NEWBERRY, S.C. — One local historian believes he's uncovered how the town and county of Newberry were named. It's remained a mystery for some time, but he thinks after significant research, he's cracked the code.
"The origin of the name Newberry has somewhat been clouded," said historian Ernest Shealy.
Some historical sources have suggested it was named after an early settler, and others say that it may have been a way to describe the area's beauty, but neither explanation was definitive.
Shealy says after much research he now believes the religious Quakers gave the town the name. "I came across the Quakers being established in a suburb in London called Newberry, as many of the Quakers moved to Pennsylvania"
He says during the French-Indian War in the 1760s, when the Appalachian area was open, the Quakers traveled down to South Carolina.
"Suddenly we have a naming opportunity in 1785 and about a third of the population in the county at that time were Quakers, so we believe that the Quakers gave us the name," Shealy said. "Well the Quakers left in the first quarter of the 19th century and moved west to Ohio and Indiana, and Quakers from our Newberry established a township in Ohio called Newberry and a town in Indiana called Newberry."
Newbery Mayor Foster Senn recently invited Shealy to speak to City council and hopes it provides information to residents on how the area's name came to be.
"It's very logical that the Quakers named other cities, they went and in the United States they named them Newberry, and so that makes sense we're some of our first settlers and we still have some remnants here, the markers and street names, that we believe can attribute to the Quaker Society of Friends," Senn said.