This church, founded in 1886 by former members of First African Baptist Church, is one of the oldest surviving institutions remaining from the town of Mitchelville, a Freedmen’s village established here by the United States Army in 1862. The present brick sanctuary,...
The school, which was located at this site from the late 1920s until the early 1970s, was one of several Rosenwald schools in the county. Rev. Smart Small, Sr. (1891-1961), assisted by Eugene Beaty (1889-1958), Dave Carr (1886-1992), Henry Small (1897-1999), and...
St. James the Greater Catholic Mission is an extremely rare example of a rural, southern, black Roman Catholic parish in continuous existence from its antebellum origins to today. The site includes a sanctuary, a school, and a cemetery. The sanctuary, built around...
This church was organized in 1865 by Charlestonians who had been members of the free black elite of the antebellum period. The congregation included some of Charleston’s most prominent African American families including the Walls, Maxwells, Mushingtons, Kinlochs,...
This church was founded in 1870 with Rev. Plenty Pinckney as its first minister and worshipped in a “bush tent” nearby until a log church was built a few years later. A new frame church was built on this site in the 1890s during the pastorate of Rev. C.L. Lawton. The...
St. Michael’s Methodist Church was designed by prominent African American architect Miller F. Whittaker and constructed c. 1922. Whittaker was a professor of mechanical arts at South Carolina State College who later served as president of the college (1932-1949). The...
This congregation was organized before the Civil War and held its services in a brush arbor until 1875 when its trustees bought land near this site from B. W. Brogdon and built a sanctuary there. First church officers were trustees Cuff Brogden, Robert Brogden, and...
One block west of this marker, on S. Vanderhorst St., is the site of Fairfield Institute, a grade school and normal institute (or teacher’s college) founded in 1869 by the Northern Presbyterian Church. It closed in 1888 to merge with Brainerd Institute in Chester, SC....
Sidney Park CME Church was founded in 1886 and has been at this site since 1889. It grew out of a dispute among members of Bethel AME Church, who left that congregation and applied to join the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The congregation acquired this site in...
Built c. 1936 with Works Progress Administration funds, Siloam School served rural African American students until it closed in 1956. The current building replaced an earlier school building constructed in the 1920s. KEYWORDS: NATIONAL REGISTER, EASTOVER, COLUMBIA,...
This church, one of the first black Baptist churches in America, grew out of regular worship services held as early as the 1750s at Silver Bluff, the plantation of Indian trader George Galphin. At first a non-denominational congregation with both white and black...
Sims High School stood here from 1927 until the early 1970s and was the first black high school in Union County. It was named for its founder, Rev. A.A. Sims (1872-1965), who was its principal 1927-1951. It included grades 6-11 until 1949 and 6-12 afterwards, and...
Sims High School, located here from 1956 to 1970, replaced a 1927 school on Union Boulevard, which in 1929 had become the first state-accredited high school for African American students in the upstate. It was named for Rev. A.A. Sims, founder and first principal...
S.C. State University was founded in 1896 as the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural & Mechanical College of S.C., with its origins in the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 providing for land-grant colleges. Intended "for the best education of the...