Throughout these early decades and relocations, Furman weathered financial straits and low enrollment. Its doors were kept open by donations from the Baptist faithful across South Carolina, a state dominated by the slave economy. Nearly all the university’s largest donors and trustees were slaveholders, and many of them were planters (a designation given to those who held twenty or more slaves). It would take four relocations before formally becoming Furman University in the 1850s. "...In other words, much of Furman’s history of movement and fundraising was racially motivated, and nearly half of its antebellum wealth derived from slave labor—wealth that continues to build capacity for exploration and decision-making today." And yet, in the antebellum years, Furman teetered on the brink of closure and was sustained financially only by toil of the enslaved.
In 1837, the school, now called The Furman Institution, relocated to land in Fairfield County near the plantation of the Reverend Jonathan Davis, the Reverend James C. Furman’s father-in-law. "In 1837, the school moved again to Winnsboro in Fairfield County and briefly added a manual labor component to the curriculum. The new site was near to the plantation of James C. Furman’s father-in-law, the Reverend Jonathan Davis, a Baptist minister and chairman of the Furman Board of Trustees, who owned more than seventy slaves and used that wealth to build the campus." "James C. Furman’s own slaveholdings in Winnsboro (mostly gained through his marriage), when he moved to Greenville in 1850-1851, were 56 in number...".
Cherrydale.