Long before the first musket was fired in anger on its soil, Ninety Six was already a place that mattered. Situated in the rolling piedmont of western South Carolina, the settlement had served since the 1730s as a trading post and crossroads — its curious name, by tradition, derived from the supposed distance of ninety-six miles to the Cherokee town of Keowee. By the eve of the Revolution, Ninety Six had grown into the most significant hub of settlement, commerce, and political authority in the Carolina backcountry, a region that sprawled from the fall line to the Blue Ridge. It was home to a courthouse, a jail, and a thriving community of farmers, merchants, and traders whose loyalties were anything but uniform. When the war came, it came to Ninety Six early, burned hot, and left scars that would shape the community — and the broader contest for American independence — for years.
PEOPLE
Major Patrick Ferguson
British Army Officer, Loyalist Militia Commander, Firearms Inventor
Lieutenant Colonel John Harris Cruger
British Loyalist Commander, De Lancey Brigade Officer
Major General Nathanael Greene
Continental Army General, Southern Department Commander
Thaddeus Kosciuszko
Continental Army Engineer, Polish Officer
KEY EVENTS
STORIES
HISTORICAL VOICE
Twenty-Eight Days
Cruger had 550 men. Greene had a thousand, and more militia operating on his flanks. Cruger had no way to know when or whether relief would come — Rawdon was still organizing his column in Charleston,...
MODERN VOICE
The Cost of Winning
The British won the siege of Ninety Six. That sentence is accurate. It's also a nearly complete mischaracterization of what happened in 1781. When I teach this period, I try to get students to think ...