#73: Thomas Green Clemson, the Chiquola Mill Massacre, and Revolutionary War Trivia Night
For South Carolina history lovers far and wide! Enjoy weekly SC history and upcoming SC historical events
Welcome to the first 100 days of the South Carolina History Newsletter! My name is Kate Fowler and I live in Greenville, SC. I have a 9-5 job in marketing, and outside of work, have a deep love of history. I started this newsletter as a passion project to learn more about our beautiful state and build a community of fellow SC history lovers along the way! To establish a foundation for the newsletter and to grow my expertise on a wide variety of South Carolina historical topics, this past February I challenged myself to post 100 newsletters in 100 days. After this coming May 20th, the newsletter will become weekly. Thank you for joining the journey!
Dear reader,
Welcome to Newsletter #73 of The South Carolina History Newsletter! I’m so happy you’re here.
As always, I’d like to also extend a special welcome to the following new subscribers — woohoo! Thank you for subscribing.
autopartsupullclt
folktra
ngcummings09
gbarks1
susan.tucker
I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter, and as always, please feel free to reply to this email with your ideas and suggestions on South Carolina history topics you’d like to learn more about. I’m only a click away.
Additionally, please join us & keep the conversation going by becoming a member of our SC History Newsletter Facebook Community here! I can’t wait to meet you.
And now, let’s learn some South Carolina history!
Yours truly,
Kate
(Writing from Greenville, SC)
Refer your friends to SC History Newsletter and win a “Best of South Carolina” gift basket!
Hi everyone! I am SO grateful and excited that there are now 470 subscribers for the SC History Newsletter. Y’all are amazing!! I have a goal for us to get to 1,000 subscribers by May 20th. Can you help me achieve my goal? And let’s make it fun by making it a contest!
HOW TO ENTER: By using the button below, you can share a unique link to the SC History Newsletter with your friends. Each time one of your friends signs up for the newsletter from your unique link, I can see on my dashboard!
WINNER: The person who refers the most people who sign up for the SC History newsletter will win the “Best of South Carolina” basket on May 20th! I will keep everyone posted on the “standings” as they come in.
THE PRIZE: The basket of goodies (valued at $100) will include iconic sweet & savory South-Carolina made goods — and a few other surprises as well!
Start sharing today! Thank you so much!
➳ Featured SC History Event
Please enjoy our featured SC History Event below, and click here to visit my SC History Events Calendar that organizes all the upcoming SC history events I have discovered. Please let me know if you’d like to add an event to the calendar! Reply to this email or send me a note at schistorynewsletter@gmail.com.
Thursday, April 25th at 6:30 pm | “American Revolution Trivia Night” | Revolutionary War Visitor Center | Camden, SC | FREE Admission
➳ SC History Fun Facts
I.
Did you know that the founder of Clemson — Thomas Green Clemson — was 6’ 6” inches tall and a renaissance man of many talents?
Clemson University’s namesake, Thomas Green Clemson, was a renaissance man — a diplomat, an agriculturalist, a mining engineer, a lover of music, art, and the classics of the ancient world, and more!
Thomas Green Clemson was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1807. His father was a prominent Quaker merchant.
Growing up in Philadelphia, Clemson would have been exposed to a large free African-American population. In his own family, they had an indentured female servant.
Clemson excelled in science and mathematics as a young man and attended the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy at Norwich, Vermont, known today as Norwich University,
At Norwich, Clemson excelled at science, particularly chemistry. During the early 19th century, the most advanced science education was available in Europe, so Clemson soon embarked on his studies abroad.
In 1826, supported by his father’s trust fund, 20-year-old Clemson went on a grand tour of Europe.
Clemson spoke French fluently and, while living abroad, studied at the Paris School of the Mines. He attended lectures of noted chemists Louis Jacques Thenard, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac and Pierre-Louis Dulong at the Sorbonne Royal College of France in Paris, one of the oldest institutions of higher education.
Tall for the era, standing 6 feet 6 inches, the young American was nicknamed “giraffe” by his French classmates.
In June 1831, Clemson received his formal diploma as an assayer of mines from the French Royal Mint in Paris. With this degree in hand, he was internationally certified as a mining engineer.
In addition to his studies, Clemson became interested in politics. As a student in Paris, he took part in the Revolution of 1830, which replaced Charles X with Louis-Philippe as king.
During the 1830s, Clemson established a successful career as a mining engineer and industry consultant, working in the United States and overseas.
He was a consultant and partner at the Mine LaMotte in Missouri, and he spent time working at a coal mine in Cuba. In addition, he wrote numerous scientific articles for the American Journal of Sciences and Arts, the Annales des Mines, the Franklin Institute Journal, the Transactions of the Geological Society of Pennsylvania, and the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Clemson was able to write scientific essays in French, English and German.
In the spring of 1838 in Washington, D.C., Clemson, a bachelor, met Anna Maria Calhoun, daughter of John C. Calhoun, former vice president and then U.S. senator from South Carolina. The young lady was 21 years old, and Clemson was 10 years her senior.
After a short courtship, the couple was married in the parlor at Fort Hill, the plantation of Anna’s father, John C. Calhoun — located in what now is the heart of Clemson, SC. The couple spent the first 2 years of their married life in Philadelphia.
In 1840, the Clemsons moved in with Anna’s family at Fort Hill.
Anna and John Clemson’s first child together, a daughter, died within 3 weeks. Their next two children, John Calhoun Clemson and Floride Elizabeth Clemson, both lived into adulthood.
John Calhoun owned 70 slaves at the Fort Hill plantation. Little is known about Clemson’s thoughts concerning the Calhoun family’s ownership of slaves.
As a dutiful son-in-law, in letters to Calhoun, Clemson detailed the condition of the plantation, and he recorded the details of the lives of the enslaved at Fort Hill. In one letter to Calhoun, Clemson recounted that the slaves “danced in the kitchen and kept it up until after midnight.”
From the Clemson University website:
“Clemson’s introduction to agriculture and slavery was an important outgrowth of his marriage into the Calhoun family. Calhoun offered his son-in-law more than a roof over his head; Calhoun inspired Clemson’s development of a lifelong interest in agriculture and how science could be applied to the soil.”
Clemson’s interest in scientific agriculture grew, and, in 1843, he bought a plantation of his own (1,000 acres) in the Edgefield District of South Carolina called Cane Brake. He purchased 37 enslaved African-Americans from Keowee Heights for $6,000 from his wife’s cousin, John Ewing Colhoun Jr.
John C. Calhoun, who was then secretary of state for President John Tyler, “knew of his son-in-law’s desire to return to Europe,” and Calhoun aided the appointment of Clemson as chargé d’affaires, or diplomat, to Belgium. Clemson became the highest-ranking ambassador from the United States to Belgium. Clemson and King Leopold I shared an interest in art, and Leopold later awarded Clemson the Order of Leopold medal. The Clemsons were in Belgium when Calhoun died in 1850. They returned to the United States in 1852.
Back in South Carolina, Clemson sold his plantation, and his enslaved workers at Cane Brake and in June 1853, relocated to a small farm, called The Home, in Bladensburg, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. At The Home, the Clemsons owned no slaves.
In 1856, Clemson aided his neighbor Charles Calvert in the founding of the Maryland Agricultural College, now the University of Maryland. He sought to “raise his public profile, particularly through fundraising efforts in the Washington D.C. area and lecturing at the Smithsonian.”
Clemson’s talents in agriculture became well known in Washington circles. On February 3, 1860, Jacob Thompson, secretary of the interior in the administration of President James Buchanan, appointed Clemson as the superintendent of an agricultural bureau.
When the Civil War descended upon the nation, Clemson chose to resign from his agricultural post and join the Confederacy, along with his son, John Calhoun Clemson.
Fifty-four-year-old Thomas Green Clemson enlisted on May 7, 1863 in the Confederacy, and he was assigned to the Army of the Trans-Mississippi Department. Clemson’s position in the ordinance bureau placed the scientist-soldier in charge of Arkansas and Texas nitrate mines which were used for the production of explosives.
His son, Calhoun Clemson, was reassigned to the Trans-Mississippi Department and promoted to captain prior to his capture in Bolivar, Mississippi, on September 9, 1863. He spent 18 months in a prison camp on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie, Ohio.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, on June 9, 1865, Thomas Green Clemson was paroled at Shreveport, Louisiana. On May 18, 1866, almost a year later, he requested and received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson.
The period of Reconstruction “proved difficult for Thomas Clemson, as it did for many former Confederates. He had voluntarily given up a promising federal post and a government career to serve in the Confederate Army.”
Like his father-in-law before him, Thomas Clemson was elected president of the Pendleton Farmers Society. One of his goals was the establishment of an institution of higher learning in South Carolina to provide practical education in agriculture and the sciences. At that time, Clemson formulated the idea of utilizing Fort Hill as the site of such a college.
By 1870, in frustration at what Clemson saw as lost opportunities, he dropped out of the Pendleton Farmers Society, and he offered his criticism of the South:
"Look at the late war, conceived in arrogance, matured in ignorance and delivered in imbecility.”
In January 1872, the Clemsons retired to John Calhoun’s plantation Fort Hill following the tragic deaths of their two adult children. In the summer of 1871 at age 28, their daughter Floride died from tuberculosis, and in that very same summer, their son Calhoun Clemson died in a train wreck.
As if the tragedy couldn’t get worse, 3 years later, on September 22, 1875, Anna Clemson died from a heart attack at the age of 58. Although she never specifically mentioned the founding of a college at the Fort Hill place in her will, “the indications were that the couple was collectively in agreement that a college would be built upon the land she would and did inherit from the estates of her mother, her brother Patrick, and her sister Cornelia.”
Now Thomas Clemson’s only living immediate family was his grandchild, also named Floride, who was growing up in New York. From the Clemson website:
“A small group of people helped take care of Fort Hill, including Clemson’s white housekeeper, Jane Prince, her daughter Essie Prince, and a small contingent of African-Americans, including one young boy named Bill Greenlee who would later recount stories of Clemson during an interview with James Corcoran Littlejohn. African-Americans Jim and Francis Fruster and Nancy Lagree, then living at Fort Hill, were photographed for professional stereopticon slides of Fort Hill that Clemson commissioned.”
Living mostly as a recluse, Clemson began formalizing his dream of founding a school on the Fort Hill estate. During the last 13 years of his life he set out to establish, in drafts of his will, the type of scientific institution that he had described in the meetings at the Farmers Hall some 20 years earlier.
In June 1886, Clemson was given an honorary degree from the South Carolina College. Though the College in Columbia had received Morrill funds from the legislation that Clemson had supported, it made only a half-hearted attempt at agricultural education.
In the history of higher education, Clemson’s will is an important document. His bequest clearly reflects his altruistic attitude. If the state was not going to accept his will after three years, Clemson’s alternative was to have his executor establish a private university along the same lines.
Clemson’s will also called for the preservation of Fort Hill, his residence and the plantation home of his father-in-law, John C. Calhoun. He sought to protect and preserve Fort Hill — almost as a second Mount Vernon — a museum furnished with belongings of the Clemsons and the Calhouns.
In the final version of his will, he spelled out the mission of Fort Hill in his bequest by specifying two items in both his will and codicil:
Item 4. It is my desire that the dwelling house on Fort Hill shall never be torn down or altered, but shall be kept in repair, with all the articles of furniture and vesture which I hereinafter give for that purpose, and shall always be open for the inspection of visitors.
On April 6, 1888, Thomas Green Clemson died of pneumonia at the age of 80. He was buried next to his beloved Anna in St. Paul’s Episcopal churchyard in Pendleton. Through his will, Clemson left 814 acres of land and more than $80,000 in other assets to the state of South Carolina.
After “a bumpy road in the courts,” Clemson’s will finally passed the S.C. State Legislature on Dec. 24, 1888, and the Act of Acceptance was formally signed into law on Nov. 27, 1889.
Thomas Clemson reflected on his vision for the college and future generations of scholars in his adopted state of South Carolina:
“If the project here presented should go into operation it would insure the prosperity of the State, and be an additional light to the world, and be surely counted to its founders in that life which we hope to realize hereafter.”
And as we reflect on Thomas Green Clemson’s legacy for higher education in America, here is another beautiful quote from him in an article he wrote in 1867, The Land We Love:
“We want light. Civilization only advances through the sciences . . . Science will open up new avenues for profitable occupation to individuals which will redound to the power of the state; resources now lying dormant, will give occupation and wealth to unborn millions.”
Initially an all-male, all-white military school, Clemson Agricultural College opened in July 1893 with 446 students. Clemson became a coeducational, civilian institution in 1955. In 1963, “with the admission of Harvey Gantt, Clemson became the first traditionally white institution in South Carolina to desegregate since Reconstruction.” With academic offerings and research pursuits, the institution became Clemson University in 1964.
Please scroll to the bottom of this email for my source for this section
Did you go to Clemson University? How was its history discussed? How did you enjoy your time there? We are encouraging my stepson (age 12) to possibly go there. Please leave a comment below!
II.
Did you know that 7 people died in the Chiquola Mill Massacre in Honea Path, SC 1934?
The Chiquola Mill (pronounced shuh-cola) “loomed large” in the lives of the citizens of Honea Path, SC. A local resident wrote, “The mill was the lifeblood of Honea Path for nearly 100 years. Until the late 1960s, it was virtually the only place to work in town.”
The mill was 4 floors and 83,200 square feet. It opened in 1903 and operated until 2003. It initially produced “coarse sheeting before switching to print cloth.”
Chiquola Mill became the site of a tragic event which would become known as Bloody Thursday or the Uprising of ‘34.
The event started as a strike organized in conjunction with the United Textile Workers of America in protest of low wages and poor working conditions.
The strikes were ordered for Labor Day of 1934, but Southern Mills “didn’t get the word in time” and began their strikes later in the week. At Chiquola Mill, 300 men and women gathered to protest.
The crowd gathered on the morning of September 6, 1934 and “tensions were high.”
The mill’s superintendent, Dan Beacham, was also the town’s mayor and judge. Beacham asked for SC Governor Ibra Blackwood to “authorize the National Guard to send troops to Honea Path.” Blackwood refused. Beacham then deputized “126 townsmen and anti-union millworkers; armed with rifles, pistols, and shotguns.” Beacham also had a “World War I machine gun” mounted on the factory’s roof.
The tension reached a tipping point between Beacham’s “deputies” and the mill workers and shots were fired into the crowd.
7 people were killed in the massacre — Claude Cannon, Lee Crawford, Ira Davis, E.M. “Bill” Knight, Maxie Peterson, C.R. Rucker, and Thomas Yarborough. All but one were “shot in the back while trying to escape.” 30 more were wounded.
11 men were charged with murder and “all 11 were acquitted.” Beacham later issued a statement saying that he was “not present during the massacre” when later evidence would confirm that he was at the scene of the crime and had given the order to fire.
The headline on the cover of the Greenville News the day after the event was “Mayor Gives Order.”
The funeral for the victims was held in a nearby field as none of Honea Path’s churches — which were owned by the Chiquola Milla — would allow the service. The funeral was attended by 10,000 people.
In this period, strikes became the “largest labor revolt in American history.” Soon after, President Franklin Roosevelt enacted the 40-hour work week and minimum wage.
Following the event, mill workers involved in the strike “either moved away for returned to work.” However, those who returned to work were forced to “denounce the union, and a gag order was issues to prevent discussion of the revolt.” The effects of this order are “still felt in the community today” and the community has begun to revisit the tragedy more closely in recent years.
In a touching turn of events, Dan Beacham’s grandson, journalist Frank Beacham, who grew up in Honea Path but not lives in New York, “worked to document the events of that day in his book Whitewash: A Southern Journey Through Music, Mayhem, and Murder.” He also helped with the creation of the monument dedicated to the workers who died in the strike — and attended its dedication.
Today, the Chiquola Mill is in ruins.
Honea Path, SC recently received $1 million in state funds to support the clean-up of the old mill site. See this video here with statements from the mayor and local political representatives:
Please scroll to the bottom of this email for my sources for this section
Do you live in Honea Path? We would love to hear your perspective on the mill story and mill side above! Please leave a comment below!
➳ Quote from an SC historical figure
“It goes back to what our parents put in our minds years ago…They wouldn’t let us talk about it.”
—Earl Lollis Meyers, 77, who has been mayor of Honea Path since 1997 — remembering the Chiquola Massacre
Thomas Green Clemson article sources:
“Thomas Green Clemson.” Clemson University, https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/thomas-g-clemson.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.
“The African-American Experience at Fort Hill.” Clemson University, https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/documents/Race%20Exhibit.pdf. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.
Chiquola Massacre article sources:
“Chiquola Mill.” SC Picture Project, 8 Apr. 2011, https://www.scpictureproject.org/anderson-county/chiquola-mill.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.
“What Sacrifices Did Your Ancestors Make For You?” Generations Down a Red Dirt Road, 7 June 2015, https://generationsdownareddirtroad.blogspot.com/2015/06/
what-sacrifices-did-your-ancestors-make.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.Riddle, Lyn. “Bloody Thursday Anniversary Passes Quietly.” Greenville News, 5 Sept. 2014, https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/2014/09/05/
anniversary-bloody-chiquola-mill-protest-passes-largely-unnoticed/15167921/. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.
I always want to improve my work. Answer the poll below to give me your review of today’s newsletter. I also welcome your suggestions for new content! Simply reply to this email with your ideas. Thank you!
While now retired, Dr. Jerome Reel lectured a great class called The History of Clemson and Higher Education or something like that. I took it my first year there and learned a great deal not only about T.G. Clemson and the establishment of Clemson University but of higher education in the US and North America as a whole. If anything similar is still offered I would recommend any incoming student to take even if an elective.
I graduated from Clemson in 1993, and my father graduated there in 1969, and I'll know in a week if my daughter attend (fingers crossed!). The history overtly shared during my time there was more than my father learned, but less than what is shared now, and that progression is key. Exploring more and sharing new or expanded information, as in the recent work at the cemetery to uncover the extent of the African-American grave sites, helps the future generations process the actions of past generations and move forward with a better understanding.