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Funerals were an important social occasion in South Carolina, particularly for the African-American community, where solemn rituals were carried on within the African-American church traditions of...J. Important Institutions in South Carolina | History of SC Slide Collection
Though we celebrate individuals and families as the keystone of our society, and celebrate the communities in which the individuals live and work, it is often institutions that bridge the gap between the individual (or family) and the community. Institutions are the way in which we organize ourselves to achieve commonly held goals. Education begins at home--but it is the institutional structure of schools, academies, colleges, and universities that makes us an educated people. Faith is a private and individual matter of belief--but it is most often through the institutional churches that belief becomes active in the community. Communities provide hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and police and fire departments, because we value our mutual health and safety. And finally, government in a democratic republic is the institution we create to link all those institutions and ourselves together, to ensure that they work for the benefit of all of us, not just for a few. In this section of the collection you will find images of the physical structures in which institutions are housed, as well as a picture of the people that make them work.
Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
Within this Series
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Health care required the training of medical personnel. A number of hospitals in South Carolina offered programs in nursing training early in the 20th century, mostly in an apprenticeship system of...Photo
The State Asylum, Columbia, later known as the State Hospital, as it appeared around 1850. Designed as a "Lunatic Asylum" by Robert Mills and completed in 1828, it was noted for its innovative ideas...Photo
The Camden Male Academy was conducted as a semi-military academy, training young men in martial skills by Charles H. Peek in Camden from 1859 until his death in 1863. Many of the cadets, shown here in...Photo
The Charleston Police Department, 1911. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.Photo
The reading room of the University of South Carolina's library in 1925. The building, erected in 1940, is the earliest separate college library structure in the country, and was the main university...Photo
Camp Welfare, near Winnsboro, photographed by Ernest Ferguson around 1950, was "the last surviving camp ground of Arbor and Tents" for African-Americans in South Carolina. Founded shortly after 1865...Photo
Roper Hospital, named after a Charlestonian who willed extensive real estate to the Medical Society of South Carolina (see The Medical College Of South Carolina ) for the establishment of a hospital...Photo
The Confederate Soldiers Home was a state-supported institution for elderly veterans of the Civil War. This photograph was taken in the late 1930s shortly after the grounds had been relandscaped as...Photo
The original building of the Penn School photographed around 1890. The Penn School, located on St. Helena's Island, was the first school for freed African-Americans opened by northerners in the South...