Dexter Edgar Converse

This monument honors the founder of Converse College, a Vermont man who built his fortune in Southern cotton. Dexter Edgar Converse was born in Vermont and settled in Spartanburg before the Civil War as the textile industry was taking root. He prospered in the mills around Spartanburg.

By eighteen eighty-nine, the story goes, he was frustrated that his college-age daughter had no good school nearby and ready to leave for Washington. To keep him, the leading citizens of Spartanburg organized to build a women's college, and within eighteen months they had raised the money and bought the site. The school opened on October first, eighteen ninety, named for the man whose threat to leave had set it all in motion.

Converse died here in Spartanburg in eighteen ninety-nine.