Encyclopedia

Baldwin's first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy (1993), was universally well received, winning the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction and becoming a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. He has also published four nonfiction books with the photographer Jane Iseley about historic Charleston and the plantations of the lowcountry. He has published two oral history reports featuring Mrs. Emily Whaley (1913–1998), grande dame of Charleston society, and her recollections of her garden, cuisine, recipes, and entertaining.

Ball served as editor of the State of Columbia, the Charleston Evening Post, the Greenville News, and the News and Courier of Charleston. During his editorship of the State, from 1913 to 1923, he championed the aging ideals of Bourbon followers of General Wade Hampton and targeted such reformers and populists as Coleman Blease.

Located in the coastal plain, Bamberg thrived with the railroad and became the commercial center for surrounding farms and plantations.

The Bamberg area was originally populated by the Edisto tribe of the Muskhogean Indians. German, Swiss, Scots-Irish, English, and Huguenot settlers began arriving during the mid-eighteenth century. Early in the twenty-first century, despite a declining agricultural economy, Bamberg County remained a heavy producer of corn, soy-beans, wheat, cotton, and sorghum.

As the largest private bank in antebellum South Carolina, the Bank of Charleston soon became regional in interest, opening agencies in the coastal cities of Apalachicola, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans. By 1860 the bank was one of the strongest financial institutions in the Southeast, with a reputation that carried across the Atlantic to the commercial centers of Western Europe.

The main branch of the BSSC was located in Charleston (the financial center of the state), and the new bank catered to both commercial and agricultural interests, offering planters relatively easy terms of repayment and low rates of interest. The bank was run by a president and twelve directors elected annually by the General Assembly.

Black and white photographic negative.

By 1898 Banks was named the first head nurse at Charleston Hospital and Training School, and she dedicated her life to nursing and seeking more equitable health care for African Americans. Promoted to superintendent of nurses, Banks devoted more than thirty-two years to this hospital and the training of nurses.

Beginning in 1926, Banov served as the public health officer for both the county and the city of Charleston. He combined the two departments in 1936 and remained as director until his retirement in 1962. Despite South Carolina’s small public health allocations, Banov attracted the attention of peers throughout the country and both federal and private funding sources because of his efficiency and diligence.

In 1876 representatives from some of these independent African American Baptist congregations met in Sumter and organized the Colored Baptist Educational, Missionary, and Sunday School Convention to provide leadership. The name was later changed to the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention, and the body is known popularly as the “Baptist E & M.”

Baptists are by far the largest religious group in South Carolina, and in many ways they are the most diverse. They are black and white, Asian and Hispanic, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and liberal and conservative in their politics, their social views, and their theology. As different as Baptist groups or even churches within a group may be from each other, almost all Baptists share a commitment to believers’ baptism by immersion, the Bible as the primary source of faith, and a congregational church polity.

Initially settled by the English in 1627, Barbados had become an exceedingly wealthy, sugar-dominated economy by the time of South Carolina’s settlement in 1670. Sir John Colleton, who probably led the effort to gain the Carolina charter for eight English noblemen, had become a Barbadian planter after the defeat of the royalist cause in the Puritan Revolution.

South Carolina barbecue is slowly cooked, hand-pulled or shredded pork that is flavored with a tangy sauce and usually served with side dishes such as rice, hash, coleslaw, sweet pickles, white bread, and iced tea.

The school opened in 1828 as the South Carolina Female Institute, but in 1835 it added “Collegiate” to its name, reflecting the institution’s provision of a rigorous four-year classical curriculum.

Perhaps Barnwell’s most enduring feature is the 1858 freestanding vertical sundial located in front of the courthouse. It was given to the town by Joseph Duncan Allen, a wealthy planter, politician, and soldier. In 1907 a portion of the five acres given by Benjamin Odom, later containing the Confederate Monument, was named Calhoun Park honoring Clinton Calhoun, longtime mayor of Barnwell.

For its first 150 years, the Barnwell economy had an agricultural base, but in 1950 the U.S. Government announced plans for the Savannah River Site, a massive nuclear weapons facility that would be located in Aiken and Barnwell Counties. This had a profound effect on Barnwell’s geography and economy.