Edgefield is part of the Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC Metropolitan Statistical Area.

[5][6][7] Parts of the district were later used in the formation of other neighboring counties, specifically:[5] In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Orville Vernon Burton classified white society as comprising the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite planters.

Stephanie McCurry argues that yeomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land (real property).

By owning large numbers of slaves, planters took on a managerial function and did not work in the fields.

It became a center of political tensions following the postwar amendments that gave freedmen civil rights under the US constitution.

They used violence and intimidation during election seasons from 1872 on to disrupt and suppress black Republican voting.

Eventually the election was decided in Hampton's favor, and the Democrats also took control of the state legislature.

As a result of a national compromise, Federal troops were withdrawn in 1877 from South Carolina and other southern states, ending Reconstruction.

The long decline in population from 1910 to 1980 reflects the decline in agriculture, mechanization reducing labor needs, and the effect of many African Americans leaving for Northern and Midwestern cities in the Great Migration out of the rural South.

[29] Some of the largest employers in the county include Dollar General and the United States Department of Justice.

[31] In addition to its ten governors of South Carolina listed below, Edgefield County was the home of numerous local notables: George Galphin (1709–1780);Samuel Hammond (1757–1842); Parson Mason Locke Weems (1759–1825); Rebecca "Becky" Cotton (1765–1807); Billy Porter (aka “Billy the Fiddler”), a slave (1771–1821); Rev.

William Bullein Johnson (1782–1862); Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870), a famous author; Andrew Pickens Butler (1796–1857); Dave Drake (1800–1879?

), a slave; Francis Hugh Wardlaw (1800–1861); Louis T. Wigfall (1816–1874); Preston S. Brooks (1819–1857); General James A. Longstreet (1821–1904), a leading Confederate general; Prince Rivers (1823–1887), a black leader; George D. Tillman (1826–1901); Martin Witherspoon Gary (1831–1881); Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832–1899); Matthew Calbraith Butler (1836–1909); Alexander Bettis (1836–1895), a black leader; Lawrence Cain (1845–1884), a black leader; Paris Simkins (1849–1930), a black leader; Daniel Augustus Tompkins (1851–1914); Alfred W. Nicholson (1861–1945), a black leader; John William Thurmond (1862–1934); Emma Anderson Dunovant (1866–1956); Florence Adams Mims (1873–1951); Benjamin Mays (1894–1984), a black leader; Francis Butler Simkins (1897–1966), a historian; and Davis Timmerman, a murder victim whose case resulted in the first execution of a woman in South Carolina's electric chair.