[6] The story of Edgefield is more than a quarter of a millennium long, reaching back to before the first European settlers arrived, when only Native Americans roamed the forests.

At that time the area which later became Edgefield County was a vast wilderness of virgin forests, occasional prairies, great cane brakes, and sparkling rivers and creeks.

When General Lighthorse Harry Lee later wrote about the Revolution in this area, he stated that "in no part of the South was the war fought with such asperity as in this quarter.

During the first several decades of the 19th century, Edgefield, being the courthouse village of a large and prosperous district, began to develop its reputation as a center of law and politics.

A number of the sons of the wealthy cotton planters and other ambitious young men, after attending elite schools and colleges across the nation, came to Edgefield to practice law and engage in politics.

These budding leaders built substantial houses in town and created a social atmosphere which attracted more similarly-situated young men.

The social prestige of being a planter with broad acres and many slaves, and dabbling in law and politics, caused many ambitious young Edgefieldians in the antebellum period to develop a self-confidence, an overdeveloped sense of honor, and an aristocratic worldview which did not always serve them well.

Another result was a sense of invincibility, which caused many to approach war with a cavalier attitude and to focus on the glories of victory rather than on the horrors of death and defeat.

These young men also accepted violence, which had been a common occurrence in Edgefield from its earliest days, as an inevitable part of life, and in some cases even glorified it.

"[9] While planting, politics, and violence captured the imagination of most white Edgefieldians, a number of other bright young men looked for opportunities in industry and commerce.

Henry Schultz, a German immigrant, developed Hamburg, a new town on the Savannah River, which became an important commercial center during the antebellum era.

Edgefield Congressman George McDuffie (later Senator and Governor) initiated the fight against federal tariffs which were imposed on imported goods to protect New England manufacturers.

McDuffie, together with South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, developed the doctrine of "nullification", which postulated that a state had the right to nullify a federal law with which it disagreed.

South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification, and President Andrew Jackson threatened to send troops to the state to enforce the tariff.

At the outbreak of war in April 1861, the vast majority of Edgefieldians welcomed the conflict, believing that they would defeat the North in short order and the risk of slavery being outlawed would be eliminated.

The emancipation of the slaves wiped out a huge portion of the county's wealth, and giving them the right to vote brought an almost total reorganization of the political, economic, and social systems.

During the eleven-year period of Reconstruction, the newly freed slaves, called "freedmen", became sharecroppers, farming the land on shares with the landowners.

Intimidated by the occupying Federal troops, the white population were militarily and politically dominated by what they perceived as corrupt Republican administrations imposed upon them by force by their Northern enemies.

The Red Shirt Campaign of 1876, largely orchestrated by the former Confederate generals Martin W. Gary and M. C. Butler of Edgefield, was a massive organized effort on the part of the white population to regain control of the political machinery of the state.

By the middle of 1877 the Red Shirt strategy, along with an increasing willingness on the part of the rest of the nation to allow the South to go forward on its own terms, proved successful in bringing the control of the state back into the hands of the white population.

In the ensuing decades the black population of Edgefield, like that of the entire South, was thrust back into second-class citizenship by the persistent efforts of the whites who were determined to see that the conditions of Reconstruction were never allowed to return.

This, together with the proliferation of manufactured consumer goods in the late 19th century, led to the development of a vigorous commercial economy in which every town and every crossroads sprouted new merchants.

During this same period, the movement to bring government closer to the people resulted in the creation of a number of new counties, four of which took substantial portions of Edgefield.

Unfortunately, beginning in 1921 and 1922, the boll weevil, which had come from Central America and had been marching across the South since the turn of the century, finally arrived in Edgefield County, devastating the cotton crop on which the economy was almost entirely based.

A well-organized effort to bring new industry to Edgefield enjoyed moderate success as the Crest Manufacturing Company was brought to town in the late 1940s.

In the 1960s Edgefield added to its list of new industrial recruits the National Cabinet Company, Star Fibers, Federal Pacific Electric, and Tranter, each bringing a substantial number of new jobs.

African-American soldiers had also fought valiantly in World War II, and when they returned, they came with a determination to improve their status in American society.

The primary focus of this campaign was to overturn the "separate but equal" doctrine, legitimized by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the United States Supreme Court.

The late 1960s and the early 1970s brought other new developments to Edgefield: a new water line capable of supplying the county for decades to come, a new country club, a new private school, a new county hospital, the National Wild Turkey Federation headquarters, and a new congressman, Butler C. Derrick, Jr. Edgefield has rich clay deposits which provide the source for alkaline-glazed stoneware pottery which was developed by Dr. Abner Landrum in the early 19th century.

The enslaved potter David Drake, who produced many large storage jars and other vessels between 1830 and 1870, was literate, inscribed and signed some of his work, and became more widely known more than a century after his death.