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.
Melissa Tunstall: “Every story has more than one side to it — particularly marriages, which is central to Laura Groff’s Fates and Furies. However, Groff does not intend to tell a story about everyone’s marriage. No, for Groff, Fates and Furies is truly only about Mathilde and Lancelot, who goes by the nickname Lotto.”
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.
S.C. Encyclopedia | The spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) became the official state amphibian by a law signed by Governor Jim Hodges on June 11, 1999. The designation resulted from the interest and activity of children in the third-grade class at Woodlands Heights Elementary School, Spartanburg, taught by Lynn K. Burgess. Students conducted research and a letter-writing campaign to get an amphibian adopted, enlisting support from scientists, public officials, and other third-graders in the state.
“Deek” Diedrickson, a builder, designer and advocate for simple living, takes readers into the fascinating world of tiny spaces and the people who inhabit them.
Though Charleston is a shrine to the past,
where every alleyway and weather-worn road
tells the story of a city resurrected;
time is never standing still.
Running beneath the surface
are fault lines of our own making,
reshaping memory brick by brick.
S.C. Encyclopedia | South Carolina’s multidisciplinary State Museum opened on Oct. 29, 1988, in the renovated Mount Vernon Mill at 301 Gervais Street in Columbia’s Congaree Vista. The development of a museum was initiated in 1973 when the state legislature formed the South Carolina Museum Commission and charged it with “the creation and operation of a State Museum reflecting the history, fine arts and natural history and the scientific and industrial resources of the state.”
The novels of the Dick Francis series were always entertaining, centering around the ex-jockey’s love of horses and steeplechase races. Unfortunately, the author died in 2010, but the series continues with his younger son, Felix, now the author.
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.
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.
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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