Business and Industry

When Jimmy Carter of Georgia was elected president in 1976, southern cuisine came to the forefront. Peanuts, tomatoes, pimentos, hot and sweet multicolored peppers, grits, pecans, rice, greens, corn, chicken, pork, pepper jelly, turnips, shrimp, grouper, flounder, catfish, and other standbys of rural life were combined with newly available foods such as zucchini and Cornish hens.

Although removed from the fighting during the Civil War, Abbeville nevertheless played a noteworthy role in the conflict.

Robert Mills called Abbeville “the original seat of learning in the upper country,” and it quickly distinguished itself as the mother of some very famous Carolinians.

Adger became one of the wealthiest and most influential merchants of antebellum Charleston, and he used his position to good effect in the affairs of the city.

Aiken owes its existence to the South Carolina Railroad, its personality to its erstwhile “winter colony” of wealthy northern sports enthusiasts, and its economic vitality and relatively cosmopolitan spirit to the U.S. government’s massive Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility.

Bounded on the west by the Savannah River, Aiken County lies at the western end of the state’s Sandhills region, whose poor soils necessitated the development of alternatives to farming. These nonagricultural alternatives defined much of the county’s history.

The Aiken Standard traces its origins to the short lived Aiken Press, which ran from 1867 to 1868, with the noted botanist Henry William Ravenel serving as its first editor.

In 1828 Aiken and others received a charter from the General Assembly authorizing the creation of the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company (SCC&RR). Aiken, the railroad’s largest investor, was soon chosen as president of the company.

As it has for generations, the family run milling company continues to produce cornmeal, mixes, feed, and breeders in addition to Adluh Flour.

Allendale is South Carolina’s youngest county, yet it contains the oldest known human habitation in the state.

Industrial development in Anderson County began in earnest in the decades following the Civil War, and gradually replaced agriculture as the foundation of the county economy.

The newspaper became the first in the state to publish daily on the Internet in 1995.

In 1915 John Gary Anderson began converting his buggy factory to the production of automobiles, and he soon promised Rock Hill that he would turn the town into the “Detroit of the South.”

The town thrived in the 1920s, due in large part to the Seaboard Airline Railway Company railroad shops and the logging operations of the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company.

Atlantic Beach flourished during the 1940s and 1950s as one of the few places on the East Coast where black families could enjoy beach vacations during the era of segregation.

Catawba women have made pottery for hundreds of years, and archaeologists credit them with sustaining the tribe through this traditional pottery, which is the oldest art form still produced in South Carolina.

Ball served as editor of the State of Columbia, the Charleston Evening Post, the Greenville News, and the News and Courier of Charleston. During his editorship of the State, from 1913 to 1923, he championed the aging ideals of Bourbon followers of General Wade Hampton and targeted such reformers and populists as Coleman Blease.

Located in the coastal plain, Bamberg thrived with the railroad and became the commercial center for surrounding farms and plantations.

The Bamberg area was originally populated by the Edisto tribe of the Muskhogean Indians. German, Swiss, Scots-Irish, English, and Huguenot settlers began arriving during the mid-eighteenth century. Early in the twenty-first century, despite a declining agricultural economy, Bamberg County remained a heavy producer of corn, soy-beans, wheat, cotton, and sorghum.

As the largest private bank in antebellum South Carolina, the Bank of Charleston soon became regional in interest, opening agencies in the coastal cities of Apalachicola, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans. By 1860 the bank was one of the strongest financial institutions in the Southeast, with a reputation that carried across the Atlantic to the commercial centers of Western Europe.