G

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.

The museum boasts individual works by such twentieth-century masters as George Bellows, Georgia O’Keeffe, Josef Albers, and Philip Guston. The collection includes forty works by Jasper Johns, sixty-eight by Stephen Scott Young, and twenty-six by Andrew Wyeth. A strong and varied exhibition program complements the museum’s collection.

For much of the twentieth century, the Greenville News-Piedmont Company defended the state’s established social, political, and economic order.

A transdenominational Reformed seminary organized in 1987, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary understands itself to stand in the theological tradition of South Carolinian James Henley Thornwell and emphasizes a strict adherence to the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.

Between 1931 and 1937 Greenville Woman’s College became Furman University’s women’s college. Its buildings were demolished after 1961, when women joined men on Furman’s new campus.

Believing a modern airport was necessary for the economic development of the upcountry, in the late 1950s Daniel and Milliken formed a committee to study the project and develop a design plan.

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.

In the 1990s Greer became involved with journalistic and political writing as well as other nonfiction projects. Greer’s refusal to be typed into one style or genre may have kept him from having the kind of audience that always knows what to expect, but has allowed him to continue to explore and experiment.

Gregg's scholarly interests included botany, ornithology, and astronomy. In 1847 he was appointed major in Milledge L. Bonham’s regiment of volunteers for the Mexican War, but this unit failed to reach Mexico in time to participate in any major battles. He was a member of the Southern Rights Convention of 1852, and in the late 1850s he advocated reopening the African slave trade.

Putting his industrial gospel into practice, Gregg and several partners secured a charter from the South Carolina General Assembly in December 1845 to establish the Graniteville Manufacturing Company. The Graniteville factory commenced operations in 1849 and quickly became one of the most successful textile factories in the entire South.

As a historian, Gregorie demonstrated the validity of good local history and the importance of local records. Her heritage and training enabled her to present South Carolina’s history with intimacy and insight enriched with anecdotes and tradition.

The Gressette Committee remained dormant until 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional. Gressette made the committee’s position on desegregation clear when he declared, “We shall recommend to the Governor and General Assembly continued resistance by every lawful means.”

Gressette earned special notoriety for his role in the debate over school desegregation. From 1951 to 1966, Gressette chaired a special legislative committee that led legal efforts to avoid desegregation in South Carolina. His influence on this committee was so strong that it came to be called the “Gressette Committee.”

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.

Working as her father’s assistant and as mill bookkeeper, Gridley mastered the daily operations of management and administration. Following her father’s death in 1890, she assumed the position of mill president, the first woman mill president in South Carolina.

From 1903 to 1919, he served as president of the American Negro Academy, the leading intellectual organization for African Americans. After 1913 he devoted himself to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving until 1923 on its national board. Through 1924 he also served as president of the District of Columbia branch, becoming a key figure in the NAACP’s efforts to oppose racial discrimination at the federal level.

During his thirty-six years on the bench, Grimké helped establish fundamental principles of South Carolina jurisprudence by advocating professionalization of legal study, uniformity of law, and judicial independence.

With familial ties to many of the lowcountry elite, the Grimké family was among the upper echelon of antebellum Charleston society. However, Sarah and Angelina rejected a privileged lifestyle rooted in a slave economy and became nationally known abolitionists no longer welcome in South Carolina.