My beef with interstates is that they replace town names with exit numbers, thus robbing a place of its distinct identity. But a town deliberately named after a number? I had to know more.
“You got 10 minutes?” Margie Blalock, the director of tourism, asks me inside the Ninety Six Visitors Center. This is a polite Southern way of asking me if I have more than an hour. I tell her I have all the time in the world, which is good because, with the history of this town, you need it.
In the museum wing, she tells me about such historical Ninety Six luminaries as Benjamin Mays (mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Bill Voiselle (major league pitcher), John Drummond (legislator and oil tycoon), and the band The Swingin’ Medallions (“Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)”). The town may be best known for the Ninety Six National Historic Site, home to a reconstructed colonial trading village and the star fort that was the scene of a notable battle in the American Revolution.
As for the main reason I came, she says, “Nobody knows how Ninety Six, South Carolina, got its name.”
The historian’s best guess, she says, is that it was part of The Old 96 District and that there were a bunch of nines and sixes on the surveying maps. But they also have a legend. Do I want to hear it?
And here is where Margie Blalock slips into Marjorie LaNelle, her pen name for the two books she’s written--The Apparitions of Abbeville and Ghost Stories of Uptown Greenwood. Of course, I want to hear it.
“A Cherokee princess, Issaqueena, fell in love with a fur trader named Allan Francis,” she says. “That was forbidden, but they fell in love, and one day she overheard the Cherokee warriors plotting to kill Allan. So, she rode bareback, 96 miles, from Keowee to here, to warn her lover that there was an impending attack.”
“You got 10 minutes?” Margie Blalock, the director of tourism, asks me inside the Ninety Six Visitors Center. This is a polite Southern way of asking me if I have more than an hour. I tell her I have all the time in the world, which is good because, with the history of this town, you need it.
In the museum wing, she tells me about such historical Ninety Six luminaries as Benjamin Mays (mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Bill Voiselle (major league pitcher), John Drummond (legislator and oil tycoon), and the band The Swingin’ Medallions (“Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)”). The town may be best known for the Ninety Six National Historic Site, home to a reconstructed colonial trading village and the star fort that was the scene of a notable battle in the American Revolution.
As for the main reason I came, she says, “Nobody knows how Ninety Six, South Carolina, got its name.”
The historian’s best guess, she says, is that it was part of The Old 96 District and that there were a bunch of nines and sixes on the surveying maps. But they also have a legend. Do I want to hear it?
And here is where Margie Blalock slips into Marjorie LaNelle, her pen name for the two books she’s written--The Apparitions of Abbeville and Ghost Stories of Uptown Greenwood. Of course, I want to hear it.
“A Cherokee princess, Issaqueena, fell in love with a fur trader named Allan Francis,” she says. “That was forbidden, but they fell in love, and one day she overheard the Cherokee warriors plotting to kill Allan. So, she rode bareback, 96 miles, from Keowee to here, to warn her lover that there was an impending attack.”
