Editor’s note: This is part of a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
Before Furman University became one of Greenville’s defining institutions, it was part of an older question: How should a society educate its ministers, teachers and civic leaders?
Furman was founded in 1826 as the Furman Academy and Theological Institution, created by the South Carolina Baptist Convention to train ministers and promote Baptist education. It moved more than once before opening in Greenville in 1851, on land acquired from Vardry McBee. By then, Greenville was an Upcountry town eager to become a center of commerce, religion, culture and learning. The downtown campus stood on the bluff above the Reedy River, on the present site of County Square, until students began moving to a new campus north of town in 1955.
Furman’s arrival gave Greenville intellectual standing and ties to a statewide Baptist network. Education was not separate from faith. It was a way to form character, leadership, and moral order.
But Furman also emerged within the slaveholding South. That does not make the institution unusual for its time – it makes it representative of the world in which it was created. Across South Carolina, churches and schools operated within an economy of enslaved labor, plantation wealth and cotton. Greenville differed from the Lowcountry, but it was not separate from slavery. By 1860, nearly 35 percent of Greenville County’s population was enslaved. The Upcountry occupied a different place within the slave South, but it was part of it.
The university’s name carries that complexity. Richard Furman was one of the South’s most influential Baptist ministers and a leading voice for religious education. Writing to South Carolina’s governor in 1822, he mounted a scriptural defense of slavery, holding that Christianity permitted the practice and obliged slaveholders only to treat the enslaved humanely. To many white Southern Christians, faith and slavery were not contradictions. Religion often became one of the ways the existing order explained itself.
That is the context Furman inherited. The point is not to single out Furman as uniquely flawed, but to see how deeply slavery shaped the institutions and moral language of antebellum South Carolina.
Furman today is a different institution. Its 2018 “Seeking Abraham” report, a study of its ties to slavery, shows a willingness to examine that inheritance rather than avoid it. That is what mature institutions do. They preserve what is worthy, confront what is painful and help a community understand itself honestly. Greenville’s history is fuller when Furman’s story is told in full.
Furman’s history is documented in Courtney Tollison Hartness’ “Furman University, 1826-2026: A Bicentennial History” (Duke University Press).
Next: How Benjamin Perry’s Greenville, despite Unionist doubts, was drawn toward secession by fear, ambition, politics, and powerful local voices.
Russell Stall is a Greenville native, former at-large Greenville City Council member, and certified city planner. He serves as executive director of the Greenville County Historical Society. For more information, visit greenvillehistory.org.
