Lincolnville: Built by the Freed

Just outside Charleston, the small town of Lincolnville carries one of the most deliberate founding stories in South Carolina.

In eighteen sixty-seven, two years after the end of the Civil War, the Reverend Richard Harvey Cain and six other African American men purchased six hundred and twenty acres from a railroad company north of Charleston. Cain was a pastor sent south by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and he believed the freedpeople deserved not just freedom but land. The group resold parcels to formerly enslaved families who had come in from the Sea Islands. Cain founded Ebenezer AME Church on the property, and the congregation became the heart of the new community.

The town was formally incorporated in eighteen eighty-nine and given the name Lincolnville to honor President Abraham Lincoln. Cain himself went on to serve two terms in the United States House of Representatives.

The National Park Service has since added Lincolnville to its Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, recognizing it as one of the clearest surviving examples of what freed people built when they were given the chance to build something.