Qualla: Marlboro County, South Carolina

Marlboro County, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Pee Dee Indian Tribe still keeps its seat of government on a plot of land in Marlboro County that was awarded to them in 1976. Today the tribe counts just under 200 enrolled members. But they were once the dominant cultural and political power across this region of the Carolinas — significant enough that the entire river system, and the geographic region around it, took their name. The Pee Dee. The river is theirs. The region is theirs. The county that contains both was named, instead, for a duke they had never heard of: John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, who died in 1722 in England, having never crossed the Atlantic.

Marlboro County, South Carolina: The Pee Dee Who Stayed

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

European settlement nearly wiped them out — through war, disease, slavery, and oppression — but the Pee Dee Indian Tribe survived. South Carolina officially recognized the tribe around the beginning of the 21st century, and federal recognition has been pursued since 1976. Across ...

Marlboro County, South Carolina: The Welsh Settlement

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1737, the South Carolina Assembly granted 173,000 acres to Welsh settlers — a single, exclusive Welsh Baptist colony along the Pee Dee River. Within a decade, nearly all that land had been taken. The settlers came directly from Wales and from existing Welsh communities in Dela...

Marlboro County, South Carolina: Cheraws District, 1785

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On March 12, 1785, the South Carolina General Assembly created Marlboro County under its powers in the 1778 state constitution, written during the American Revolution. The name honored the Duke of Marlborough — an arms-length British honorific that, given the political moment, ra...

Marlboro County, South Carolina: Cotton, Disenfranchisement, and Realignment

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marlboro grew on cotton, and on the labor of enslaved people who made cotton profitable. After the Civil War, the brief opening of the Reconstruction era — when Black voters here, as a majority of the county's population, exercised real political power — was closed deliberately b...

Marlboro County, South Carolina: A Rural County, Still

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marlboro County remains rural. The 2020 census counted 26,667 people across a county where the Great Pee Dee River, the Little Pee Dee, and Crooked Creek all carve through farmland and pine flatwoods. Lake Wallace and Lake Paul Wallace offer fishing and boating; Lake Paul Wallace...