Fairfield County: Where Cornwallis Wintered

Fairfield County in the South Carolina Midlands carries a name that may have come from an invader. Tradition holds that Lord Cornwallis, encamped here with his army during the autumn of seventeen eighty, looked out over the rolling hills and gently wooded farmland and said something to the effect of: what fair fields. Whether he actually said it is debated. That he was here is not.

Cornwallis made his headquarters in the county seat of Winnsboro from October of seventeen eighty through January of seventeen eighty-one, one of the longer occupations of an American town by British forces during the Revolutionary War. The house where he stayed still stands in Winnsboro. From here he attempted to coordinate the suppression of a South Carolina backcountry that kept refusing to submit, even after Charleston had fallen and the main Continental Army in the South had been captured.

The county lay in the backcountry where the Regulator movement arose in the seventeen sixties, when backcountry settlers petitioned, and eventually rioted, for representation and circuit courts in a colonial system dominated by the coastal planter class. That tradition of organized defiance carried directly into the Revolutionary War. The county produced Patriot leaders including General Richard Winn, for whom the county seat is named, who continued harassing British forces throughout the occupation.

After the Revolution, Fairfield County followed the arc of much of the Carolina Piedmont. The cotton gin transformed the landscape. Fairfield planters became prominent cotton producers and slaveholders in the South Carolina Midlands. The county voted for secession and sent men to Confederate armies. After the war, cotton agriculture persisted, eventually displaced by textile mills. The Winnsboro cotton mill, built in the late nineteenth century, operated as an economic anchor through most of the twentieth century.

Today the county is largely rural, anchored by Winnsboro's grid of nineteenth-century streets and the courthouse that faces the town square where Cornwallis once quartered his men.