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Bonnet, Stede

Bonnet was a member of the planter elite until 1717, when he purchased and armed the sloop Revenge and left his family to pursue a career as a pirate. After a significant defeat, Bonnet relinquished his command of Revenge and joined Blackbeard aboard Queen Anne’s Revenge. Augmenting their flotilla with two sloops, Blackbeard and Bonnet returned to the Carolinas, arriving off Charleston in mid-May 1718. After being captured by Colonel William Rhett, he was convicted and hanged on December 10, 1718, at White Point (now the Battery, Charleston).

Bosc, Louis Augustin Guillaume

Among his Carolina discoveries were four species of frogs (among them the handsome green tree frog, Hyla cinerea), three of turtles, and one species of lizard, found during his stay in Charleston. He also collected three new species of fish in Charleston harbor. He was especially interested in invertebrates, and the names of fourteen new species of coelenterates, mollusks, worms, and crabs that he described from South Carolina are still valid today, among them the familiar fiddler crab (Uca pugilator) of coastal salt marshes.

Bouchillon, Christopher Allen

In November 1926 Chris returned to Atlanta for the first of six sessions for Columbia Records. His initial effort resulted in “Talking Blues” and “Hannah (Won’t You Open That Door),” both of which went on to become highly successful and widely copied numbers that sold nearly 100,000 copies. One of his 1927 recordings, “Born in Hard Luck”/“The Medicine Show,” also did quite well, racking up sales in excess of 40,000 at a time when anything that sold more than 20,000 copies could be considered a hit.

Boudo, Louis and Heloise Boudo

Boudo’s best-known piece is a silver map case made on behalf of the state of South Carolina for General Lafayette during his farewell tour of America in 1825; this case is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Following Louis’s death, Heloise Boudo administered his estate and continued in the “manufactory of gold and silver work” at various addresses on King Street, paying cash for gold and silver and carrying on the jewelry business “in all its branches.”

Boyce, James Petigru

Boyce gave a speech before the state convention of South Carolina Baptists in 1856, arguing for the necessity of a separate Baptist seminary. In response, the convention proposed to put forth $100,000 toward the endowment of a seminary located in Greenville if the same sum was raised by others. At the Southern Baptists’ Educational Convention held in Louisville in May 1857, the proposal from the South Carolina Baptists was accepted, and Boyce went about the task of securing the money. The institution opened in 1859 as the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Boyce served as its first president.

Boyd, Blanche McCrary

Boyd has published four novels: Nerves (1973), Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), and Terminal Velocity (1997). The last two are part of a trilogy telling the story of Ellen Burns, a Charleston native who experiences an unsatisfying marriage, experiments with heavy drinking and drugs, and loses herself through various affairs and lifestyle changes. In 1988 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Four years later she received the Lambda Literary Award for her novel The Revolution of Little Girls, and in 1993–1994 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

colored close up of the State dog the Boykin spaniel, it is sitting on a wood porch and has yellowish eyes, a shiny brown coat of fur, floppy ears with curly hairs.
Boykin spaniel

This amiable, small, dark brown retriever is a superb hunter and loving family pet. It was bred to provide an ideal dog for hunting fowl in the swamps along the Wateree River, which demanded a sturdy, compact dog built for boat travel and capable of retrieving on land or water. Lemuel Whitaker “Whit” Boykin, a planter and sportsman from the Boykin community near Camden, tested many dogs to answer these needs. With luck and selective breeding, the multipurpose retriever was being bred to type by the 1920s.

Bragg, Laura

In October 1920 Bragg was named director of the Charleston Museum and became the first woman in the country to hold such a position at a publicly supported museum. Soon thereafter she opened the museum to black patrons one afternoon a week. She continued the educational focus of the museum and added a children’s library and a reading room that lent books. These efforts were the forerunners of the Charleston Free Library, which opened in January 1931. She was both its trustee and its first librarian.

Bratton, John

In May 1864, Bratton was promoted to brigadier general, commanding Bratton’s Brigade, Field’s Division, First Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Bratton served in this position until the army’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Bratton returned to Fairfield County and entered politics. A conservative Democrat, he served as a delegate to the 1865 South Carolina constitutional convention and represented Fairfield County in the S.C. Senate from 1865 to 1866. In the fall of 1884 Bratton was elected to Congress. Taking his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 8, 1884, Bratton served until March 3, 1885, and did not seek reelection.

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