A-Z

One of the myriad organizations that gave structure to the free black community and functioned primarily as a mutual aid association. During its early history, free blacks received minimal benefits from public services and had to provide for their own needs. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, some members were college-educated professionals. Affiliation with the society became a marker of aristocratic status within Charleston’s black community.

In September 1954 U.S. Senator Burnet Rhett Maybank died. His death occurred after the Democratic Party’s primary but before the general election. The South Carolina Democratic Party’s executive committee held a special meeting and decided to select Edgar Brown as the party’s candidate rather than hold a special election. In response, Strom Thurmond announced a write-in candidacy for the U.S. Senate, claiming that his campaign was a fight for principle— government by the people instead of government by a small group of committee members. Thurmond’s write-in campaign was successful, and he became the first candidate ever elected to Congress by a write-in vote.

While he was called the “Godfather of Soul,” his body of work forms the rhythmic foundations of funk, disco, and hip-hop. He is arguably the most sampled musical artist of all time.

After practicing medicine in North Carolina for two years, Brown moved to Charleston and became the first black female physician to practice in South Carolina. With several other African Americans, she contributed to the establishment of the Cannon Hospital and Training School for Nurses in 1897, which was later renamed McClennan-Banks Hospital.

After white church officials in Charleston reduced the control that black Methodists heretofore exercised over their church affairs, Brown led most of them from the denomination in 1817 in protest. They formed an African church, and Brown traveled to Philadelphia, where in 1818 he was admitted as an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. His Charleston church, which had grown to more than three thousand members, affiliated with this northern black denomination.

Despite Flemming’s loss at trial, her case had a significant effect on desegregation of buses and civil rights law across the country. Her incident occurred seventeen months before the famous Rosa Parks case that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Brown was among the most notorious Loyalist commanders in the South during the Revolutionary War. In one of David Ramsey’s histories of the war, Brown wrote an impassioned defense of his conduct in reply to charges of cruelty. Brown died on his St. Vincent Island plantation on August 3, 1825.

Brown’s experience in developing pension and insurance programs for large businesses convinced him that he could operate his own business. In 1972 he created American Development Corporation (ADCOR), the first minority-owned manufacturing plant in the Southeast. It was financed largely by a $200,000 Small Business Administration loan, which Brown paid back in three years.

In all volumes edited by Bruccoli, readers can expect to find interesting, critical details in the preface and notes; sometimes the editor offers his own insight into the art of writing and the abiding value of literary effort.

In February 1742, when Bryan sent the assembly a journal of his predictions that God would use the slave population to punish those who profaned his laws, the Commons House ordered his arrest. Bryan fled and underwent a grave crisis of faith. Witnesses claimed that, like Moses, he attempted to part the waters of a creek and cross that way, and he was nearly drowned. Shortly thereafter, Bryan wrote the Speaker of the House apologizing for “the Dishonour I’ve done to God, as well as the Disquiet which I may have occasioned to my Country.”

Bull participated with General William Moultrie in the American victory at Port Royal Island on February 3, 1779. Two months later the lowcountry was overrun by British General Augustine Prevost’s invasion from Georgia, and defeat and desertions decimated Bull’s regiment. After the fall of Charleston in May 1780, Bull went into self-imposed exile in Virginia and Maryland and offered no more service to the patriot cause.

Bull inherited Ashley Hall, a plantation on the Ashley River. In 1704 he built a handsome brick mansion on the site and with his kinfolks, the Draytons and the Middletons, transformed the Ashley River area into a showplace of the planter elite. Bull was also among the early settlers in Prince William’s Parish on the colony’s southern frontier. His plantation, called Sheldon, was the main source of his economic wealth.

During the 1770s Bull’s political views grew increasingly out of step as South Carolina and other colonies moved toward radical opposition to the crown. Lord William Campbell, the last royal governor, arrived at Charleston on June 18, 1775, and took office, but his term lasted only three months. On September 15 he was forced to flee the city for refuge on a British warship in Charleston harbor. The revolution was under way, and Bull’s position was an impossible one. He resigned from the Royal Council and retired to his Ashley Hall plantation. In 1777 he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the revolutionary government and was banished from the state.

Burke was elected as an anti-Federalist to the First Congress of the United States, commencing service in New York on March 4, 1789. He served on thirty-three committees and was instrumental in crafting bills that led to the judiciary act and the creation of the Library of Congress, the postal system, and the patent system. His congressional service was marked by an incident with Alexander Hamilton, whom Burke felt had slighted southern soldiers when Hamilton eulogized General Nathanael Greene.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s the area was only land with a dirt road running through it. In 1890 Daniel Burnette obtained land on one side of the dirt road. In 1901 he sold a few lots, homes were built, and the property became known as “Mr. Burnette’s land.” A portion was later traversed by the route of a proposed interurban trolley line between Aiken and Augusta, Georgia.

Headquartered in Myrtle Beach and holding tens of thousands of acres throughout Horry County, Burroughs & Chapin is dedicated to coastal economic development and attracting new businesses to Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand. The firm is the linear descendant of the business partnership formed in 1895 by Franklin Burroughs and B. G. Collins.

Although Myrtle Beach was not founded in his lifetime, Burroughs dreamed of a coastal resort midway between New York and Miami. He set in motion the building of a railroad to what is now Myrtle Beach, and his sons completed his plan—a major step toward developing the resort. His widow named Myrtle Beach for the plant that thrived there. The Burroughs heirs, along with Simeon Chapin, built a remarkable business that was to include forestry, farming, shopping centers, theme parks, and golf courses.

Burroughs’s work, often compared to that of New England poet Henry David Thoreau, was collected in Best American Essays in 1987 and 1989. In 1989 he was awarded the Pushcart Prize for nature essays. His collection Billy Watson’s Croker Sack appeared in 1991, followed by a paperback edition in 1992. That same year his book Horry and the Waccamaw was published, and it was later reprinted in 1998 with the title The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country.

In April 1865 Confederate First Lady Varina Howell Davis and her family stayed in the Burt home for twelve days after they fled Richmond. They left Abbeville two days before Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, and the Confederacy’s senior military advisers arrived. On May 2, 1865, at Burt’s house, the leaders held their final council of war. On advice from his advisers, Davis agreed that further resistance was impossible and that the Confederate cause was lost.

Burton’s intense interest in the culture and history of the South Carolina lowcountry resulted in three landmark books: South Carolina Silversmiths, 1690–1860 (1942); Charleston Furniture, 1700–1825 (1955); and the critically acclaimed Civil War narrative The Siege of Charleston, 1861–1865 (1970). A dynamic individual with charm, refinement, and an engaging personality, Burton spent forty years as director of the Charleston Museum, retiring in 1972.