Great Men Of The Waxhaws

By Historian Louise Pettus

The tri-county area of York, Lancaster and Chester have some common characteristics. The original settlement of all three counties was overwhelmingly Scots-Irish. Most of these came down from the western frontier of Virginia and Pennsylvania during the French and Indian Wars.

The first settlement was in Lancaster County in an area called the Waxhaws, named for an Indian tribe that had been absorbed by the Catawba Indians several decades before white settlers came. Geographically the heaviest influx came to the rich country between present-day town of Lancaster and the Catawba Indian Land north of Twelve Mile Creek.

By 1756 the Old Waxhaw Presbyterian Church had been established. The Presbyterian synod listed about 120 families in attendance. In 1956 the church marked its 200th anniversary with a special ceremony.

One of the speakers was Julian Starr, then editor of the Lancaster News, but also a descendant of those early settlers. Starr, a prize-winning journalist for his reporting of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case, mused that there must have been something special about the Waxhaws. He said that he had made a list of distinguished Americans who had roots in the tiny community. He had 96 names on the list (which was considerably more than the 1956 membership of the church).

Starr was not the only person to speculate on what it was that lifted this rural community to such heights that historians had long since dubbed the Waxhaws as a "cradle of genius."

Lancaster county is the native ground of some interesting and important people. The best known are President Andrew Jackson, Dr. J. Marion Sims (the Father of Gynecology), Astronaut Charles Duke (who walked on the moon), Col. Elliott White Springs (aviator, author and mill owner) and Gen. William Richardson Davie (Revolutionary War hero, governor of NC and founder of UNC-Chapel Hill, Jefferson's envoy to France), etc.

Lancaster county also has more "history" in the sense that it abounds in historic places and events to chronicle: Old Waxhaw Presbyterian Church (the first church in the SC upcountry), important Revolutionary War battle sites (Buford Battleground, Hanging Rock), Andrew Jackson State Park, the tour markers of George Washington's 1791 stops, two Robert Mills-designed historic buildings (the courthouse and jail), Mount Carmel (AME Zion camp grounds), Haile Gold Mine (the most productive gold mine east of the Mississippi River), etc.

Old Waxhaw was the first South Carolina church to participate in the Great Revival (also called the Second Great Awakening) of 1802 with 22 preachers present, including Dr. Richard Furman for whom Furman University is named. Rev. John Brown, the Waxhaws pastor, left following his attempt to change the ritual, and worse in the eyes of his congregation, taking communion with Methodists. Brown went to Georgia and founded Franklin College, the forerunner of the University of Georgia.

The Waxhaws community had an unusual number of natives to enter politics. Besides a U. S. president, there was Stephen D. Miller, S. C. governor (and also father of the famed Civil War diarist, Mary Boykin Chesnut), William Smith a judge and U.S. senator (represented York County but was born in the Waxhaws and was educated there), James Hervey Witherspoon was a S. C. lieutenant-governor and his son of the same name was a member of the Confederate Congress. And, the present governor of S. C., Jim Hodges, is a native of Lancaster.

Business leaders native to the Waxhaws include William Henry Belk, founder of Belk stores, William States Lee who designed the Duke Power system and father of a later president of Duke Power, and John T. Stevens, a leader in the cotton oil business. There were four Heath brothers who owned banks, cotton mills, railroads, a fire insurance company, cotton brokerage house, etc.

All of that, and today most people seem to think that "Waxhaws" is a town in North Carolina that dropped its "s!"