Charleston Currents – Special to Charleston Currents

Articles by: Special to Charleston Currents

HISTORY: South Carolina’s technical education system

S.C. Encyclopedia | Technical education in South Carolina has a lengthy history, dating back to John de la Howe’s 1797 bequest of land to a school that would provide practical instruction for the needy children of Abbeville District. Systematic technical education, however, would have to wait until the post–World War II era, when political leaders realized that South Carolina’s ability to attract new industry hinged on the availability of an educated workforce.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 03/14/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: 1929 state bond bill creates Highway Department

The 1929 Highway Bond Bill authorized the State Highway Commission to sell bonds to build a system of hard-surfaced roads throughout the state. Beginning with the creation of the State Highway Commission in 1917, state officials had used available gas tax revenue to build roads on a pay-as-you-go basis. This proved to be a slow process, and Lowcountry legislators decided […]

by Special to Charleston Currents · 02/29/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Prisons and penitentiaries

S.C. Encyclopedia | The first significant jail in South Carolina, a twelve-foot square designed to accommodate sixteen prisoners, was built in Charleston in 1769. Additional jails were built following the division of South Carolina into judicial districts. According to one account, “These jails were forbidding structures, reared to prevent escape and make life gloomy for their inmates.” South Carolina was […]

by Special to Charleston Currents · 02/22/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Bamberg County

S.C. Encyclopedia | Bamberg County, located in the inner coastal plain in south-central South Carolina, was formed from the southeastern section of Barnwell County in 1897. It is named for Francis Marion Bamberg (1838–1905), the grandson of John Bamberg, who arrived in the area in 1798 and was thought to have originally come from Bavaria before stopping in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War period.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 02/15/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

FOCUS: 48 years ago today: The Orangeburg Massacre

By Jack Bass | On the night of Feb. 8, 1968, police gunfire left three young black men dying and twenty-seven wounded on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. Exactly thirty-three years later, Governor Jim Hodges addressed an overflow crowd there in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium, referring directly to the “Orangeburg Massacre”—an identifying term for the event that had been controversial—and called what happened “a great tragedy for our state.”

The audience that day included eight men in their fifties—including a clergyman, a college professor, and a retired army lieutenant colonel—who had been shot that fateful night. For the first time they were included in the annual memorial service to the three students who died—Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 02/08/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Focus, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: White lightning, a.k.a. “moonshine”

S.C. Encyclopedia | White lightning, a white whiskey made surreptitiously and illegally, was once produced in great quantities in South Carolina. It got its name from its color and the kick it delivers when consumed.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 01/18/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

Colleton County Courthouse, Walterboro, S.C.

HISTORY: Colleton County

S.C. Encyclopedia | First visited by Robert Sandford in 1666 while he was reconnoitering the southeastern seaboard of North America for Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Colleton County was one of three original counties organized in the English province of Carolina in 1682. However, Colleton was divided into three parishes by 1730 (St. Bartholomew’s, St. Paul’s, and St. John’s Colleton), which took over most county responsibilities, including oversight of elections.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 01/11/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Emancipation Day celebrations

S.C. Encyclopedia | The tradition of marking the end of slavery with Emancipation Day celebrations began in South Carolina on January 1, 1863—the day the Emancipation Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln declared three million slaves in the Confederate states to be “thenceforward, and forever free.” Since then, African Americans in South Carolina have gathered annually on New Year’s Day to commemorate the “Day of Jubilee” with food, song, dance, and prayer.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 01/04/2016 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Joel Roberts Poinsett

S.C. Encyclopedia | Joel Roberts Poinsett was born on March 2, 1779, in Charleston, son of the Huguenot physician Elisha Poinsett and his English wife, Ann Roberts. As a child, Poinsett spent six years in England, where his formal education probably began. In 1794 he entered the Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, academy of Dr. Timothy Dwight but stayed only two years because of his frail health. Returning to England, Poinsett attended private school at Wandsworth, where he excelled in languages.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 12/28/2015 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY: Spanish moss

S.C. Encyclopedia | Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) is a gray tree-borne epiphyte native to the coastal plain of the southeastern United States. As an epiphyte, Spanish moss gets water and food from the air and does not harm the host tree. It is not a true moss but a relative of the pineapple family in the genus Bromeliaceae.

by Special to Charleston Currents · 12/21/2015 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia