Saluda County Historical Society

Meeting at St. Williams

Jeremiah Donovant and His Wife Emiline Rodgers

Jeremiah Donovant, a stonemason from Ireland, came to America in the early 1850s to help build St Mary’s Catholic Church in Edgefield. Completed in 1858, Jeremiah migrated to the Mine Creek area of Edgefield District in the 1860s. In 1863 he met and later married Emiline Rodgers, the window of Confederate soldier John Salter. John Salter and Emiline were charter members of Richland Springs Baptist Church.

Marsh-Johnson House Restoration

Historic Sites - Marsh-Johnson House

The Marsh-Johnson House, an excellent example of a plantation plain house, has withstood the elements for over 200 years in its own little corner of what is now Saluda County. This house symbolized the owner's prosperity and status in the Carolina upcountry in the 18th and 19th centuries.

1st Day of restoration, note long walls and clapboard inside shed rooms. The shed rooms were added in the middle 1960s from boards removed from the torn down “ell” and separate dining room and kitchen.
An ell is an extension of a building which is at right angles to the main part of the building.
The file on the M-J house from the 1990s, when the Historical Society first received the house, mentions the ell. Someone came by and remembered where the ell was located.

Mount Willing Books

Society Network - Books and Other Media

Charles Andrews

Bela Padgette Herlong

Carol Hardy Bryan

We’ve worked for fifteen years researching and amassing the history of Mount Willing, which was once a part of the royal colony of South Carolina, then of Ninety Six District, of Edgefield County/District, and today of Saluda County. Chapman, in his history of Edgefield County, published in 1897, stated that Mount Willing was one of the four population centers of the area from the Revolution to the War Between the States.