Education

The museum’s collection contains more than seven thousand paintings, works-on-paper, and examples of the decorative arts. Resources within the museum include an art library, an auditorium with a fully equipped audio-visual booth and onstage dual projection screens, and a teacher resource center.

Influential citizens of Columbia, wanting “a southern theological seminary,” helped purchase the Ainsley Hall mansion to house the seminary. Following the model of Andover and Princeton theological seminaries, Columbia was a graduate professional institution with a three-year curriculum.

The confederation exists to “strengthen and enrich local cultural, political, and economic institutions through the preservation and study of historical documents, sites, buildings, and artifacts, and to further this purpose through the dissemination and exchange of information and the exercise of cooperative endeavor.”

The college opened its doors in the fall of 1890, enrolling 117 students. Unlike many southern women’s colleges, Converse offered students a course of study roughly equivalent to that offered by male colleges.

In addition to establishing one of the most important industrial enterprises in Spartanburg County, Converse contributed to the educational institution in Spartanburg that bears his name.

Conwegians have sought to preserve their past even as they enjoy the present. Many historically significant residences, churches, and commercial and public buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In South Carolina, Cooper completed his philosophical journey and became an ardent proponent of states’ rights. He was appointed the second president of South Carolina College in May 1820 and taught courses in chemistry, mineralogy, and political economy.

The first known professional artist in the South to explore the art of landscape for purely aesthetic purposes, Coram derived his initial style and approach by studying and copying picturesque English books and engravings.

From 1850 to 1861 Corcoran served as editor of the United States Catholic Miscellany, the newspaper founded by Bishop England. In its pages he defended Catholicism against its critics. He vigorously defended states’ rights and castigated abolitionists, whom he thought were motivated by anti-Catholicism and the nativist Know-Nothing movement.

A man with broad zoological interests, Corrington began working on the then little-known herpetology (study of amphibians and reptiles) of the Columbia region, an area of considerable biological importance as a result of its location on the fall line between the Piedmont and the coastal plain.

Working in affiliation with the Associated Press, United Press International, and Religious News Service, she initiated weekly religious news-interview programs in several cities and wrote hundreds of scripts for radio and television spots.

Dacus was an active professional and regularly attended meetings of the S.C. Teachers’ Association, the National Education Association, and the American Library Association. “Miss Ida,” as she was known to Winthrop scholars, endeared herself to her students.

Ron Daise and Natalie Daise, his wife since 1985, have tirelessly performed the program Sea Island Montage, a multimedia theater performance that combines photographs, storytelling, song, and dance.

Davenport considered himself a teacher foremost and his writings as “an extension of the classroom,” the creative component of a searching mind.

In collaboration with various visual artists, Dawes published in the following year Bruised Totem, a series of ekphrastic poems that respond to an exhibit from the Bareiss Family Collection of African Art.

Forced to leave his native state, he later wrote the FBI that he fled South Carolina, “Not to escape justice, but to escape injustice.”

DeSaussure and many of his fellow lowcountrymen feared that upcountry growth would overwhelm their interests, especially the protections given to both plantation and slave holdings. Regarding the increasingly egalitarian rhetoric of upcountry leaders and their yeomen constituents with “dread,” he warned of the “ultimate effects of a degrading, calumnating democracy.”

In 1968 Dickey was appointed the first Carolina Professor at the University of South Carolina and settled in Columbia, beginning thirty years of distinguished teaching there.

Early in his career, he was an influential figure in the chartering of the Medical College of South Carolina (1823). He was elected professor of medicine in the new school and gave the inaugural address for the first entering class in 1824.

Immensely popular with her students, she was named South Carolina Teacher of the Year in 1985. Later that same year she received the National Teacher of the Year Award from President Ronald Reagan.