S.C. Encyclopedia

HISTORY:  Barbecue

HISTORY:  Barbecue

S.C. Encyclopedia  |  South Carolina barbecue is slowly cooked, hand-pulled or shredded pork that is flavored with a tangy sauce and usually served with side dishes such as rice, hash, coleslaw, sweet pickles, white bread, and iced tea. Barbecue often is served on festive occasions such as holidays, family reunions, weddings, church and community fundraisers, football tailgating parties, and political meetings. It varies widely across the state with respect to cooking methods, cuts of pork, sauce type, and side dishes served. Barbecue is often the topic of friendly debate since many South Carolinians have strong preferences for particular types that reflect the cultural character and identity of specific regions or places.

by · 11/04/2019 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
MYSTERY PHOTO:  Loggerhead turtle area

MYSTERY PHOTO:  Loggerhead turtle area

There are a couple of clues in this week’s Mystery Photo, but the location of this place might be kind of tough to guess – unless you’ve been there.  Send your guess to:  editor@charlestoncurrents.com.  And don’t forget to include your name and the town in which you live.

Our previous Mystery Photo: The Aug. 20 mystery were some of the houses along Rainbow Row in Charleston, which was identified by several loyal readers.

by · 08/27/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
Engraving shows British ships firing on Fort Sullivan in the Battle of Sullivan’s Island.  Engraving via the Library of Congress.

HISTORY: Carolina Day recalls Battle of Sullivan’s Island

S.C. Encyclopedia  |  The Battle of Sullivan’s Island was the first major patriot victory in the Revolutionary War. In February 1776, after British plans to capture Charleston were revealed, South Carolina patriots began construction of a fort on Sullivan’s Island close to the main shipping channel at the mouth of Charleston harbor. Colonel William Moultrie was given command of the island’s forces and ordered to supervise the fort’s construction.

by · 06/25/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
HISTORY: Newberry College

HISTORY: Newberry College

S.C. Encyclopedia | One of twenty-eight liberal arts colleges of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Newberry College was chartered in December 1856 by the South Carolina Lutheran Synod. Under the leadership of the Reverend John Bachman as chairman of the board of trustees, a building was erected in the town of Newberry, a president and several faculty secured, and classes begun in 1859. Almost immediately came the devastating impact of the Civil War, which resulted in the closing of the college. Its buildings were utilized in 1865 as a Confederate hospital and then occupied by federal troops, who inflicted much damage.

by · 03/05/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
HISTORY: Benedict College

HISTORY: Benedict College

S.C. Encyclopedia | A historically black college in Columbia, Benedict College was founded in 1870 on the site of an eighty-acre plantation. Rhode Island native Bathsheba Benedict, serving with the Baptist Home Mission Society, purchased the property with the long-term goal of educating recently emancipated African Americans.

Originally named Benedict Institute, the school began with a class of ten men, one building (a dilapidated former slave master’s house), and one teacher, the Reverend Timothy L. Dodge, a college-educated northern minister who would become the school’s first president. These first students followed a curriculum of grammar school subjects, Bible study, and theology. Later, additional courses were added to train Benedict’s students for work as teachers and ministers.

by · 02/26/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
HISTORY:  Women’s suffrage in South Carolina

HISTORY:  Women’s suffrage in South Carolina

S.C. Encyclopedia | The enfranchisement of women in South Carolina was first discussed publicly during the Reconstruction period. A women’s rights convention held in Columbia in December 1870 received a warm letter of support from Governor R. K. Scott. In 1872 the General Assembly endorsed a petition of the American Woman Suffrage Association to grant women political rights, but it adjourned without taking any specific action. The earliest suffrage clubs in the state were not organized until the 1890s, but suffragists were beginning to receive notice. Writing for the Charleston News and Courier in 1882, the journalist N. G. Gonzales described the typical suffragist as “thirty to sixty, a majority of considerable embonpoint, a majority passable looking, a majority with gray hair and a majority wearing bright colors.”

by · 02/19/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
HISTORY:  Mepkin Abbey

HISTORY:  Mepkin Abbey

S.C. Encyclopedia | Located on the Cooper River, Mepkin Abbey has a diverse history. In its early life the property served as the seven-thousand-acre rice plantation and family home of the eighteenth-century statesman Henry Laurens. Surviving traces of the plantation include a family cemetery and a large oak avenue. In 1936 the noted publisher Henry Luce, who established both Time and Life magazines, purchased the property.

While living at Mepkin, Luce and his wife, Claire Booth, hired the architect Edward Durell Stone to construct several buildings on the site, including a forester’s lodge, a laundry building, a pump house, and a farm manager’s house, made mostly of brick. Stone received his training at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent his early career designing houses in the international style. The buildings at Mepkin reflect his modernist sensibility. The Luces also hired the landscape architect Loutrel Briggs, designer of many important gardens in South Carolina, to create a formal composition of camellias and azaleas overlooking the Cooper River.

A 2014 photo of the bowling alley that is part of the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.  Photo by Andy Brack

FOCUS: The Orangeburg Massacre, 50 years ago

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. Their deaths, more than two years before the gunfire by Ohio National Guardsmen that killed four on the campus of Kent State University, marked the first such tragedy on any American college campus.

by · 02/07/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, Focus, S.C. Encyclopedia
HISTORY: Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel

HISTORY: Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel

S.C. Encyclopedia  |  The Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel is an unfinished nineteenth-century railroad tunnel located near Walhalla. The variation of the name “Stump House” was drawn from the legend of a Cherokee woman who lived on the mountain with her white husband. Rejected by both their respective communities, the couple lived on the mountain in a log home built atop stumps.

by · 01/29/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia
HISTORY: Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge

HISTORY: Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge

S.C. Encyclopedia  |   Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1932 as a wintering ground for migratory waterfowl. Located in Charleston County and stretching for twenty-two miles along the coast between Charleston and the Santee River delta, Cape Romain is a rich natural resource. In its shallow bays, tides combine the life-giving nourishment of the ocean with the nutrient-laden freshwaters of rivers to make one of the most productive environments on earth. Plants and animals from the land, rivers, and ocean are all present at Cape Romain, and all are dependent on the delicate balance of the marshlands.

by · 01/22/2018 · Comments are Disabled · Features, S.C. Encyclopedia