Building the Greenville Campus

Throughout its 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