Qualla: Abbeville County Courthouse

Abbeville County Courthouse: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Scott, CC BY 3.0. The Abbeville County Courthouse you see today is the sixth one. The fifth was simply replaced after standing for three decades. The fourth burned in 1872. The third, designed by Robert Mills during a residency in town, kept sinking into the South Carolina clay and had to be condemned. The second was torn down after someone discovered the workmen had used kaolin instead of lime in the mortar. The first was a wooden frame pulled down in 1825. To stand on Court Square in Abbeville is to stand on a piece of ground that has been rebuilding itself for two centuries.

Image: Brian Scott | CC BY 3.0

Abbeville County Courthouse: A Beaux Arts Survivor

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Published for the McMurray Drug Co., by the Albertype Co., Brooklyn, Public domain. William Augustus Edwards, a Darlington native who eventually designed academic buildings at twelve institutions across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, drew the 1908 plans. He worked in the Beaux Arts vocabulary then sweeping American civic architecture: symmetrical mass, cl...

Image: Published for the McMurray Drug Co., by the Albertype Co., Brooklyn | Public domain

Abbeville County Courthouse: The Calhoun Portrait

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Scott, CC BY 3.0. Inside the central hallway hangs a portrait of John C. Calhoun, twice Vice President of the United States and one of the most consequential and divisive senators South Carolina ever sent to Washington. Calhoun was born southwest of Abbeville on his father's plantation, and he pra...

Image: Brian Scott | CC BY 3.0

Abbeville County Courthouse: Court Square Today

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Scott, CC BY 3.0. Court Square remains the social and visual heart of Abbeville, the kind of intact small-town civic core that Southern preservation movements spend decades trying to save. The courthouse anchors the east corner; the Opera House its neighbor; the Burt-Stark Mansion, where Jefferson...

Image: Brian Scott | CC BY 3.0