Greenwood County GenWeb Project
Created from portions of Abbeville and Edgefield counties
on March 2, 1897, Greenwood County claims a distinguished
century of its own as well as a share in the earlier history
of older counties.
Before Spanish adventurers arrived in South Carolina in the
sixteenth century, the rolling hills of the piedmont offered
abundant game to Cherokee, Creek, and Catawba hunters. The
first European settlers in the region were Indian traders
and cattle drovers, followed by Scots-Irish farmers who
poured down from Pennsylvania. About 1750, Robert Gouedy
established a plantation and store on the Cherokee Path at a
place called Ninety-Six, a name inspired by an estimate of
the distance to Keowee, a principal Cherokee town.
A village of Ninety-Six, established in 1769 as the judicial
center of the backcountry in the newly-created overarching
Ninety-Six District, was the scene of the first
Revolutionary War battle in the South on November 19-21,
1775. Later a British fort at Ninety-Six was under a siege
directed by Major General Nathanael Greene from May 19-June
21, 1781. The British abandoned and burned Ninety-Six in the
summer of 1781, but the town was reborn as Cambridge in
1787. Today the Ninety-Six National Historic Site protects
the British Star Fort and other features of the colonial and
Revolutionary era..