Environment and Geography

Until 1869 South Carolina never furnished its executive officer with a residence. Governors used their private homes to serve as the seat of the state’s executive office.

Granby was among the first important trading posts in the South Carolina interior. The town originated as a large Indian village on Congaree Creek.

During the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the South for the great urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Spurred by declining opportunities at home, this internal migration of African Americans in the United States, dubbed the “Great Migration” by historians, significantly altered the racial makeup of the South Carolina population.

The road originated as an Indian trail, providing a north-south route for hunters and warriors down the Shenandoah Valley and along the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Perhaps nowhere in the United States have greens been so beloved as in the South. South Carolina has a long history of cooking greens—typically collards, turnip greens, and some wild leaf greens.

The fourth largest city in South Carolina, Greenville traces its origins to 1797 when Lemuel Alston, the largest landowner in Greenville County, laid out the “Greenville C. H. Village of Pleasantburg” on either side of Pearis’s wagon road on the east bank of the Reedy River.

The antebellum economy was agricultural, based initially on wheat and corn and a few mills and foundries. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dozens of textile factories sprang up in Greenville County. Small farmers and sharecroppers migrated to mill villages and the county found itself at the center of a booming textile industry.

It became a bustling railroad town, with passenger and freight trains steaming through a village served by three railroads by 1890. The Greenwood economy, based on agriculture and transportation, was altered dramatically in 1890 when William L. Durst opened the Greenwood Cotton Mill.

Greenwood escaped most of the ravages of the Civil War. While no armies plundered its towns and farms, many men entered Confederate service and no resident was spared the war’s economic dislocations.

The new town quickly established a prosperous business environment, claiming fourteen stores by the early 1880s. Four cotton mills were in operation by 1908. The principal business district along Trade Street sprouted a number of impressive multistory business edifices named for the city’s leading business families, including the Bennett, Bailey, and Marchant buildings.

Student (both undergraduate and graduate) and faculty research has included studies in cell biology, molecular biology, ecology, fisheries biology, ichthyology, invertebrate zoology, oceanography, physiology, and systematics.

A woman with varied interests, Grosvenor is best known as a writer and culinary anthropologist. During her travels abroad, she became interested in the African diaspora and how African foods and recipes traveled and changed as a result of it.

The term “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” describes a unique group of African Americans descended from enslaved Africans who settled in the Sea Islands and lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.

The town of Hamburg was one of South Carolina’s primary interior markets during much of the antebellum era.

By the early 1920s Hampton was well laid out with a broad, tree-lined main street, Lee Avenue, spanning the three blocks from the courthouse to the Charleston & Western Carolina railroad depot.

In the second half of twentieth century, most Hampton County industries manufactured plastics or forest-related products, but they also processed soybeans and corn, and ginned cotton.

His enthusiastic writing style and conservation ethic gained him a following among the state’s outdoorsmen and conservationists, and his work had a far-reaching influence on the public’s concept of game and fish.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the land that became Hanahan was prime rice-growing acreage fronting the waters of Goose Creek.

The one-and-one-half-story house is distinguished by two substantial exterior end chimneys, a gambrel roof with a nearly flat upper section, and cypress framing and woodwork.

Artifacts of South Carolina forest history are on display in and around Harbison headquarters. Among the exhibits are a working sawmill, a fire tower, a steam-powered log skidder, and a display of tools from the turpentine industry.