Local city information for Orangeburg, SC

Orangeburg, also known as "The Garden City," is the principal city and county seat of Orangeburg County, South Carolina, United States. The city population was 12,765 at the 2000 census, although the greater Orangeburg area had a population of approximately 45,000. The population declined from the 1950s to the 1990s, but it is starting to see an increase. The city is located southeast of Columbia, on the north fork of the Edisto River.

A civil rights protest was staged at a whites-only bowling alley in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968. In what would become known as the Orangeburg Massacre, officers of the SC Highway Patrol became involved in an altercation with the protesters. The officers fired into the crowd, killing 3 and wounding 27.

In May 2000, the city created the Orangeburg County Community of Character initiative, which is a collaborative effort by the Downtown Orangeburg Revitalization Association (DORA), The Times and Democrat newspaper, the Orangeburg County Chamber of Commerce, and the Orangeburg County Development Commission.

In 2005, the National Civic League awarded Orangeburg County with the coveted All-America City Award (which can be awarded to either a city or a county), which recognizes and encourages civic excellence and honors communities in which citizens, government, businesses, and non-profit organizations demonstrate successful resolution of critical community issues.

In 2007, Orangeburg hosted the first 2007 Democratic U.S. presidential candidate debate at Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium on the campus of South Carolina State University.

Orangeburg, named for William IV, Prince of Orange, the son-in-law of King George II, of England, was first settled in 1704 by an Indian trader, George Sterling.

To encourage settlement, the General Assembly of the Province of South Carolina in 1730 made the area into a township in the shape of a parallelogram 15 x . In 1735, a colony of 200 Swiss, German and Dutch immigrants formed a community near the banks of the North Edisto River. The site was attractive because of the fertile soil and the abundance of wildlife. The river provided an outlet to the port of Charleston for the agriculture and lumber products. The town soon became a well-established and successful colony, composed chiefly of small farmers.

The church played an important role in the early life of Orangeburg. The first church was of Lutheran denomination but was later the Episcopal Church. The church building was erected prior to 1763 in the center of the village and was destroyed at the time of the Revolutionary War. A subsequent church building was used as a smallpox hospital by General William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War.

The center of the original village was near what is now Broughton and Henley Streets, according to a marker there.

In the 1960s Orangeburg was a major center of Civil Rights Movement activity involving students from both Claflin College and South Carolina State College and residents of Orangeburg's Black community. When economic retaliation was used against local Blacks seeking school integration in 1956, students came to their support with hunger strikes, boycotts, and mass marches. In 1960, over 400 students were arrested on sit-ins and integration marches organized by CORE. In August 1963, the Orangeburg Freedom Movement (OFM) chaired by Dr. Harlowe Caldwell of the NAACP, submitted 10 pro-integration demands to the Orangeburg Mayor and City Council. After negotiations failed, mass demonstrations similar to those that occurred in Birmingham resulted in more than 1,300 arrests. On February 8, 1968, after days of protests against a segregated bowling alley, violence broke out on the South Carolina State campus between police and Black students. Police opened fire on a crowd of students, killing Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton, and wounding 27 others in what became known as the "Orangeburg Massacre."

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