Situated along the Savannah River, Aiken County shares its name with its county seat. An equestrian-enthusiast’s paradise, Aiken County is home to a polo club and a prominent horse racing scene with its own Triple Crown. The area is also known for agriculture, especially the cultivation of soybeans, hay, peaches, and corn. As of 2010, about 160,000 people resided in Aiken County.
In 1871, lands previously belonging to Edgefield, Lexington, Barnwell, and Orangeburg counties were merged to create Aiken County. The area began to serve as a vacation destination frequented by visitors from the Northern United States in the late 19th century. William Aiken, the county and county seat’s namesake, was the president of the South Carolina Railroad.
Aiken County: About Aiken County. Accessed June 01, 2016.
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James Brown was born in 1933 in Barnwell, SC, where he spent his early childhood. He developed his interest in music at an early age, performing gospel songs and first playing piano and later bass and...
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Miss Sedgewick and her house servants pose outside her home in the Winter Colony of Aiken in 1896. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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A polo match in Aiken. Both Aiken and Camden have been noted for polo matches, and for sportsmen who raise and train the polo ponies essential to this mounted team sport. 1930s, WPA. Courtesy of the...
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A tennis game in progress at the Highland Park Hotel in 1890. A note on the back of this photograph, written long afterward when sports clothing for women had changed dramatically, asked a young...
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A new section of the Vaucluse Mill Village of the Graniteville Manufacturing Company. Photo by J.F. Sofge, Graniteville, December 19, 1947. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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North Augusta has a dual personality; although it has developed since the Second World War as a suburb of Augusta, across the Savannah River in Georgia, its citizens are very conscious of their South...
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An aerial photo of the site of the new Gregg Finishing Plant shows the original Graniteville Mills in the right foreground (see William Gregg and The Graniteville Mill). Newtown, a newer section of...
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Aerial view of Aiken, around 1956. Courtesy of the Aiken County Historical Museum.
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Aiken County Courthouse, photographed by J.A. Palmer, around 1890. The town of Aiken was laid out in 1834, at the western end of the Charleston-Hamburg Railway line, built to carry cotton from the...
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A hunting party in at Aiken, around 1910. The dry, pleasant climate attracted winter visitors to Aiken as early as the 1850s, but its real expansion as a winter resort took place after the Civil War...
