Aiken County, South Carolina: History
In the colonial era, the area that is now Aiken County was part of Edgefield and Orangeburgh Districts. Most of the population were immigrant farmers, many from the rural parts of Lincolnshire, England, but very few were from the town of Lincoln. Virtually all of the farmers from Lincolnshire came to the colony as indentured servants in the 1730s and 1740s. By the 1750s, though, almost all of them were living on their own private land, almost exclusively engaging in subsistence agriculture on smallholding farms. Many immigrants also came from the rural eastern half of the English county of Nottinghamshire. Specifically, many indentured servants came from the towns of Newark-on-Trent, Winthorpe, Coddington, Balderton, Kelham, and Farndon. A third group of English farmers settled in the colony, mostly arriving not as individual indentured servants, but as entire family units, coming from the Derbyshire Dales region of the English county of Derbyshire; these settlers primarily originated in the three towns of Ashbourne, Bakewell, and Matlock, as well as the farm country surrounding these towns. These settlers also settled on lands between the Savannah River in the west and the towns of Berlin and Jones Crossroads in the east, all arriving in what has since become Aiken County in the 1740s. A numerically smaller but influential migration came to what has since become Aiken County in the form of Presbyterian immigrants of Scottish ancestry who came from County Antrim and the northern portion of County Down in Ireland, as well as small numbers from the town of Kesh in County Fermanagh, Ireland. This population referred to themselves as "Ulstermen" and "Irish Presbyterians", but were known in the colonies as "Scots-Irish" settlers, though this was not a term they self-applied. They, too, arrived in the 1740s. The area that has since become Aiken County had a significantly high number of first-generation British immigrants who fought for the Patriot cause in the Revolutionary War.
Both Aiken County and its county seat of Aiken are named after William Aiken (1779–1831), the first president of the South Carolina Railroad Company. Aiken County was organized during the Reconstruction era in 1871 from portions of Barnwell, Edgefield, Lexington, and Orangeburg counties.
Prince Rivers, a freedman and state legislator from Edgefield County, had been a leader in the United States Colored Troops. He was named to head the commission that drew the new county's boundary lines. He was dubbed "the Black Prince" by local newspapers, including the Edgefield Advertiser. He also led the commission that selected the site of Aiken County's present-day courthouse. Other freedmen who were part of the founding of the county were Samuel J. Lee, speaker of the state House and the first black man admitted to the South Carolina Bar; and Charles D. Hayne, a free man of color from one of Charleston's elite families.
Political tensions kept rising in South Carolina during the 1870s, especially around elections. In the months before the 1876 elections, Aiken County was one of the areas to suffer white paramilitary Red Shirts attacks and violence directed against black Republicans to suppress the black vote. Between the Hamburg Massacre in July and several days of rioting in September in Ellenton, more than 100 black men were killed by white paramilitary groups in this county. …