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The governorship of South Carolina is a dynamic office that has changed frequently, and sometimes dramatically, during the past three hundred years. As the biographies of individual governors show, each has faced common as well as unique challenges, often with mixed results.

He made perhaps his greatest contribution to the city with the opening of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929. Grace was president of Cooper River Bridge, Inc., which built the bridge connecting Charleston with Mount Pleasant, Sullivan’s Island, and the Isle of Palms.

Gragg has earned praise from historians and critics for his books that are rich with history and powerful in their message.

Graham served one term in the South Carolina House before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1994 “Republican sweep,” in which the Republicans seized control of both the Senate and House for the first time in forty years.

Granby was among the first important trading posts in the South Carolina interior. The town originated as a large Indian village on Congaree Creek.

From its earliest days, the coast was promoted as a family resort. The first visitors were middle-class and blue-collar families from the Carolinas seeking a summer getaway in their own “backyard.”

After some initial teething, the company quickly proved highly prosperous, producing shirting and sheeting that sold well in markets as far away as Philadelphia and New York. Graniteville was also unusual in that it employed the labor of free white laborers, mostly women and teenaged children, at a time when most southern manufacturers used the labor of black slaves.

West Africans transported to South Carolina as slaves had their own belief system regarding death, burial, and the power of the living and the dead.

The Grays were influential civic leaders, devoted Methodists, conservative Democrats, and contributors to the industrial development of their town.

Grayson is best remembered for his proslavery verse, The Hireling and the Slave (1854), a rejoinder (structured in heroic couplets) to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

During the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the South for the great urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Spurred by declining opportunities at home, this internal migration of African Americans in the United States, dubbed the “Great Migration” by historians, significantly altered the racial makeup of the South Carolina population.

The road originated as an Indian trail, providing a north-south route for hunters and warriors down the Shenandoah Valley and along the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The formation of permanent settlements resulted in the establishment of Greek Orthodox churches in the state’s major cities and towns. The church became the center of Greek cultural and religious life for the immigrants as well as for successive generations.

Best known for depicting the people and landscape of the lowcountry, Green refers to memories of local African American traditions, as well as tales and stories told by members of his extended family and friends. The artist’s paintings reflect an authentic historical understanding of lowcountry culture.

A writer of fiction and nonfiction, Harlan Greene created a body of work that thematically centers on Charleston, homosexuality, and Jewish identity. Dripping in historic details and intricacies, Greene’s fiction and nonfiction benefit from the skills and expertise honed in his professional life as an archivist, researcher, and historian.

During the siege of Boston, Greene began working with General George Washington, an association that would continue throughout the war. Greene’s service with the main (“northern”) army included being the first general to command troops not from his own state. His most important contribution was as quartermaster general, successfully reorganizing the main army’s supply system.

In 1870 Greener graduated with honors, earning the distinction of being the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard.

Perhaps nowhere in the United States have greens been so beloved as in the South. South Carolina has a long history of cooking greens—typically collards, turnip greens, and some wild leaf greens.

The fourth largest city in South Carolina, Greenville traces its origins to 1797 when Lemuel Alston, the largest landowner in Greenville County, laid out the “Greenville C. H. Village of Pleasantburg” on either side of Pearis’s wagon road on the east bank of the Reedy River.

The success of the Anderson and Abbeville spurs inspired the creation of other short routes that extended the reach of the Greenville and Columbia in the upstate. In 1854 the Laurens Railroad completed a thirty-two mile line from Laurens to Newberry.