Ninety Six, SC

Ninety Six is a Greenwood County town about nine miles northeast of Greenwood. The 2020 census counted 2,096 residents. The name is usually traced to the distance from Keowee, a Cherokee settlement, and a trading post was operating here by about 1730. Ninety Six became an important courthouse and trading center in the South Carolina backcountry before the Revolutionary War reached it. A 1775 fight was the first land battle of that war in the southern colonies, and the 1781 siege of the British Star Fort lasted twenty-eight days.

The Ninety Six National Historic Site preserves the older settlement two miles south of the present town, including the star-shaped fort, earthworks, and part of the tunnel dug by American troops. The town itself moved east when the railroad arrived in the nineteenth century, and its square still holds many buildings from the 1800s and early 1900s. The retired 1915 Southern Railway station now serves as a multipurpose building. Main Street, Town Park, the Ninety Six Trail, and Greenwood School District 52 give the modern town its everyday shape. Ninety Six carries an unusually large Revolutionary-era history in a small-town map, with the old battlefield and the later railroad town sitting close together.