Qualla: Florence County, South Carolina

Florence County, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LittleT889, CC BY-SA 4.0. Florence the daughter never lived in the county that bears her name. She was the child of General William Harllee, the railroad president who in the 1850s built his home at the junction where the Wilmington and Manchester met the Northeastern Railroad. He called the community after her. Decades later, in 1888, the South Carolina legislature carved a new county out of pieces of Darlington and Marion - and slices of Williamsburg and Clarendon, with the last Williamsburg fragment not added until 1921 - and gave it the same name. Florence County was, from the beginning, a railroad child.

Image: LittleT889 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Florence County, South Carolina: Eight Hundred Square Miles of Pee Dee

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Post Office Department. Bureau of Operations. (7/1/1957 - ca. 1971), Public domain. The county covers a little over eight hundred square miles of the Atlantic coastal plain, bounded on the east and northeast by the Great Pee Dee River and crossed on the west by the Lynches. The land is flat, the soil sandy in places and rich in others, and the rivers are the slo...

Image: Post Office Department. Bureau of Operations. (7/1/1957 - ca. 1971) | Public domain

Florence County, South Carolina: The Railroads and the Stockade

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit formulanone from Huntsville, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0. Florence the city grew because three rail lines met there: the Wilmington and Manchester, the Northeastern, and the Cheraw and Darlington. In a region where rivers had once moved everything, the rail junction reorganized the economy in a generation. During the Civil War the strat...

Image: formulanone from Huntsville, United States | CC BY-SA 2.0

Florence County, South Carolina: Marian Wright Edelman's Country

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DanTD, CC BY-SA 4.0. Florence County has produced complicated history and remarkable people. Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund and one of the great civil rights leaders of the second half of the twentieth century, was born and raised in Bennettsville, the county seat of ne...

Image: DanTD | CC BY-SA 4.0

Florence County, South Carolina: Working Country

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Florence County has about 137,000 people, more urban than rural in census terms but still farming country around the edges. The 2022 GDP of around 8.5 billion dollars makes it one of the more productive counties in the state outside the major metros. Employers include McLeo...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Florence County, South Carolina: Lynches River and Woods Bay

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Thomas Mckenzie Jr, CC BY-SA 4.0. The county's protected places lean toward the watery and the strange. Lynches River County Park preserves blackwater cypress along one of South Carolina's wildest small rivers. Moore Farms Botanical Garden, on Darla Moore's family land in Lake City, brings in horticulture pilgrim...

Image: Robert Thomas Mckenzie Jr | CC BY-SA 4.0