Qualla: Pickens County, South Carolina

Pickens County, South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charles M. Conlon, Public domain. Shoeless Joe Jackson learned to hit a baseball with a stick in the dirt yard of a mill village in Pickens County. He was born July 16, 1887, and by the time he died in 1951 he had been declared one of the greatest natural hitters the game ever produced and then banned from it for the rest of his life. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 cost him his career and his name, but the legend would not stay buried. Generations of South Carolina kids grew up hearing about the boy from the foothills who batted .356 lifetime, swung a bat called Black Betsy, and went to his grave insisting he played the World Series straight. Pickens County is where the story begins.

Image: Charles M. Conlon | Public domain

Pickens County, South Carolina: Where the Mountains Step Down

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Umbra Lab, Inc., CC BY 4.0. Pickens County occupies a corner of South Carolina where the Blue Ridge ends abruptly. The northern edge of the county runs up against Sassafras Mountain, the highest point in the state at 3,553 feet. Drive south from there and the land falls fast, through rolling Piedmont farmla...

Image: Umbra Lab, Inc. | CC BY 4.0

Pickens County, South Carolina: Orange, Always Orange

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DXR, CC BY-SA 4.0. Clemson University sits in the southwestern corner of the county and dominates everything around it. The school began in 1889 as an agricultural college on land left by Thomas Green Clemson, John C. Calhoun's son-in-law, and grew into a research university of roughly 28,000 stude...

Image: DXR | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pickens County, South Carolina: Mill Town to Suburb

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Foxe, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pickens County's 20th century looked a lot like its neighbors': textile mills opened, workers came down from the mountains and across from Europe, baseball leagues were organized between mill teams, and then in the 1970s the mills started closing as the industry moved overseas. B...

Image: John Foxe | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pickens County, South Carolina: Politics and Quirks

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mason Brock (Masebrock), Public domain. Pickens has been the most Republican county in South Carolina since the year 2000. In 2008 it was the only county in the state to give John McCain over 70 percent of the vote, and Republican margins of 70 percent or more have held steady through every presidential election since....

Image: Mason Brock (Masebrock) | Public domain