Qualla: Fairfield County, South Carolina

Fairfield County, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it is the only story anyone tells. In the winter of 1780, after the Battle of Camden, British General Charles Cornwallis marched north into the rolling South Carolina Piedmont and supposedly looked across the fields and said, "How fair these fields." The county was named for the remark. The house he stayed in still stands. Whether or not Cornwallis ever said the words, the fields themselves were real, and they have been the spine of Fairfield County's history ever since - first as cotton plantations worked by enslaved African Americans, then as Black-majority Reconstruction politics, then as the source of a particular blue-gray granite called "the silk of the trade" that paved the way to monuments around the world.

Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fairfield County, South Carolina: The Town Clock

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The most photographed building in Winnsboro is a strange one. South Carolina's General Assembly authorized the town fathers in 1832 to build a market house no more than thirty feet wide, so wagons could pass on either side. The narrow structure was modeled, deliberately, after In...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Fairfield County, South Carolina: George Barber and the 48th General Assembly

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit blahedo, CC BY-SA 2.5. In 1868, after the Civil War, South Carolina's new constitution barred former Confederate fighters from voting. In Fairfield County, 942 white voters were eligible. So were 2,434 Black voters. The election that followed sent George Barber, an African American man, to the South Ca...

Image: blahedo | CC BY-SA 2.5

Fairfield County, South Carolina: The Silk of the Trade

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PegasusRacer28, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beneath Fairfield County's fields lies one of the world's finest deposits of monumental granite. Winnsboro blue granite is dense, fine-grained, and a soft luminous blue-gray under polish. Quarrymen called it "the silk of the trade." It has been shipped around the world for more t...

Image: PegasusRacer28 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fairfield County, South Carolina: Nuclear, Granite, and Quiet

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Khanrak, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 20th century brought industry of an unusual kind. The Carolinas-Virginia Tube Reactor operated near Parr in the 1960s as a small experimental nuclear power plant. The much larger Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station came online in 1984 and still produces power for the ...

Image: Khanrak | CC BY-SA 3.0