Midlands

Most prominent among the archival collections of the museum is a school textbook collection of approximately seven thousand volumes, primarily those used by South Carolina students, dating back to 1789.

During this period when they were turning out largely commercial titles—including some true crime sagas—in order to pay the rent, Naifeh and Smith were devoting most of their free time to research on the life and career of iconic American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.

When President Benner C. Turner was forced to retire in 1967 after lengthy student protests and a boycott of classes that spring, the newly integrated board of trustees named Nance interim president. Nance’s informal, open, and cooperative demeanor was a refreshing and sharp contrast to the seventeen years of autocratic leadership under Turner.

The original course focused on three main areas: the meaning of higher education, students’ roles at the university, and the university’s resources and support services.

Set in the South Carolina environment she grew up in, Nelson’s writing typically recounts what life was like for ordinary African Americans of her community.

First enumerated in 1880 with a population of just 94, Ellenton enjoyed steady growth through 1950, when the population stood at 746. Ellenton’s quiet existence came to an abrupt end, however, following the announcement by the Atomic Energy Commission in November 1950 of plans for the massive Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility in Barnwell and Aiken counties.

New Windsor was among the least populous of the 1730s townships and by 1756 had an estimated population of only three hundred. Its reputation for an unhealthy climate and poor land further slowed its development.

Although the most important district town, Newberry remained quite small through most of the antebellum era. In 1826 Robert Mills counted between twenty and thirty dwellings and stores that carried on “considerable business” during court sessions. By 1840 the population stood at just three hundred, and Columbia was the principal market for most district planters.

The college maintains close relations with the Lutheran Church, relating to four synods of the ELCA: South Carolina, Southeastern, Florida-Bahamas, and Caribbean. Its mission statement asserts, “As a Lutheran college, Newberry College recognizes the value of academic freedom, intellectual dialogue, and diversity of viewpoint. The Lutheran tradition also celebrates the concept of vocation, leading students to prepare for meaningful life experiences, occupations, and service to the world as well as to the church.”

Newberry County was formed in 1785 when the General Assembly divided Ninety Six District into six counties. In 1789 John Coate gave two acres for public buildings and a plan was drawn for a county seat. A decade later, Newberry Court House was a small village with postal service, a courthouse, a jail, residences, and a few taverns and small stores.

Throughout his varied and distinguished career, Newman thought of himself primarily as a minister, and it was in this role that he made his most significant contributions to South Carolina.

McCray Nickens was very much aware of the complex demands made upon women in general and upon African American women in particular as she negotiated the demands of motherhood, higher education, and her career in the context of two marriages.

John Niernsee was the principal architect responsible for the design and construction of the South Carolina State House and had a significant influence on architectural practice in the state during the second half of the nineteenth century. His son Frank followed in his father’s footsteps by finishing the interior of the State House and operating a successful architectural practice in Columbia during the 1880s and 1890s.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North Augusta was a popular winter retreat for well-to-do northerners. Excellent rail connections, a mild climate, and its proximity to the large winter colony at Aiken combined to make the town a well-patronized winter destination for tourists from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

First elected to the General Assembly from Newberry District in 1816, O’Neall served one term. He failed to win a second term in 1818 because he had voted to increase the salary of state judges.

On May 9, 1803, the church was the site of a gathering of ministers and church elders that resulted in the formation of the Associate Reformed Synod of the Carolinas. Today it is revered as the “mother church” of the A.R.P. faith.

Oliphant’s most ambitious project, and the one for which she is most widely known, began in 1937 when Dr. Benjamin E. Geer, president of Furman University, persuaded her to write a biography of her grandfather, William Gilmore Simms. As she began research, Oliphant realized that it would be necessary to collect, edit, and publish Simms’s letters before a proper biography could be written.

Oliver is best known for a rescue mission he later founded in Columbia to serve as a refuge for homeless and troubled men. He purchased a lot at the corner of Assembly and Taylor streets in Columbia in 1888, for what became the Oliver Rescue Mission. The following year a gospel tabernacle was constructed.

Unlike other cotton mills in Columbia that used steam or hydroelectric power, Olympia had its own coal-fired electrical plant that supplied electricity to Olympia and Whaley’s three other mills, as well as the Columbia Street Railway Power Company.

The drama of Reconstruction and the New South played out in microcosm in Orangeburg. Spurred by the resistance of white planters to their new status as free laborers, three black delegates from Orangeburg attended the Colored Peoples Convention in Charleston in November 1865 to petition Congress and the General Assembly for redress against the repressive Black Codes, an action that precipitated Radical Reconstruction.