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revised 9-27-03

SOUTH CAROLINA

    Spaniard Lucas Vasquez de Ayllón founded the first settlement in The Spaniards and he French made numerous attempts to settle South Carolina between 1526 and 1644 but these efforts failed.  Prior to their arrival, this land was the home of the Cherokee, the Yamasee, and many other Native American tribes.  

    In 1663, King Charles II granted the lands between Florida and Virginia to eight "lords proprietors".  The first English settlers of the granted land named "Carolina" after the Latin form of Charles and included many planters from Barbados.  They landed near present-day Charleston  in 1671 in the area of  the Ashley River.  This first group was English straight from England and a group of people who came here from the Barbados Island of the West Indies.   They established Charles Town.  They were later joined by a group of Dutch families from New York and these, in turn were joined by families direct from Holland. 

    In 1675,  Quakers joined the mix and in 1680, a group of 45 Huguenots established homes there.  In 1683, a group of dissenters from the Episcopal church came from Sommersetshire to establish Charleston.  A new group of Irish settled along the Ashley River.   In 1684, a group of about ten Scotch Presbyterians moved into the area and established Port Royal.  The primary crops to be harvested were Indigo, Tobacco and rice.  It was the cultivation of rice that made the use of slave labor a necessity because this crop was extremely labor-intensive.

    From 1732 until 1736, families continued to pour into the area.  The countries represented were England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Switzerland and Germany.  Some of the early settlements from 1745 to 1760 were established by immigrants from the Rhine section of Germany, the northern American colonies and the Ulster section of Ireland.  Subsequent to the Indian Wars, more Scotch-Irish came in about 1761.  There was a diverse socioeconomic order between the immigrants of the Appalachian region and that of their southern plantation-owner neighbors.  By 1786, the tension between these two factors made a compromise necessary and thus the old capital of Charleston was replaced with a more centralized capital in Columbia.

        In viewing the establishment of the counties, it is important to know that the first three colonies of Berkley, Colleton and Craven were discontinued  at a later date.  The present Berkley Co. is not the original. By an act ratified in 1769, the province of South Carolina was divided into seven judicial districts:  Charleston, Georgetown, Beaufort, Orangeburg, Ninety-Six, Camden and Cheraws.  Cheraws was named after the Cheraw Indians that were the former residents of that area.    

    In 1780, a decisive group of battles were fought against the Loyalist Troops at Kings Mountain and again at Cowpens.  South Carolina became the 8th state to join the Union in 1788.  The 1868 Constitution changed 30 districts to counties although some recorders continued to use the term "district" as they felt it to be a "Yankee" term.   When the Civil War began with the firing upon Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor,  The south as they had known it, would never be the same.  South Carolina was the first to secede from the union, this act occurring in 1860.  It was readmitted to the Union in 1868.  South Carolina was devastated from the damages of the war and did not fare much better during the reconstruction.  It was many years before South Carolina came into its own again.  Visiting today, you can visit many of the beautiful relic of the past and wax nostalgic on the way things were.  The city of Charleston is an absolute must for anyone going down there.  So draw up a rocking chair, get yourself a fan and pull up a mint julep and relax and set a spell.

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