Furman University home page
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Founding a University
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
The Furman Academy and Theological Institute
Edgefield County, 1826
Although the Reverend Richard Furman died the year before, the founding of The Furman Academy and Theological Institute in Edgefield in 1826 fulfilled a lifelong vision of the Baptist leader. As the pastor of Charleston’s First Baptist Church from 1787 until his death in 1824, Furman had promoted both religious education for ministers and general academic education for the laity. In 1821, Furman and a small group of Baptist ministers established the South Carolina Baptist Convention, which “considered as a primary object”...“the gratuitous education of indigent, pious young men, designated for the gospel ministry” through “the organization and support of a seminary of learning in this state”...“under the patronage of the general convention.” In its first twenty-five years, the university struggled to survive financially. It tested three locations before its move to Greenville in 1851.
Edgefield Campus
The first campus in Edgefield was established on land donated by Eldred Simkins.
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