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Celebrate 1776 in the town of 96
Ninety Six was a colonial trading post and the scene of a notable battle in the American Revolution, but nobody is quite sure how the town got a number for a name. Jonathan Pratt and other reenactors help share the town’s rich history at Ninety Six National Historic Site.
Photo by Milton Morris
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Hometown proud
Mac McClendon, owner and proprietor of Mac’s Farm Supply (“Round O’s Finest”), shares his theories on how the farming community in Colleton County got its name.
Photo by Milton Morris
“What’s in a name?” Juliet famously sighs in the Shakespeare play bearing her name, “that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”
But had Juliet been a South Carolinian, she might not have posed such a philosophical question. Ashepoo, Honea Path, Tega Cay, Fountain Inn, Daufuskie—it’s hard to imagine South Carolina being so sweet without such words decorating our maps and serving as our landmarks.
Like most writers, I am obsessed with toponymy—the study of place names that shape our awareness of who we are and where we are. One weekend, I embarked on what I can only call a “South Carolina place name road trip.” I logged over 800 miles in and around our state. I stopped in some of the most intriguingly named towns, and I interviewed a diverse cross-section of regional historians, local know-it-alls, area raconteurs, and random passersby.
Of course, much of this information is Google-able, but I wanted to hear history in their own words. The old waters may have dried up, the railroads decommissioned, the battles long over, but town names live on. I wanted to know, simply, if people still knew.
What I found out is that the origin of a town’s name often remains a mystery. Of the five people I talked to in Adam’s Run, for instance, none could tell me who Adam was, nor why he might have been running. But I also found that place names, like food, are gateways into our political and natural histories—they remind us of features in the landscape, of occurrences in particular spots, of honored leaders and homelands. Call them, if you will, linguistic legacies of culture and migration. Or, more simply: great conversation starters.
Unfortunately, many place names did not make the final cut. I focused on habitation names (the names of places where people live), and I left out some terrific hydronyms (names of bodies of water, e.g., Hellhole Swamp) and oronyms (names of hills and mountains, e.g., Caesars Head). I stayed away from the usual suffixes: the -villes, -burgs, -tons, and -boros. I regrettably didn’t make it to Boiling Springs, Pumpkintown, Lone Star or Fair Play.
Of course, no South Carolina place name list could be complete without honoring the many wonderful place names derived from Native Americans—Coosawatchie, Socastee, Yemassee, Waccamaw, to name but a few. However, because these names are often exonyms (names used by outsiders), rather than autonyms (names used by insiders), I chose to leave that list for someone with more expertise.
Far from a definitive account, and certainly not a “Top Ten,” my list merely celebrates 10 South Carolina place names from 10 different counties—their histories, mysteries, myths, and legends. Above all, perhaps my quest answers Juliet’s question thus: What’s in a name? Everything.
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Round O (Colleton County)
Coming into Round O, I hold my breath. I hope the name isn’t obvious. If, for instance, there is only one traffic circle around which the whole town coalesces, then the name will make boring sense. Alas, Round O is a crossroads, not an O.
“I’ve heard two stories,” says Mac McClendon, owner and proprietor of Mac’s Farm Supply (“Round O’s Finest”), a general store that sells hunting supplies, feeds and seeds and home-ground grits. As he starts to talk, I wonder if “Round O” might refer to that iconic Lowcountry accent, but he points across the street.
“Inside them woods there, there was a pretty good-sized Indian encampment. There’s really a good bit of a hill there for this part of the world. And the chief supposedly had some sort of a tattoo in the shape of a circle. That’s one of them. And the other one is supposedly down there where two of them creeks go together, there’s a swirl there, a little whirlpool-looking thing. Round O!”
McClendon goes into the back room and makes me a copy of a typewritten document by A.S. Salley, secretary of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, published in 1926. The document confirms McClendon’s story: “The name preserved that of a famous Cherokee Indian who had a purple medallion tattooed on one shoulder. The English traders found it easier to call him by his ornament than by his lengthy Indian name.”
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North (Orangeburg County)
North, South Carolina: an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp, freezer burn and seriously funny.
“I have no earthly idea,” says Randy Williams, rocking on the porch of his downtown North brick home. “All I know is, every time I call someone on the phone and they ask where I’m from, they say, ‘Oh, North Carolina.’ And I have to say, ‘No. North, South Carolina!’”
Rusty Fogle, of R&J Drugs Pharmacy, doesn’t quite know either. “Seems like North had something to do with the railroad,” he says.
One pharmacist perks up and says, “Oh, I remember” and Xeroxes a visitor’s brochure for me. A section called “History of North” reads plain as day: “Like many towns established during that era, North was built around the railroad, and was named for the town’s first mayor, John F. North, one of the men who donated the land for the depot.”
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Plum Branch (McCormick County)
When I ask the clerk at the Fishing Village Corner Store in Plum Branch where the town got its name, she stares wide-eyed at me and just says, “Something to do with plums?”
She points me down the street—to the old mayor, E.M. Winn. He should know. In his office, “Mac” Winn picks up his landline and dials by heart the number of town councilman and local historian, Marion Sturkey: “Hey, Stinger, what’s up? You real busy?”
Sturkey, fortunately, is not too busy, and he hefts over a five-pound, leather-bound tome he authored—Plum Branch: Heaven in South Carolina. As Sturkey and Winn supply me with fascinating historical tidbits about Plum Branch (a railroad town with one of the oldest Baptist churches, a fancy French-Cajun restaurant called The Plum in the 1980s with clientele pulling up in limousines from Atlanta), I only have to open the book to Chapter One to get my answer.
“In western South Carolina,” Sturkey writes, “several springs and ground-water seeps combine with rainfall drainage and create a small rivulet two miles west of Stevens Creek and five miles east of the Savannah River. The stream would become known as ‘Plum Branch’ because of flowering plum bushes that line its banks.”
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Ninety Six (Greenwood County)
My beef with interstates is that they replace town names with exit numbers, thus robbing a place of its distinct identity. But a town deliberately named after a number? I had to know more.
“You got 10 minutes?” Margie Blalock, the director of tourism, asks me inside the Ninety Six Visitors Center. This is a polite Southern way of asking me if I have more than an hour. I tell her I have all the time in the world, which is good because, with the history of this town, you need it.
In the museum wing, she tells me about such historical Ninety Six luminaries as Benjamin Mays (mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Bill Voiselle (major league pitcher), John Drummond (legislator and oil tycoon), and the band The Swingin’ Medallions (“Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)”). The town may be best known for the Ninety Six National Historic Site, home to a reconstructed colonial trading village and the star fort that was the scene of a notable battle in the American Revolution.
As for the main reason I came, she says, “Nobody knows how Ninety Six, South Carolina, got its name.”
The historian’s best guess, she says, is that it was part of The Old 96 District and that there were a bunch of nines and sixes on the surveying maps. But they also have a legend. Do I want to hear it?
And here is where Margie Blalock slips into Marjorie LaNelle, her pen name for the two books she’s written—The Apparitions of Abbeville and Ghost Stories of Uptown Greenwood. Of course, I want to hear it.
“A Cherokee princess, Issaqueena, fell in love with a fur trader named Allan Francis,” she says. “That was forbidden, but they fell in love, and one day she overheard the Cherokee warriors plotting to kill Allan. So, she rode bareback, 96 miles, from Keowee to here, to warn her lover that there was an impending attack.”
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Due West (Abbeville County)
The old joke about Due West goes like, “Due West of what?”
“I’ve heard Due West of Ninety Six,” says D. McGill at his Due West Supply Store. “I’ve heard there was a Dewitt’s Corner and that kind of passed down to Due West. There are two or three other stories about it, too, so really nobody knows.”
Another of the men chewing the fat in the hardware store says, “I heard due west of Donalds.”
“Yeah,” McGill says. “I heard that, too.”
According to the tract How Due West Got Its Name by local historian Dr. Lowry Ware (which the Due West town hall prints off for me), the name is both a direction and a misinterpretation of DeWitt’s: “The main traffic through and to Dewitt’s Store was from the east. As more and more strangers came to Ninety Six on trading ventures into the Indian areas, they would ask the way to the Indian Camps and were told that they were due west (a direction).”
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Possum Kingdom (Anderson County)
This is how I am told to get to the unincorporated community of Possum Kingdom: “At the second red light in Belton, take River Street five miles. When you cross the river, you’re in downtown Possum Kingdom. But there’s nothing there.”
Ken Holliday tells me this from his collectibles shop in Honea Path. His family has lived in Possum Kingdom for several generations, and he grew up there. “Different people will tell you different things,” he says, “but I heard there was lawyers that come out of Greenville to hunt raccoons, and all they got was possum. But I don’t know. Call my sister. She knows.”
Later, I pass through the community, but I only see a sign for Possum Kingdom Super Speedway (“The Biggest and Fastest Karting Complex in the South”). So, I call up Joan Holliday.
She texts back: “The only thing I have heard about the naming of Possum Kingdom was from a Greenville news article from at least 30 years ago. It used to hang in the Possum Kingdom fire department.”
I track down the article, “Smack in the middle of Possum Kingdom,” by Jim McAllister, from 1981. He quotes an old-timer named Dewey Cothran: “‘My Daddy said they used to have picnics down here at the Saluda River. They’d sit around the fire and talk about how many possums there were through here. Somebody said, “Yeah, it’s a regular possum kingdom.”’”
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Cross Anchor (Spartanburg County)
I walk into the One Stop Grocery in Cross Anchor (now permanently closed), where I am greeted by the aroma of Crock-Pot barbeque. Adela Robinson is behind the counter, and Molly Irby is sweeping up with a corn broom.
“It was founded by two retired sailors,” Robinson says. “They split apart. One came here. The other guy went down to Cross Keys.” She tells me she wishes she knew more, but the Spartanburg Herald-Journal ran an article a few years back about it. I should look that up.
Before I leave in search of the article, though, Robinson and Irby spend 30 minutes telling me all about Cross Anchor. Like many of the people I meet, they reminisce on the town’s better days.
“This town had a bank. It had a doctor’s office. It had a drug store. It had a mercantile,” Robinson says. “But the interstate redirected traffic and killed the town.”
In the article I find, the Herald-Journal history columnist Michael Leonard notes that “one day, coming upon a crossroads, the captain found the countryside fair, and to his liking. At the spot where the roads crossed, he stopped, lowered his anchors, and made his camp.”
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Prosperity (Newberry County)
“You got two seconds?” the woman running Carolina General Store asks. She starts punching buttons on her phone, and I worry she’s Googling it. But then she puts Michael Martin on speaker. He’s lived in Prosperity all his life; he knows a thing or two.
“It actually used to be called Frog Level,” he says. “The name was changed when Southern Line Railroad came in, and they changed it to Prosperity.”
Did he, um, say, “Frog Level?”
“Down the road there was a big pond right there,” Martin says. “The legend, the folklore, whatever you want to call it, there used to be tons of frogs. Tons. Some guy got drunk, you know, fell into the pond, and when he woke up, everybody near him just started calling that place Frog Level.”
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Coward (Florence County)
“Somebody was a punk somewhere,” says the lady stirring grits at the Coward Truck Stop’s breakfast buffet. “Somebody must have been a scaredy-cat.”
No one else in the truck stop knows for sure either (“I never really asked that question.”) Luckily, I find Hope Arroyo at the meat market counter of the nearby Stop-n-Shop. Arroyo, born and raised in Coward, sighs as if she’s been telling this story her entire life.
“A Confederate colonel called Asbury Coward,” she says. “Well, that’s the story they say. We’ve also heard there’s a lot of farmers in the area named Coward.”
“I’m a Coward!” the man in line getting chicken wings says. “My whole family is from here.”
As we all start laughing, Arroyo remembers another funny story.
“This town has a lot of families with the last name Braveboy in it,” she says. “And a boy went off to war and did extraordinary things, and ended up winning awards, but the headline at the time was ‘Braveboy from Coward!’”
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Ketchuptown (Horry County)
There aren’t any businesses in Ketchuptown, not even a corner store or a Dollar General, so I knock on the house closest to the weathered, hand-painted sign that reads, “Ketchup Town.” The woman who answers the door tells me to go down the road aways to talk to Mr. Andrew Atkinson.
“How Ketchuptown got its name, well,” Atkinson says, greeting me in the front yard of his historic farm home. “It was back when they got the store built, all the farmers would go and ‘catch up’ on the news. They’d all gather up on Saturday evenings, and they’d hear the stories. They’d catch up on the weather, mostly just to keep up with what everybody was doing.”
So, it has nothing to do with tomatoes or Heinz 57?
“No, sir,” he says. “Just to catch up on the news. And Miss Ruth Hamm was the one who named it that. Ketchuptown Store was built in 1927. It’s just a community.”
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Sound off
Do you have a favorite story about the origin of a South Carolina place name? We’d love to hear from you. Share your story, photos and documents with us at SCLiving.coop/place-names or send them to Place Names, South Carolina Living, 808 Knox Abbott Drive, Cayce, SC 29033.