Qualla: Bennettsville, South Carolina

Bennettsville, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She was born in this town on June 6, 1939, the youngest of five children of a Baptist minister and his wife. Her parents ran a home for the elderly because no one else in Bennettsville would take care of the Black neighbors who had nowhere else to go. Marian Wright Edelman left for Spelman College, then Yale Law School, then civil rights work in Mississippi, then Washington — where in 1973 she founded the Children's Defense Fund, the advocacy organization that has spent half a century arguing that the children of America deserve to be seen as full human beings. On February 22, 2010, the Marlboro County Library opened in Bennettsville with her name on it.

Bennettsville, South Carolina: An Apple Orchard Becomes a Courthouse

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1819, the South Carolina General Assembly authorized moving the Marlboro County courthouse to a more central location. The site chosen was a three-acre apple orchard on a bluff above Crooked Creek. Robert Mills — the South Carolina architect who would later design the Washingt...

Bennettsville, South Carolina: Cotton and the People Who Worked It

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bennettsville grew on cotton, and cotton grew on the labor of enslaved African Americans. Many were brought to this upland region from the Carolina Lowcountry, carrying their Gullah culture with them. Others were transported north by slave traders from the Upper South. The cotton...

Bennettsville, South Carolina: Sherman Comes North

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In March 1865, during the last year of the Civil War, Union troops occupied Bennettsville. General William T. Sherman used the Jennings-Brown House and the first County Courthouse as his headquarters during the brief stay. The new courthouse, somehow, was not burned. Local lore s...

Bennettsville, South Carolina: The Bennettsville Historic District

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bennettsville Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Its contributing buildings tell the architectural history of the town: the Jennings-Brown House (1826), the Female Academy (1830), the Medical Museum (1902), the Murchison School (1...

Bennettsville, South Carolina: What Marian Wright Built

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The library named for Marian Wright Edelman sits on 4.4 acres at Marlboro Street and Fayetteville Avenue, adjacent to the 1902 Murchison Building. Its front tower aligns with the Murchison tower. Inside are 60,000 volumes and two conference rooms, paid for partly with $1.325 mill...