Posts

Showing posts from June, 2013

Cokesbury - Ninety Six History Tour

Image
I had been looking forward to this day for two months now, and today was that day. The day of the Cokesbury College Tour , that is. The Cokesbury College Tour is part of Greenwood's annual Festival of Flowers , and this past Saturday the college was open to the public. For this outing, I'm joined by Tom Taylor , and his good friend Alan Russell. Cokesbury College Cokesbury is situated a few miles north of Greenwood, South Carolina. Cokesbury was established in 1824 as a planned Methodist village after the people of the Tabernacle community decided to move to a higher elevation. The village was named Mount Ariel at first, but became Cokesbury in 1834 to honor Methodist bishops  Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury . In 1854, the Bascombe Lodge No. 80 of Freemasons opened the Masonic Female College of South Carolina, an experiment in women's education. Financial difficulties forced the school to close in 1874. In 1876, the South Carolina Methodist Conference bought the building t