Statue of Dizzy Gillespie in Cheraw, SC, home of the South Carolina Jazz Festival. Image courtesy of SCPRT.
From hometown soldiers and nurses to Camp Sevier in Greenville, South Carolina was deeply invested in World War I.
Life in the Military
- World War I
Learn about the causes and key players of World War I. - Forward Together: South Carolina in World War I
See a Congressional Medal of Honor, a campaign hat, German gasmask, and other items of war from World War I. - 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century
Read a history of World War I, see a timeline, and explore how The Great War shaped the 21st century. - Posters of the Great War
Explore 36 posters from the era, created in the United States, Canada, France, and other countries. - Letter from Cornelius Kollock to his mother on wound received in Bordeaux, France, November 1918
Read a letter from a soldier who was shot in the leg above the knee in France. - Camp Wadsworth
Between 1917 and 1919, Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg was an army base that trained up to 100,000 soldiers. - Camp Sevier
Over 80,000 soldiers trained at this military camp in Greenville, SC.
People
- Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator and civil rights leader who was born in Mayesville, SC. - Ambrose E. Gonzales
Ambrose Gonzales and his brother founded The State newspaper in 1891. - Ernest Everett Just
Ernest Just was a renowned African-American scientist from Charleston, SC. - John Gardiner Richards, Jr.
John Richards was the governor of South Carolina from 1926-1931. - Freddie Stowers
Freddie Stowers was a member of the 371st Infantry Regiment who was posthumously awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor.
Culture
- Clara Smith-Don't Advertise Your Man
Clara Smith was a part of the great migration from the south, moving from her home in South Carolina to Harlem in the early 1920s, where she became a popular blues singer. - Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital
Pellagra is a disease caused by a lack of niacin (vitamin B3) in the diet. The Spartanburg hospital was established in 1914 to find a cause for this disease, which was increasingly dangerous: 1,306 reported pellagra deaths in South Carolina during the first ten months of 1915. - "Drug Him Through the Street": Hughsey Childes Describes Turn-of-the-Century Sharecropping
Hear a first-hand witness account of a sharecropper who was lynched in Abbeville, SC. - Ads for New Household Inventions, 1915
South Carolinians could buy new household appliances such as telephones, refrigerators, and electric lighting. - Suffrage and Mrs. Salley
Eulalie Chafee Salley fought for the right for women to vote.
Photographs from Around the State
- Michael Francis Blake Photographs, 1912-1934
Michael Francis Blake owned one of the first African-American photography studios in Charleston. - The Curb Market in Columbia, ca. 1928
See a photograph of a curb-side market on Assembly Street in Columbia. Does it look similar to today's flea markets? - E.E. Burson Photograph Collection
E. E. Burson worked as a photographer in Denmark, South Carolina, and the surrounding areas of Bamberg County approximately between the years of 1905 and 1920. Burson not only worked in his Denmark studio, but he also photographed town scenes and nearby Voorhees College.
Boll Weevil
Boll Weevil. Division of Plant Industry Archive, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Bugwood.org.
The boll weevil entered South Carolina in 1918, and by the mid 1920s, the pest was devastating to the cotton crops. The boll weevil was not successfully eradicated in the state until the mid 1980s.
- Boll Weevil Honored
Be sure to listen to the songs near the end of the page. - Reports by the South Carolina Boll Weevil Commission regarding decrease in cotton production due to infestation, 1917 & 1921
- We Don't Cotton to Boll Weevil 'Round Here Anymore
