Almost all of the images in this collection document a particular South Carolina place at a specific time in its history. This section, organized alphabetically is not intended, therefore, as a comprehensive list of every South Carolina community. It is actually a fairly impressionistic look at the county seats and rural villages, as well as the cities, in which South Carolinians live and work. For several towns and cities (Beaufort, Camden, Charleston, Columbia, Darlington, Georgetown, Greenville, Spartanburg, and Sumter), an effort has been made to select several images that show how that place has changed over time. Other places were chosen for special features that have made that town unique; still others have been chosen because they illustrate the features that many towns in the state have shared.
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The Main Street of Lexington, sometime before a devastating fire in 1916 burned many of the business district buildings seen here. The county seat of Lexington County, the area was first settled by...
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Laurens, carved out of the Ninety Six District in 1785 and named after Henry Laurens (see Henry Laurens), was, like much of the backcountry, settled by Scotch-Irish in the pre-Revolutionary period...
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Aerial view of the Lancaster Mill of Springs Industries, in Lancaster, August 1946. The community of Lancaster is the county seat of Lancaster County, named for the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of...
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Hampton County was carved out of Beaufort County in 1878, creating a separate white political enclave, populated in part by those who had fled their coastal homes when the Beaufort area was occupied...
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Greenwood, in what was originally the old Ninety Six District, got its name from the plantation located there in 1823-1824 by Judge John McGehee, and named "Green Wood" by his wife. The post office...
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The portrait artist William H. Scarborough (1812-1871), his wife Miranda, and their infant son spent the summer of 1840 in Greenville, when he made this painting of the falls on the Reedy River...
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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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This aerial view of Georgetown was painted by Harper Bond as part of the display for the Georgetown booth at the Charleston Exposition of 1902 (see The Palace Of Commerce) Established in 1735 at the...
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A Fourth of July picnic celebration at Frogmore, photographed in color in 1939 by Marion Post for the Farm Security Administration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
