and into the next, Greenville industry was expanding up and down the banks of the Reedy River.
By the 1920s Greenville being touted as the “ Textile Center of the South” and was the second wealthiest town in South Carolina. In a building boom the 12-story Poinsett Hotel, billed as “Carolina’s Finest,” and the ten-story Chamber of Commerce Building were both completed in 1925. That same year the state’s largest furniture store and a theater were also built in Greenville.
In recent years Greenville’s urban renewal efforts have been among the state’s most vigorous. Although it still contains many structures and residential neighborhoods of historical and architectural significance, most of the city’s housing and commercial stock in downtown have been replaced. To see what remains and what new wonders line the streets, our walking tour will begin on the banks of the Reedy River where a landscaped park preserves the site of the city’s first settlement and the succession of mills that once stood there...
The town traces its beginnings back to 1873 when it was established as a flag station along the Atlanta Charlotte Air Line Railroad. Officially incorporated as Greer’s in 1876, the town later became known simply as Greer. The main business avenue stretched out from the railroad depot and quickly became known as Trade Street. Cotton brought in most of that trade and by the early 1900s two new railroads, Southern Railways and the Piedmont and Northern, constructed competing lines through Greer.
Textile industries were expanding rapidly. Within 100 miles there were an estimated 400 mills operating by 1930, including several in and around Greer itself. Warehouses, lumber and fuel production and the manufacture of cotton byproducts such as cotton seed oil and fertilizer were an outgrowth of the proliferation of the textile mills. The streetscape of Greer was transformed as the older wood frame buildings were replaced with brick commercial structures.
Today’s Greer is a snapshot of the early 1900s with the Downtown Historic District stuffed with intact examples of early upcountry commercial architecture. But before we get there our walking tour will begin a block away at the modern city government complex...
This was long the land of the Catawba, Cherokee and Waxhaw Indians. In the 1750s Scotch-Irish immigrants from the northern colonies seeking inexpensive land and religious freedom began settling in the area. Many came from southern Pennsylvania and brought the Lancaster name, tracing back to the House of Lancaster in 15th-century England, with them. The House of Lancasteropposed the House of York in the legendary War of the Roses and the town still today claims the red rose, the traditional coat of arms of the House of Lancaster, as their emblem.
Shortly after arriving in 1759, one of those Scotch-irish immigrants gave birth to a son just south of the North Carolina border and South Carolina had its first - and only - native-born President of the United States, Andrew Jackson.
The first county court was held in the home of John Ingram, south of Heath Springs, but was later moved to Nathan Barr’s Tavern. In 1795, a log courthouse was constructed on the corner of Main and Dunlap Streets; a two-story frame courthouse replaced it in 1802, and the town growing up around it was named Lancasterville. In the 1820s its two most important buildings - a new courthouse and jail - were designed by America’s first native professional architect, Charlestonian Robert Mills.
Most of the early days in and around Lancaster were devoted to agricultural pursuits. During the Civil War, Union troops visited the town but did not burn it, apparently impressed with the local hospitality.
The fabric of the community changed dramatically with the arrival of Leroy Springs who founded Springs Cotton Mill in 1895, an industrial enterprise that grew to become the “largest textile plant in the world.” Global in scope, Springs Industries shaped the fortunes of Lancaster and its citizens for more than 100 years.
The names Mills and Springs will be much in evidence during our walking tour of Lancaster which will begin at the county courthouse, where an arsonist’s torch ended 180 years of continuous judicial service in 2008...
Newberry County came into existence with the new nation after the American Revolution, having been carved out of the Ninety-Six district in 1785, once described as the largest tract of unbroken farm land in South Carolina. The origin of the county’s name is still unknown. It is likely an alternate spelling for the English town “Newbury,” but a more folksy explanation maintains that the surrounding fields and forests were as pretty as a “new berry.”
A site for the county courthouse was selected near the center of the county in 1789 on land donated by John Coate. Frederick Nance was the first resident of Newberry, having been appointed Clerk of the Court in 1794 in addition to establishing a small mercantile trade and managing the post office. Early settlers in the town were wealthy plantation owners and entrepreneurs not in need of many services. The small town had the only post office in the district, a jail, a school, a cemetery and even a library but not much else. No churches were built in Newberry until the 1830s when the town’s residents petitioned for incorporation.
In a familiar tale, Newberry grew largely as a result of the coming of the railroad in 1851. By the late 1800s the town was the hub for both the Greenville & Columbia Railroad and the Laurens Railroad. By the 1870s Newberry possessed the second largest cotton market in the state after Charleston. Cotton mills brought industry to the town in the 1880s and upon its completion in 1883 the Newberry Cotton Mills was the largest steam-powered factory in America.
Many of Newberry’s buildings appeared in the years to follow - although it seemed town residents were in a perpetual state of rebuilding. In June 1866 half the town was destroyed by fire; an 1870 fire claimed 20 stores and another blaze in 1879 took another dozen. A tornado swept though downtown in March 1884. The last devastating fire occurred in 1907 when five square blocks of downtown burned.
Our walking tour of Newberry will begin in the Public Square, which the government abandoned for more spacious quarters around town in 1906, and fan out to visit the structures that followed the old courthouse, including a monumental Neoclassical brick pile and a rare Italian Renaissance classic in South Carolina...
Orangeburg County and its county seat, Orangeburg, were named for William IV, Prince of Orange, the son-in-law of King George II. The name was first used in the 1730s for a township on the Edisto River, one of eleven townships created by the governing body of Charles Town. The original township, which was settled along the banks of the Edisto River, was 20,000 acres in size. The head of each family was given 50 acres of land and provisions for one year before departing from Charles Town. Swiss and German farmers moved into this region around 1735, and English settlers from the Lowcountry followed. The center of town in these early years was know as Public Square. The Square was bounded on its four sides by today’s streets of Broughton, Bull, Middleton, and Waring. The site of an early trading post, the Square continued to grow and became the center of downtown business, industry, finance, religious life, and entertainment. By the early 1800s, downtown provided its citizens with blacksmiths, lawyers, doctors, and shopkeepers.
The battle of Eutaw Springs was fought nearby during the Revolutionary War on September 8, 1781; it was the last major battle of the war in South Carolina. Large plantations using slave labor were established in Orangeburg in the nineteenth century, and the county became a major producer of cotton. Railroads arrived in the area early; Branchville became the first railroad junction in the state in 1840. Union troops under General Sherman passed through Orangeburg in February 1865.
The years following the Civil War brought positive changes. The town of Orangeburg was incorporated as a city in 1883. In 1887, a water system was built and leased to the city. A street trolley system was constructed in 1888. The trolley was mule-drawn during the day to carry passengers, but with the aid of a small steam locomotive, it was used to haul freight to various downtown businesses at night. Electricity came to the city in the 1890s, and before the end of the decade, Russell Street, the city’s main street, was lit with electric lights.
In 1926, the land along the Edisto River in downtown Orangeburg was cleared, filled in, and the first azaleas planted. In the early 1950s, 3,500 rose bushes were planted. The bank of the river, which was such a vital part of the early settlement, morphed into a panoply of springtime color. In 1972 the first South Carolina Festival of Roses, now called the Orangeburg Festival of Roses, was held. Each year since, thousands flock to Orangeburg in the spring to enjoy the beauty of the flowers.
Our walking tour will begin in the historic center of town where four courthouses were constructed over the years but none remain...
The Town of Pendleton comprises the majority of the 6,316 acre Pendleton Historic District, created in 1970 as one of the nation’s first and largest historic districts. On April 8, 1790, the Justices of the Peace for Pendleton County purchased this land to establish the courthouse town of Pendleton. Once Cherokee Indian land, the town became the judicial, social and commercial center for what now are Anderson, Oconee and Pickens Counties. Pendleton is the Upstate’s oldest town and is basically unchanged since it was laid out over 200 years ago.
Pendleton is to South Carolina’s frontier Up Country what Charleston, Beaufort and Georgetown are to the Low Country. From Indians days onward, especially through the Revolutionary period and the century following, Pendleton has played a part in state and national development. For many years, Pendleton was the center of business, culture, and government in the northwestern part of the state. Its position at the crossroads of the Cherokee Trading Path into the Low Country with the Catawba Path into Virginia made it accessible to traders from both directions; its climate attracted wealthy coastal planters seeking a breather from humid summers.
While other South Carolina municipalities relied on the railroad for economic development, the diversion of primary railroads from Pendleton helped to preserve the scale of the town. Today, many of the once thriving rail towns have dysfunctional centers split by seldom used rail lines as the train has fallen out of favor over time. Conversely, Pendleton has suffered little from the railroad’s demise. Similarly, so far the town has escaped the commercial development that follows heavily-traveled roads and interstate highways.
The community was noted for fine cabinet and carriage makers; for ironworking; for the raising of fine livestock. The historic sites and structures of Pendleton have survived despite periods of economic decline and limited growth over the past 150 years. Dogwoods line many streets. Massive cedars and oaks are dominant throughout the area. More than 50 buildings of 18th and 19th century significance remain, the majority within the town limits. The district includes more than a dozen historic sites and numerous museum items.
Our walking tour of this timeless town in 2010 will look pretty much like it would have in 1860 and we’ll begin under the shade trees of the Village Green...
The actual geological “ridge” indeed played a critical role in the town of Ridgeway, both in its founding and its development. The settlement of New Town came about just before the dawn of the 19th century when planters from Columbia and Charleston found the elevation provided a respite from the heat and humidity of southern summers. One of these planters, Edward Gendron Palmer, of Saint James Parish in Santee, moved into the area in 1824. In 1845 Palmer joined a consortium of cotton growers to promote a railroad from Charlotte to Charleston.
When it came time to select a route for the new Charlotte and South Carolina Railway the road followed the ridge of high land running directly through New Town and Palmer’s plantation. That “ridge way” gave the town a new name when the railroad was completed in 1850 and also spurred the growth of the town. The first telegraph in the area was completed about 1855 adding to Ridgeway’s importance during the War Between the States.
After a period of economic depression following the Civil War, Ridgeway began to develop as a commercial center serving area farmers. The town had a commercial block with ten stores by 1880. Between 1880 and 1910, when a rise is cotton production was accompanied by sustained high prices, Ridgeway entered a period of prosperity. Stores and residences were built in the popular Queen Anne and Neoclassical styles of the day. Brick was the building material of choice in the commercial district, a reflection of the prosperity of the era.
After 1910 a decrease in cotton production and prices brought the good times to a halt. In the 1930s the population of Ridgeway was 404; by 1970 it had grown only to 437. Cotton was replaced by beef cattle and plantation pines. Today the Ridgeway Historic District is significant as an example of a virtually intact turn-of-the-century town whose development was inextricably tied to agricultural prosperity. A majority of the buildings in the district were built between 1890 and 1915, the heyday of cotton production in the area.
Our walking tour will begin in a parking area near the center of town, adjacent to which is one of the more curious buildings in South Carolina...
It has long been noted that the landscape around Rock Hill is not particularly rocky and not particularly hilly. If anything, the dominant geographic feature in the area is the Catawba River. The city was named for a flint hill of rock that was in the way of the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad Company, which was building a rail line from Charlotte to Columbia. Much of this rock was removed to make way for the railroad, which built a depot at the site that eventually became known as Rock Hill.
For hundreds of years this was the land of the Catawba Indians, perhaps as many as six thousand. In 1763, despite mostly friendly interaction with the Scotch-Irish who were settling in the rolling backwoods, a treaty with the Catawba, their population greatly reduced by smallpox, left the tribe with a fifteen-square-mile tract on which present-day Rock Hill is located. By the end of the American Revolution Indian Land, as the parcel was known, was home to maybe 250 Catawbas.
It was 1852 when the railroad arrived and a post office called Rock Hill was established. When the state legislature incorporated the town in 1870, Rock Hill was home to three hundred residents, two churches, eleven bars, two hotels, two schools, a tannery, cabinet shop, Masonic Lodge, and post office. In 1870, building contractor A. D. Holler built Rock Hill’s first two-story commercial building. Ten years later James M. Ivy and A. E. Hutchison organized the Rock Hill Cotton Factory and built South Carolina’s first steam-powered mill, one of the state’s earliest postbellum industrial developments.
The venture was so successful that within 25 years there would be seven textile mills in Rock Hill and the town’s boom was in full swing. It scarcely slowed during the Great Depression - labor unrest, not unemployment was the main obstacle to growth - and in the post-World War II years Rock Hill experienced the greatest population growth of any South Carolina city or town. In 1947, thirty-two manufacturers employed over 5,000 people.
But the new residents were not settling in the old neighborhoods, like Oakland, the city’s first planned suburb northwest of town, or the once-prosperous areas to the south and east. They were living near the plants miles out of town and the downtown businesses would eventually follow. Urban renewal came in the 1970s, destroying as much as 40% of Rock Hill’s 19th and early 20th-century buildings by one estimate. To mimic the new suburban shopping malls, a roof was placed over Main Street to create an enclosed retail space called Town Center Mall. It proved a dreary imitation and was finally removed in the 1990s as the town rededicated it priorities to the restoration and rehabilitation of existing buildings.
Our walking tour of the resulting streetscape will begin at the York County Library and the plaza it shares with City Hall on East Black Street...
In 1870, Seneca was a wilderness penetrated only by a strip of iron rails along the Blue Ridge Railroad Line. A few years later the Richmond Air Line Railroad crossed the Blue Ridge and this obscure railroad junction became a transfer point for freight shipped to and received from every section of the country. It was a natural townsite and in 1873 the first auction was held for building lots. The new town was named for Sinica for an old town of the Cherokee nation and it was destined to become the largest in Oconee County, that had been formed in 1868.
When the town celebrated its Centennial in 1973, preservationists mobilized to list the Seneca Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Located south of the railroad tracks in Seneca the residential district consists of a number of homes and three churches that were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The houses have architectural styles that were popular in the period.
But before we explore the Historic District our walking tour will begin on the north side of the tracks, in the commercial district along a colorful block that not so long ago was a ghost town of dilapidated structures that has been reinvigorated...
After a treaty was struck with the Cherokee Nation in 1753 European settlers, primarily Scotch-Irish, began trickling into this area from Pennsylvania and Virginia in the late eighteenth century. Almost unimaginably, here, far from the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia and Boston and Williamsburg, some of the most influential battles of the American Revolution would be fought.
In the impenetrable woods on King’s Mountain 160 Loyalists were killed and 760 more were taken captive by American woodsmen. Several months later more seasoned armies clashed on land used to winter cattle known locally as Hannah’s Cowpens. American general Daniel Morgan broke his badly outnumbered Continental force into three lines of defense and were able to completely rout the British. The fighting at Cowpens lasted barely one hour, but British losses were staggering: 110 dead and over 700 captured and wounded. Morgan lost only 12 killed and 60 wounded in a victory as complete as any in the Revolution. The Continental Congress awarded only 14 medals during the American Revolution, and three, including Daniel Morgan, were given for heroism at Cowpens.
Once the war ended, settlements sprang up in and around the area, and the new district began to take shape by forming its own government. Following the construction of a new courthouse, the town was named Spartanburg after the Spartan Regiment that had represented the area in Daniel Morgan’s army.
In 1831 the town incorporated and would become known as the “Hub City” as many railroads connected into the town. Between the late 19th century and early 20th century the textile industry dominated the economy in Spartanburg. Nearly 40 textile mills were built during this time period. Camp Wadsworth, located west of the city, became a second home to over 100,000 men as they trained for World War I. Then, during World War II over 200,000 men trained at Camp Croft located south of the city.
Spartanburg remains an important manufacturing center today but the streetscape is much changed from a hundred years ago. Some 19th century buildings remain, most are gone. Corporate headquarters and modern buildings have arrived to take their place in some cases, in some cases not. Daniel Morgan has watched it all since his statue was erected in the center of town in 1881 on the Centennial anniversary of his landmark Cowpens victory. And that is where we will begin our walking tour...
The city of Sumter is the seat of Sumter County and the largest city, the eighth largest metropolitan area in the state of South Carolina. In 1798, the village was selected for the site of the courthouse of old Sumter District. With no access to waterway or railroad, development was slow until the Camden branch of the South Carolina Railroad extended into the town in 1843. Incorporated as Sumterville in 1845, the city’s name was shortened to Sumter in 1855. It has grown and prospered from its early beginnings as a plantation settlement.
The city and county of Sumter bear the name of General Thomas Sumter, the “Fighting Gamecock” of the American Revolutionary War. Born in Virginia in 1734, Thomas Sumter settled in St. Mark’s Parish in 1767. He founded the town of Statesburg, where his financial interests included a sawmill, grist mill, general store and a large plantation. During the Revolution, Sumter fought in numerous skirmishes and battles, including the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, the Georgia Campaign, Turnbull’s camp, Hanging Rock and Fish Darn Ford. His fierce revolutionary zeal had its origins in an incident involving a Captain Campbell, whose men plundered his home, placed his invalid wife in her wheelchair on the lawn and then set fire to the house. This event so enraged Sumter that he formed and led a band of guerillas in victorious combat against the British, helping to turn the tide in the war for independence.
Following the war, General Sumter continued in the service of the young nation, ultimately as a member of the United States Congress. He retired at age 76 to his beloved “Home House” in the High Hills of the Santee, where he continued to actively manage his business affairs and remained a respected figure in the Statesburg community until his death in 1832 at age 98, the last surviving general of the Revolutionary War. General Sumter is buried in Statesburg, the adoptive hometown to which he gave so much.
In 1912, the city of Sumter became the first city in the United States to successfully adopt the council-manager form of government. It is still in effect today. Sumter’s council-manager government combines the political leadership of elected officials in the form of a seven-member City Council headed by the Mayor, with the strong managerial experience of an appointed City Manager, who serves as the chief administrative and executive officer of the city.
Sumter’s political, commercial, and cultural development is reflected in the architecture of the central business district that spans a time period from 1828 to the present. Many of the buildings in the original commercial district date from 1880 to 1912 and are typical of turn-of-the-century commercial buildings, using materials such as pressed tin, limestone, and brick. Detail work of buildings includes arches, columns, decorative brickwork and dentil work. Our walking tour of the downtown historic district, listed in the National Register on April 21, 1975, will begin in front of the town’s most glorious building, practically obscured from the tree-lined street...
During the summer of 1784, several owners of large rice plantations in what is now Colleton County, South Carolina, began searching for a location for summer homes to escape their malaria-ridden, lowcountry homes. This is where they settled. The original settlement was located on a hilly area, covered with pine and hickory trees and named “Hickory Valley.” This small summer retreat grew and in 1817, the town became the county seat and was officially incorporated in 1826. The story goes that two citizens, one named Walter and the other Smith, each insisted the town be named for him. They ended the dispute by a tree-felling contest in which Smith was the loser.
The town quickly spread out from the original Hickory Valley location, its population growth fueled successively bythe establishment of a railroad line connecting the city with Columbia and Charleston in the 1880s, the establishment of an airfield in the 1930s and the north-south highways on the 1950s, making the town a prime overnight stop on the road to Florida or New York.
When bypasses took the highway around town, development stopped. The main street shopping district remains almost unchanged from the 1940s and the tree-lined streets through the residential areas are wide and sidewalk-less. The ambiance of days gone by has attracted movie location scouts and style magazines.
Our walking tour will wind through two historic districts and start in the center of town where the talents of South Carolina’s artists are on display and there is plenty of public parking...
Although named for prominent Patriot leader Richard Winn, who arrived in what would become Fairfield County a few years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, the picturesque town is better remembered as the winter headquarters of Lord Cornwalis after the disaster at Kings Mountain aborted his first invasion of North Carolina. The British remained in Winnsboro for four months beginning in October 1780, building the army’s strength to more than 4,000 troops. Quite an influx for a tiny village that maybe sported 20 residences when the British arrived.
That army found room to camp on the grounds of Mt. Zion Institute that had been founded in 1777, one of the first upcountry schools in South Carolina. During the stay of Lord Cornwallis, Colonel John Winn and Minor Winn attempted to ambush and kill his Lordship, but they were frustrated. They were captured and condemned to the gallows, but Cornwallis pardoned and released them.
From its beginnings until the exhausted soil gave out in the 1920s this was cotton country. In December 1832 Winnsboro, already the Fairfield County seat, was incorporated as a town. Industry never intruded much on the town as it grew around its agricultural and educational heritage. One exception was the quarrying of Winnsboro Blue Granite or simply Winnsboro Blue, a light-blue or gray-colored stone was quarried in Fairfield County between 1883 and 1946. A 1893 publication described the rock as “the silk of the trade.” It was used in buildings from Columbia to Philadelphia, including the South Carolina Statehouse. In 1969 Winnsboro Blue Granite was designated the South Carolina State Stone.
We will see some Winnsboro Blue on our walking tour that will begin in the center of town under a clock tower whose main components are not local at all but in fact come from across the sea...