This collection contains letters and other materials surrounding the life of five-term U.S. congressman David Wyatt Aiken, who biographers have styled "South Carolina's Militant Agrarian." Born in 1828 in Winnsboro (Fairfield County, S.C.), Aiken served as a colonel in the Confederate Army and later went on to serve in the S.C. House of Representatives. He was a member of the Agricultural and Mechanical Society of South Carolina and served on the executive committee of the National Grange. From 1877 until 1887, he represented South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives. He died in 1887 at his home in Cokesbury, South Carolina. The collection consists in large part of letters to his second wife Virginia Carolina Smith Aiken (1831-1900) , as well as a hand-written autobiography and other materials surrounding his life.

These forty South Carolina soil survey maps from the early Nineteen Hundreds were prepared with booklets to explain the soil classifications on the county level. They include information that do not appear on updated survey maps, such as old rail lines, schools, churches and other structures as well as entire towns that no longer exist.

The 1825 publication of Robert Mills’ Atlas of the State of South Carolina marked an American cartographic first. This volume is the first systematic atlas of any state in the union. Remarkably, too, no other state atlas of South Carolina was published for the next century and a half.

This core unit of three hundred fifty items -two hundred sixty-two manuscripts, miscellaneous printed artifacts, and eighty-eight photographs- added to the papers of the late Joseph Armstrong DeLaine (1898-1974) covers chiefly the period from 1942, when he submitted his annual report as secretary of the Clarendon County Citizen[s] Committee, to 1974, when he delivered an address entitled "History leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court's Decision outlawing Segregation in Public Schools."

Originally conceived in the late 18th Century, fire insurance maps provided structural and urban environmental information necessary for insurance underwriters. Included here are over 2000 Sanborn Maps of over eighty cities in South Carolina from 1884 - 1923 as well as over two hundred unpublished draft maps of additional cities in the state.

The 1930-1943: Depression –Era Library History in South Carolina collection consists of photographs and documents from the archives of the SC State Library. These digital images highlight public libraries, bookmobiles, librarians, and patrons from around the state. Many photographs and documents relate to the federal Works Project Administration (WPA) Library Project in South Carolina, which provided statewide library services from 1935 to 1943.

The South Caroliniana Library has been collecting photographs of train stations, depots, rail yards, engines, and rolling stock for many years. The images come in as single items, as part of other collections, or as collections of their own. There are also photographs of railways used by the mining and lumber industries. Presented here are photographs pulled from different sources to provide the researcher with a virtual collection of South Carolina railway related photographs.

Since 1911 the South Carolina State Department of Education has published a yearly directory of schools in the state that includes Department of Education staff information. Information catalogued in each issue is different; some issues also include additional school and district information, listings of private schools and colleges, statistics, and state educational organizations associations. These directories provide valuable information about the school buildings and educational leaders in a community.

The Map Library has made available from this site 236 of it's 15 minute, 30 minute, and 7.5 minute topographic maps of South Carolina. Measuring 14 x 20 inches the Polyconic Projections were first published in the late 19th Century. Some were produced by the Army, others by the Corps. of Engineers and the remainder were produced by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).