Qualla: Edgefield County, South Carolina

Edgefield County, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Edgefield County produced ten South Carolina governors. Read that number again. A rural piedmont county of fewer than 26,000 people - smaller than many suburbs - sent ten of its sons to the governor's mansion, from Andrew Pickens II in 1816 to Strom Thurmond in 1947. It also gave America James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's "Old War Horse," and Preston Brooks, the congressman who beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death with a cane on the floor of the Senate in 1856. And it gave the world Dave Drake, an enslaved potter who signed and dated some of the most extraordinary stoneware ever made in the South.

Edgefield County, South Carolina: On the Savannah River

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 i...

Edgefield County, South Carolina: Dave the Potter

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. ...

Edgefield County, South Carolina: The Hamburg Massacre and Reconstruction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Rep...

Edgefield County, South Carolina: Empty Land, Persistent Crops

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cot...