S.C. Encyclopedia | Operation Lost Trust was arguably South Carolina’s largest and longest-running political scandal. Including the investigation, trials, and retrials, the Operation Lost Trust saga extended from 1989 to 1999.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Formed in 1919, Allendale is South Carolina’s youngest county, yet it contains the oldest known human habitation in the state. Archaeological investigations in Allendale have found evidence of human settlement dating back more than sixteen thousand years. These prehistoric people used “Allendale Chert” in making stone tools.
S.C. Encyclopedia | The Boykin spaniel was originally bred in South Carolina before the 1920s. This amiable, small, dark brown retriever is a superb hunter and loving family pet. It was bred to provide an ideal dog for hunting fowl in the swamps along the Wateree River, which demanded a sturdy, compact dog built for boat travel and capable of retrieving on land or water.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Just after the Revolutionary War, rice planters along the Edisto, Combahee, and Ashepoo Rivers, tired of an annual summer jaunt of fifty miles to Charleston, created an alternate refuge from the malarial swamps closer to home. By the 1790s, among local forests and freshwater springs, they built a village of about twenty log houses, which they called Walterboro, after two brothers whose retreat was prominent among them.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Located between the mouths of the North and South Edisto Rivers south of Charleston, Edisto Island is a Lowcountry Sea Island of approximately sixty-eight square miles. The island is shielded from the Atlantic Ocean by Edisto Beach, a barrier island municipality contained in Colleton County and linked to Edisto Island by a causeway.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Situated at the head of navigation of the Congaree River, Granby was among the first important trading posts in the South Carolina interior. The town originated as a large Indian village on Congaree Creek.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Construction of this major U.S. highway in South Carolina began in 1932 during the Great Depression, when the federal government began taking over the maintenance and construction of many state roads. The route began at Baltimore, Maryland, and ended at Sarasota, Florida, crossing through many towns in eastern South Carolina, including Dillon, Latta, Florence, Manning, Olanta, Summerton, Bamberg, and Allendale.
S.C. Encyclopedia | The loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta), a threatened species, was named the state reptile in an act signed by Governor Carroll Campbell on June 1, 1988. Recognizing the loggerhead as “an important part of the marine ecosystem” and that South Carolina’s coastline provides “some of the most pristine nesting areas” for the turtle on the East Coast, the General Assembly declared that the state’s responsibility is “to preserve and protect our wildlife and natural resources.”
S.C. Encyclopedia | President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a New Deal federal initiative that put millions of unemployed men to work on conservation projects. Initially known as the Emergency Conservation Work program, the CCC represented an unprecedented effort to combine social welfare with conservation on public and private lands. Between 1933 and 1942 South Carolina’s CCC camps employed more than 49,000 workers, many between the ages of 18 and 25. In countless hours of backbreaking and often tedious work, CCC workers fought soil erosion and wildfires, created a state parks system, built roads and trails, erected fire towers, and carried out extensive reforestation projects. Wages sent home by CCC workers helped many families weather the Great Depression.
S.C. Encyclopedia | One of the enduring myths of American history is the centuries-old assertion that the thirteen original colonies were “English” colonies. While they were governed by the English, the colonies were not peopled only by individuals of English ancestry.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina! (2019) by editor and publisher Andy Brack offers incisive commentaries on the American South, politics, the common good and interesting South Carolina leaders. Available exclusively for Kindle for $7.99. A paperback version will be ready soon. Learn more.
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