Spartanburg, South Carolina: A Name From the Spartan Regiment

Spartanburg, South Carolina, borrowed its name from a militia unit: the Spartan Regiment, organized in the upcountry in 1775 at the start of the Revolution. The “burg” came ten years later, when the legislature drew the county lines and wrote the name down as Spartanburgh.

A regiment of their own

Dr. J. B. O. Landrum, who wrote the county’s history in 1900, starts the story in the summer of 1775. South Carolina’s Council of Safety sent William Henry Drayton and the Rev. William Tennent (Landrum spells it Tennant) into the backcountry to explain the quarrel with Britain to settlers, many of whom didn’t back the Patriot cause. The whole region between the Broad and Saluda rivers was one militia district under Colonel Thomas Fletchall, who, Landrum says, stayed hostile to the American cause the whole war.

The settlers along Lawson’s Fork, Fair Forest and the Tyger rivers were different. On August 21, 1775, Drayton wrote from Lawson’s Fork that “these people are active and spirited” and “staunch in our favor,” and that they “insist in being formed into a regiment independent of” Fletchall. By September 11 they had one, under Colonel John Thomas. “It was called the Spartan Regiment,” Landrum writes, citing Gibbs’s Documentary History. In February 1776 the Provincial Congress split the region into three election districts, and the top one became the “Upper or Spartan District.”

Why “Spartan”?

Here’s the thing: nobody in Landrum’s account explains the choice in so many words. Landrum thought the name was “doubtless suggested” by Drayton, who was president of the Provincial Congress that created the Spartan District and wanted to honor the patriotism he’d seen on his trip. That’s Landrum’s reading, and he doesn’t quote a document that says so. His own explanation is that the settlers had earned it: “Like the ancient Spartans of Greece, they were inured to hardship and sacrifices.” Henry Gannett’s federal list of name origins, in its 1905 edition, gives a one-line version of the same idea: county and city were “so called from the rigorous self-discipline practiced by the inhabitants during the Revolutionary war.”

Adding the “burg”

The county came after the war. Robert Mills, in his 1826 Statistics of South Carolina, says only that “the name of Spartanburg was given it after the revolutionary war.” The law is more specific. An act of March 12, 1785, carved new counties out of the old Ninety-Six District, and one of them, bounded by Laurens County, the Indian line, North Carolina and the Broad River, “shall be called by the name of Spartanburgh.”

Landrum explains that the last syllable “was simply a suffix agreed upon and added to the old name Spartan,” and that “by common consent and modern usage” the “h” was dropped later. That’s why you’ll run into “Spartanburgh” in the old laws. Today’s city stands on what was Thomas Williamson’s plantation, where the county built its first courthouse on two acres he donated.

The jug-of-whiskey story

Landrum also passes along a story about how that spot got picked, though he says plainly he’d “always doubted” it. A committee spent a whole day hunting for a county seat without agreeing on one. They’d brought a jug of whiskey, camped for the night at a little spring, “imbibed freely,” and decided the courthouse should go right there. Landrum printed it “for what it is worth,” and you should take it the same way: as a tale that came with the town, not as the record.

Sources & further reading

• J. B. O. Landrum, History of Spartanburg County (1900). The 1785 act and the commission of the first county justices (pp. 2–4); “Spartanburgh,” the suffix “added to the old name Spartan” and the dropped “h” (p. 5); Drayton and Tennent’s 1775 mission and Fletchall’s district (pp. 5–7); Drayton’s letter of August 21, 1775, from Lawson’s Fork (pp. 6–7); the regiment under Colonel John Thomas by September 11, “It was called the Spartan Regiment,” and the “Upper or Spartan District” of February 11, 1776 (p. 8); the name “doubtless suggested” by Drayton (p. 9); “Like the ancient Spartans of Greece” (p. 11); Thomas Williamson’s two acres and the whiskey tradition “which we have always doubted” (pp. 31–32).
• The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 4. Act No. 1263 of March 12, 1785: one county “shall be called by the name of Spartanburgh” (p. 662).
• Robert Mills, Statistics of South Carolina (1826). “The name of Spartanburg was given it after the revolutionary war”; the village of Spartanburg as the seat of the district’s courts (pp. 724–725).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Spartanburg, county and city, “so called from the rigorous self-discipline practiced by the inhabitants during the Revolutionary war” (p. 288).
• GNIS feature 1250982 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Spartanburg: county and coordinates.