![]() The base later housed hundreds of German prisoners of war, who assisted local farmers in tending and harvesting crops. Here, cadets arrived from across the nation to train, and some of them married local girls and settled in Marlboro after the war. Army Air Corps flight-training facility that opened near his hometown just prior to World War II, Palmer Field. William White Palmer of Bennettsville, a World War I aerial ace, provided the name for a U.S. The twentieth century brought additions to the landscape and the economy. In Bennettsville a new courthouse opened in 1885, with extensive additions made in the 1950s by the local architect Henry D. Urban areas prospered as well, with impressive homes and brick stores and offices appearing in new railroad towns such as Blenheim (incorporated in 1883), McColl (incorporated in 1890), and Dunbar (incorporated in 1894). Despite the changes, cotton remained king in Marlboro, and railroads transported harvests to markets and mills far beyond county borders. He soon thereafter brought cotton mills to the towns of McColl and Bennettsville. McColl brought the first railroad to Marlboro and opened its first bank, the Bank of Marlboro, in 1884. ![]() Like the rest of South Carolina, Marlboro County struggled through the Reconstruction era, although the productivity of county farmlands helped ease the transition from slave labor to sharecropping. Although several town buildings were burned, Marlboro’s courthouse was spared, giving Marlboro complete records since 1785. Blair made his headquarters at the Jennings-Brown House. Plantations throughout the county were ravaged by the invading army, as was the town of Bennettsville, where Union general Francis P. Sherman’s army in March 1865, after it crossed the Pee Dee en route to North Carolina. The county was occupied by General William T. Marlboro sent more than one thousand men to fight for the Confederacy, and a third of them never returned. Drake set a world’s record by producing 255 bushels of shelled corn from a single acre of Marlboro County farmland. Marlboro’s reputation for agriculture went international in 1889 when the local farmer Zachariah J. African slaves were responsible for much of Marlboro’s agricultural prosperity, and their descendants contributed to the county’s economy and culture throughout its history. In the early nineteenth century cotton and corn replaced grain and indigo as the primary agricultural products. Planters found Marlboro’s loamy soils excellent, and many made fortunes in the antebellum era. Additional communities developed around churches, principal roads, and at the county’s popular mineral springs at Blenheim. ![]() During this period male and female academies were organized and opened. Baptists from the Welsh Neck Church came to Bennettsville in 1832, followed by Methodists in 1834 and Presbyterians in 1855. It was replaced in 1852 by a twin-towered structure that survived occupation by Union troops in March 1865. A Robert Mills–designed courthouse opened in 1824. A third site near the creek became the county seat of Bennettsville in 1819. Marlboro County’s first courthouse stood at Gardner’s Bluff on the Pee Dee but later moved slightly inland to the northern bank of Crooked Creek at Carlisle. Another skirmish occurred near Cashua Baptist Church in April 1781. Colonel Abel Kolb’s tomb commemorating his murder by Tories is situated in Marlboro, as is the site of the Battle of Hunt’s Bluff, where patriots captured a barge filled with ill British troops en route to Georgetown. Near the modern town of Wallace, General Nathanael Greene established his “Camp of Repose,” where he assumed command of the Continental army in the South in December 1780. At Pegues Place plantation near the North Carolina border, a cartel for a prisoner exchange was signed on May 3, 1781. David’s Society added an academy to the Welsh Neck community.ĭuring the Revolutionary War inhabitants divided among patriots and Tories. English, Scots-Irish, and French settlers arrived soon thereafter. ![]() Here, the first Baptist church in the backcountry, Welsh Neck Baptist Church, was established in 1738. During the 1730s the British government encouraged settlement along the Pee Dee by enticing Welsh families from Pennsylvania with land grants, tools, and seeds. The Cheraw Indians occupied the region before European settlers arrived. Retaining the same general dimensions throughout its existence, Marlboro County is bounded by the Great Pee Dee River on the west, North Carolina on the north and northeast, and Dillon County on the southeast. Marlboro County was formed on March 12, 1785, and named for John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough. ![]()
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