Seeking Abraham at Furman University

User Note: In the app, you can swipe left to see more photographs for each site. Under Settings, you can toggle to turn off the audio narration.

Furman's landscape, ranked frequently in the top ten most beautiful colleges in the country, tells a fragmented story of its past. This tour will mix chronology and a reasonable walking path to narrate Furman's roots in antebellum slave culture into its modern reckoning with that history.

The tour will start at Cherrydale Alumni House, a symbol of our antebellum start. Founded in 1826, it's the oldest private university in South Carolina.

We start at Cherrydale Alumni House because of the inspiration for this history: Abraham. A former slave, Abraham worked for the university’s first president and yet all we knew about his life is a blurry photograph of him beside the house and his name typed on the back of the same photo.

The school is named for Richard Furman, a clergyman considered the most important American Baptist leader in the U.S. South.

His son, James C. Furman, whose plantation home has been converted into the alumni house, was the school's first president.

Both of these men have plenty of rhetoric for unpacking. We’ll also look at campus from the perspective of the native people who first called the campus home, the enslaved and laborers, the women who pushed against the Furmans' views, the eventual students and faculty who pushed desegregation forward, and the reckoning process that brought attention to these, especially the Seeking Abraham report released by the Task Force on Slavery and Justice report on July 28, 2018.

Funding and Background the Project

Sponsored by a grant from the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) in 2017, this digital humanities project was the first step in inventorying campus for its persuasive capacity in fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The tour has been updated as campus has changed significantly to reflect this shared history and reckoning process: renaming of buildings, a new statue and plaza centerpiece to campus, and better contextual plaques along the way.

Still, more can be done to foster awareness and create equity. Along the way, reflective questions and prompts will help set the tone for future reckoning and possible reconciliation.

A special thanks for the help of Jeffrey Makala and Julia Cowart in Furman's Special Collections & Archives.

The places you'll visit were first inventoried and described by Furman students in Communication Studies, both in an independent study and Rhetoric+Strategy.

For any questions or concerns about this tour, please contact brandon.inabinet@furman.edu