South Carolina from A to Z

“S” is for Spartanburg Methodist College. The college traces its origins to the Textile Industrial Institute (TII), founded in 1911 by David English Camak then pastor of Duncan Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church, South in the Spartan Mill Village. Concerned with the plight of southern cotton textile workers Camak determined to devote his life to ministry among mill workers. He persuaded the presi...

“S” is for Spartanburg County (811 square miles; 2020 population 328,000). Spartanburg County is located in the northwestern section of South Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The signing of a treaty with the Cherokees in 1755 made land grants available to British settlers. During the Revolutionary War fighting in the area resembled a civil war between Patriots and Loyalists....

“S” is for Spartanburg (Spartanburg County; 2020 population 38,732). The town of Spartanburg was incorporated in 1831, its name originating from a local Revolutionary War regiment: the Spartan Rifles. During the antebellum years, the village was the commercial center of an overwhelmingly agricultural district in which cotton and corn were major crops. In the years following the Civil War the city'...

“C” is for Coram, Thomas (circa 1757-1811). Engraver, painter. Born in England, Coram emigrated to Charleston in 1769. He was largely a self-taught artist. By1778, he advertised his skill as an engraver and was designing money for South Carolina as early as 1779. Few examples of his engravings survive, but his own book plate, a seal for the Charleston Library Society, and several bills of credit c...

“C” is for Cooperationists. Cooperationists believed that slavery could ultimately be preserved only through disunion, but they differed with radical secessionists over the feasibility of South Carolina seceding alone. During the secession crisis of 1850 to 1851 the state was divided into three political factions: unionists who opposed secession outright; secessionists who wanted South Carolina to...

“C” is for Cooper River. The Cooper River and its tributaries drain much of the central portion of the lowcountry. The river flows out of Lake Moultrie, which is in turn fed by Lake Marion. The river combines with the Ashley to form Charleston harbor. English colonists named both rivers in honor of one of the Lords Proprietors, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper. Cooper River rice planters assumed an impo...

“C” is for Cooper, Thomas (1759-1839). Educator, scientist. A native of England, Cooper attended Oxford. Discouraged by England's conservative reaction to the French Revolution, he immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1794 where he was active in politics.  In 1811Cooper returned to teaching chemistry and worked at several schools before arriving at South Carolina College in 1820. In South Carolina he com...

“C” is for Cooper, Robert Archer (1874-1953). Governor. A native of Laurens County, Cooper served two terms in the South Carolina House of Representatives. In 1919 with the support of outgoing governor Richard I. Manning, Cooper won the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial primary. In November he won an uncontested general election. Emulating the progressive policies of his predecessor, he proposed an...

“P” is for Purvis, Melvin Horace, Jr. (1902-1960). Federal agent. Born in Timmonsville, Purvis gained national fame during the 1930s as the nation’s “ace G-man.” After earning a law degree at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI. In 1932 Purvis, as senior agent in charge of the bureau’s Chicago field office, organiz...

“P” is for Purrysburg (Jasper County). The town of Purrysburg, located on the Savannah River in present day Jasper County, was named after its founder, Jean-Pierre Purry. Born in Switzerland, Purry was a wine merchant who developed colonization plans for areas in the Dutch and British empires that could be suitable for agricultural development. The township plan initiated in 1731 under Governor Ro...

“P” is for Punches. Punches have been prominent at South Carolina social gatherings for centuries. When Eliza Lucas Pinckney recorded her favorite receipts (recipes) in 1756, she included a potent rum-laced punch. Though men often drank at home, they also enjoyed drinking in the rowdy atmosphere of the city's many taverns. Women also drank socially, at the parties and balls that were frequent in C...

“S” is for Spanish moss. Spanish moss is gray tree-borne epiphyte native to the coastal plain of the southeastern United States. As an epiphyte, Spanish moss gets water and food from the air and does not harm the host tree. It is not a true moss but a relative of the pineapple family. Spanish moss produces small, yellow green, three-petaled flowers in the spring in early summer. Seedpods, carried...

“S“ is for Spanish. On a monument at the tip of Parris Island, a tile plaque proclaims, “Aqui estuvo España” (“Here was Spain”). The plaque refers to the colony of Santa Elena, located at this site (1566 to 1587), but the Spanish presence in South Carolina extended much longer than those twenty-one years. Some of Spain's earliest efforts at exploration, evangelization, and settlement in the presen...

“P” is for PTL Club. Based first in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then Fort Mill, South Carolina, the PTL Club (launched in 1974) was one of the most successful ventures in televangelism for much of the 1970s and 1980s. PTL stood for both “Praise the Lord” and “People that Love.” Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye used the popular program as a springboard to develop a Pentecostally oriented resor...

“P” is for Provincials. When warfare broke out between the colonies and Great Britain in 1775, in addition to British soldiers and German mercenaries, British officials organized loyal Americans into conventional fighting units commonly referred to as provincials. A provincial soldier was a volunteer subject to the same control, benefits, and hardships as a British soldier. In 1780, the South Caro...

“P” is for Promised Land (Greenwood and Abbeville counties; 2020 population 555). Located just off of S.C. Highway 10 south of Greenwood, this rural African American community was created by freed slaves in the early 1870s. The South Carolina Land Commission had acquired a 2,742-acre tract and in 1869 began selling fifty-acre lots to freed African Americans. By 1872 some forty-eight families resid...

“C” is for Cooper, Anthony Ashley (1621-1683).  Lord proprietor. Born in Dorset, England, Cooper attended Exeter College, Oxford. In 1661, for his role in the restoration of the monarchy, he was elevated to the peerage and named Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1663 the king granted the joint proprietorship of Carolina to Lord Ashley and seven other English noblemen. With the aid of John Locke, Lor...

“C” is for Cooke, William Wilson (1871-1949.) Architect. Born in Greenville, Cooke attended Claflin College and later studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and art history at Columbia University. Between 1902 and 1907 he was a practicing architect working primarily in the Orangeburg area. In 1907 he passed the federal civil service examination and was assigned to the office...

“P” is for Prince George Winyah Parish. Comprising portions of modern Georgetown, Horry, Marion, and Dillon Counties, Prince George Winyah Parish was established in 1721 to accommodate a wave of European settlers who had taken up residence north of the Santee River following the Yamasee War. One year earlier the inhabitants of “Winyaw” a burgeoning settlement on “Sampeet Creek,” had petitioned the...

“S” is for Southern Wesleyan University. Southern Wesleyan University is a private Christian liberal arts institution. Founded in 1906 as Wesleyan Methodist Bible Institute, the university is affiliated with the Wesleyan Church, an evangelical denomination with Methodist roots in the American holiness tradition. The school was chartered as Wesleyan Methodist College in 1909 and in 1959 became Cent...

“S” is for Southern Quarterly Review . The Souther n Quarterly Review originated in New Orleans in 1842 but later moved to Charleston. It had the advantage of being not a literary magazine but rather a magazine open to any branch of knowledge. The Review was unabashedly a conservative southern magazine, advocating classicism in literature, agrarianism and slavery in economy, and Protestantism in r...

“S” is for South of the Border. Located just south of the North Carolina border near the South Carolina town of Hamer, South of the Border has long captured the attention of travelers on U.S. Highway 301 and Interstate 95. In 1950 beer distributor Alan Shafer expanded a one-room beer depot to include a twenty-four-hour diner. The opening of the South of the Border Motel in 1954 capitalized on grow...

“S” is for South Caroliniana Library. The South Caroliniana Library building was completed in 1840 as the central library building for South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina). It was the first freestanding college library building in the United States, predating those of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The structure—on the university’s historic horseshoe-- contains design ele...

“P” is for Prince Frederick's Parish. Established in 1734, Prince Frederick's Parish stretched like an elongated triangle from the Santee River northward “to the utmost bounds of the province,” encompassing all our part of modern Dillon, Marion, Florence, Horry, Georgetown, and Williamsburg Counties. Prior to 1730 European settlement north of the Santee was sparse. Still, in 1721 the assembly orga...

“M” is for Musgrove, Mary (ca. 1700-1765). Mediator between the Creeks and the English. Musgrove was born Coosaponakeesa in Coweta, the Creek Nation (central Georgia), the daughter of a Lower Creek woman and a Charleston trader. Her father took her to Pon Pon, South Carolina, to be baptized and educated. She returned to the Creek Nation and married Johnny Musgrove, son of a Creek woman and a plant...