Edgefield County was established on March 12, 1785, carved out of the old Ninety-Six District when the legislature broke the colonial back country into smaller units. The Savannah River forms its western border, and across the river lies Augusta, Georgia - which means Edgefield is folded into the Augusta metropolitan area despite its rural feel. The county covers about 500 square miles of land, most of it the gentle rolling Piedmont that defined antebellum cotton country. The origin of the name itself is uncertain. The South Carolina State Library calls the choice "fanciful," and there is a village called Edgefield in Norfolk, England, which may or may not have provided the inspiration.

Of all Edgefield's notable sons, none has grown in stature over the last fifty years as much as David Drake (c. 1800-1879), who worked the local alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition that began with Dr. Abner Landrum's early-nineteenth-century pottery industry. Drake was enslaved. The state had passed anti-literacy laws meant to keep enslaved people from reading or writing. Drake did both. Onto the wet clay of the storage jars he turned - some holding forty gallons or more, vessels of a scale almost no one else attempted - he incised rhyming couplets, his name, and dates. "I made this jar all of cross / If you don't repent you will be lost," reads one. He signed dozens. Today his work hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, and the High Museum, and his pots are foundational works of African American art. He made them while owned by men who tried to keep him from doing exactly what he did.

Edgefield's nineteenth-century history is also a history of organized white violence against Black political participation. During Reconstruction the county had a slight Black majority, and Black voters - newly enfranchised under the postwar constitutional amendments - were a Republican voting bloc. White paramilitary groups called Red Shirts answered with terror. In May 1876, a white mob lynched six Black men accused of murdering a white couple. On July 8, 1876, the Hamburg Massacre unfolded: a white mob, including men who had crossed the river from Augusta, attacked a Black militia company at a court hearing. Several Black militiamen were killed; others were taken prisoner and shot afterward. Fraudulent vote counts that fall reported more Democratic ballots than the county had residents. By 1877, federal troops were gone and Reconstruction was over. The disenfranchisement that followed would last generations.

Population in Edgefield County declined from 1910 to 1980, a long slow draining as mechanization reduced the demand for farm labor and the Great Migration pulled hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners north and west. The boll weevil that arrived in the 1920s collapsed the cotton economy on which the county had been built. Today peaches have replaced much of the cotton, and the Federal Correctional Institution at Edgefield is among the larger employers. Sumter National Forest covers part of the county, and Stevens Creek Heritage Preserve protects a stretch of stream and bluff. The place that produced ten governors now produces, mostly, quiet.