Qualla: Winthrop University

Winthrop University: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FuriousSoundbyte, CC BY-SA 3.0. Robert Charles Winthrop, the Boston philanthropist who chaired the Peabody Education Board after the Civil War, never set foot in South Carolina. But in 1886 his board sent $1,500 - a substantial sum - to a young Columbia school superintendent named David Bancroft Johnson, who wanted to train white women to teach. The school Johnson founded with that money opened with twenty-one students in a borrowed Columbia building, took the donor's name, moved to Rock Hill in 1895, integrated in 1964, went coeducational in 1974, became a university in 1992, and in 2024 - to general national bewilderment - became the first NCAA Division I institution in America to offer scholarships for cornhole.

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Image: FuriousSoundbyte | CC BY-SA 3.0

Winthrop University: Founding for a Particular Purpose

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hashtag youre it, CC BY-SA 4.0. David Bancroft Johnson was twenty-eight and the superintendent of Columbia's schools when he started Winthrop in 1886. His pitch was practical: South Carolina, devastated by the Civil War and barely emerged from Reconstruction, had no system for training teachers and was educatin...

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Image: Hashtag youre it | CC BY-SA 4.0

Winthrop University: Opening the Doors

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. For seventy years Winthrop remained what it had been founded to be - a women's college, racially segregated by state law. That ended in 1964, when Cynthia Plair Roddey became the first Black student admitted. (The desegregation came a year before the federal Civil Rights Act made...

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Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0

Winthrop University: A Disc Golf Course and a Coliseum

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Winthrop's main campus sits on 100 acres in downtown Rock Hill. The 317-acre Recreational and Research Complex, about a mile northeast, holds the disc golf course that has hosted the United States Disc Golf Championship every year since 1999 - the sport's longest-running and most...

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Image: Public domain

Winthrop University: The Cornhole Scholarships

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nascar1996, Public domain. In February 2024 Winthrop announced something so unusual that the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post both sent reporters to Rock Hill to figure out what was going on. The university would offer the country's first Division I athletic scholarships to play cornhole - the woode...

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Image: Nascar1996 | Public domain