Though we celebrate individuals and families as the keystone of our society, and celebrate the communities in which the individuals live and work, it is often institutions that bridge the gap between the individual (or family) and the community. Institutions are the way in which we organize ourselves to achieve commonly held goals. Education begins at home--but it is the institutional structure of schools, academies, colleges, and universities that makes us an educated people. Faith is a private and individual matter of belief--but it is most often through the institutional churches that belief becomes active in the community. Communities provide hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and police and fire departments, because we value our mutual health and safety. And finally, government in a democratic republic is the institution we create to link all those institutions and ourselves together, to ensure that they work for the benefit of all of us, not just for a few. In this section of the collection you will find images of the physical structures in which institutions are housed, as well as a picture of the people that make them work.
Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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This colored lithograph portrays the horseshoe of South Carolina College as it appeared in 1853, a half century after its founding. An act to establish the College was passed in December of 1801, but...
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This detail of a large lithographic map of Columbia published in 1872 shows the campus of the University of South Carolina as it appeared after the Civil War. The Confederate government had taken...
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Aerial view of the University of South Carolina horseshoe in 1948. Women had been admitted to the college in 1895, and in 1906 it once again became a University. After lean years during the Tillmanite...
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Construction of the Main Building of Winthrop College, also known as Tillman Hall, 1894. The Winthrop Training School was first opened in 1886 in a renovated stable and former chapel of the Columbia...
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A Winthrop biology student in the early 1950s. Courtesy of the Winthrop University Archives.
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In the 1950s, Winthrop was still a college for white women, with rules regarding dress and class attendance. These attentive students taking notes in a large classroom are a remarkable contrast to...
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This 1974 photograph of a Winthrop College classroom illustrates many of the changes in higher education that occurred in South Carolina in the late 1960s. The College had become co-educational, and...
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Winthrop Industrial College, photographed May 12, 1894, was the industrial half of the Winthrop Normal and Industrial School constructed in Rock Hill. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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Wofford College, founded in 1850 through a gift from local Methodist minister Benjamin Wofford, was one of the several denominational colleges that emerged in competition with the South Carolina...
