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Indian Fields Campground in Dorchester County was more than 100 years old when it was photographed here by Carl Metz in the late 1940s. The central "arbor" (see Camp Welfare) was surrounded by...J. Important Institutions in South Carolina | History of SC Slide Collection
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.
Within this Series
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The WPA provided funds to help build new women's dormitories for a county home for the aged in Spartanburg County. The residents in 1938 seem to like their new rooms. Courtesy of the National Archives...Photo
The Oberlin Unit of Faith Cabin Library, in Seneca. These libraries were the result of the cooperation of a white textile mill laborer and a teacher in an African-American school in Edgefield County...Photo
South Carolina Baptist Hospital, 1519 Marion Street, Columbia, as it appeared around 1960. The hospital had its beginnings on Marion Street as a private infirmary operated by Dr. Augustus B. Knowlton...Photo
The Avery Institute in Charleston. The Avery Normal Institute was established by the American Missionary Association in the spring of 1865, and initially named after the New York abolitionist Lewis...Photo
Fire companies were usually volunteer associations, and separate African-American and white companies developed in most sizeable towns in the state after the Civil War. The Star Fire Engine Company...Photo
The first graded school in St. Matthews, photographed around 1910. A campaign to improve rural schools in the late 19th century replaced many one-room schools, in which all students were taught by a...Photo
The interior of the Mary C. Judson Library at Greenville Woman's College, around 1950. From the Baptist Historical Collection. Courtesy of the Furman University Archives Special Collections Department...Photo
The steeple on the building in the right of this photograph, on Hampton Street in Sumter, is that of the Jewish synagogue, next door to the Rabbi's house. There were Spanish and Portuguese Jews in...Photo
The Darlington Police Department in 1984 had both women and African-Americans as uniformed officers. Courtesy of the Darlington County Historical Commission.