Qualla: Ninety Six, South Carolina

Ninety Six, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Washuotaku, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name is the puzzle. Ninety Six. A town of about 2,096 people in the South Carolina Piedmont, with no apparent connection to the number except that traders from Charleston who pushed up the Cherokee Path centuries ago wrote "96" on their maps somewhere near this spot. The most enduring theory is that the count refers to six creeks running south from the Saluda River and nine running south from the Savannah - landmarks the traders noted as they reckoned distance. Another theory pointed to a count of 96 miles from the Cherokee town of Keowee, but that estimate has been proven false. The Welsh expression nant-sych, meaning "dry gulch," has been offered too. Nobody knows. The name has been a mystery since long before South Carolina was a state.

Image: Washuotaku | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ninety Six, South Carolina: The Cherokee Path

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donna Wells, CC BY 4.0. By the early 1700s, the settlement at Ninety Six was a well-known trading post on the route from Charleston into Cherokee country. The trade was deerskins - millions of them, processed and shipped to European markets. The traders kept maps and shared information about creek cross...

Image: Donna Wells | CC BY 4.0

Ninety Six, South Carolina: The Siege of 1781

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donna Wells, CC BY 4.0. Ninety Six saw the first land battle of the Revolution south of New England - November 19-21, 1775, when Loyalists and Patriots fought a brief, bloody engagement near the trading post. But the battle the town is best known for came six years later. From May 22 to June 19, 1781, P...

Image: Donna Wells | CC BY 4.0

Ninety Six, South Carolina: Mills, Decline, Revival

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donna Wells, CC BY 4.0. In the 1840s the local economy shifted from small self-sufficient farms to the commercial cultivation of cotton, dependent on enslaved labor. After the Civil War, textile mills rose along the area's creeks - the Ninety-Six Mill among them - and mill villages were built to house w...

Image: Donna Wells | CC BY 4.0

Ninety Six, South Carolina: The Trail and the Star Fort

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Ninety Six Trail follows roughly 1.3 miles of the old Southern Railway corridor through town, passing Revolutionary-era markers. Lake Greenwood State Park is five miles northeast; the Ninety Six National Historic Site is two miles south of town center. The Star Fort battlefie...

Image: Acroterion | CC BY-SA 4.0