Greenwood, South Carolina

About Clinton, South Carolina

The Cherokee Indians were Clinton's original inhabitants. The first settler to inhabit the area was John Duncan, a native of Aberdeen, Scotland, who arrived in 1752 from Pennsylvania and settled along a creek between the present-day towns of Clinton and Whitmire. Scots-Irish immigrants from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia became the predominant settlers in the area in the two decades before the American Revolutionary War and took active part in a Revolutionary War battle in 1780 at nearby Musgrove Mill. As late as 1852, the town was called Five Points because it arose at the intersection of four major roads and the railroad. It was named Clinton after Henry Clinton Young, a lawyer from the county seat of Laurens, who planned the first roads in the area. As the railroad began to grow, so did the town, and more plots of land were developed around the railroad. With the population's growth came the establishment of the First Presbyterian Church in 1855. In 1895, "factory fever" had struck the town of Clinton. This came with the establishment of the Clinton Cotton Mill in 1896 by Mercer Silas Bailey, owner of the town's leading dry goods store. Lydia Cotton Mill, also owned by the Baileys and their descendants, followed in 1902. In 1933 there is a documented case of the lynching of an African American 35-year-old Norris Dendy in Clinton after he was arrested for killing a white man. The mills continued to be a vital source of prosperity for Clinton until their closure in 2001 brought years of economic hardship from which the area is still struggling to emerge. The Clinton Commercial Historic District, Duncan's Creek Presbyterian Church, and Thornwell-Presbyterian College Historic District are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.