2214 Barhamville Road
Site of Reverend Carroll House
The Reverend Richard Carroll lived and died at 2214 Barhamville Road, in a house no longer extant, and today the site of a modern apartment building. Born into slavery in 1859 in Barnwell County, Richard Carroll studied theology at Benedict College in Columbia and Shaw University in North Carolina and became a Baptist minister. After serving as chaplain for the 10th U.S. Infantry during the Spanish-American War, Carroll returned to South Carolina and founded the Industrial Home for Boys and Girls, an institution located just outside of the city of Columbia on land once owned by Hamptons and established with the purpose of educating African American youth.
Carroll was politically very active, championing an agrarian philosophy which encouraged African Americans to avoid urban areas and maintain a rural lifestyle. Though near to the city’s boundaries, Carroll’s own home on Barhamville Road, during the early twentieth century, still consisted mostly of farmsteads and open land. Carroll was remarkable for his unusual influence among white politicians, garnering the support of individuals such as South Carolina Senator Benjamin R. Tillman and U.S. ambassador William E. Gonzalez. Criticized by some as too acquiescent to the inequalities existing between blacks and whites, Reverend Carroll was nonetheless a nationally prominent African American minister and speaker, and his funeral at First Calvary Baptist Church on Pine Street, on November 1, 1929, was the first police-escorted funeral held for any African American in the city of Columbia.(1)
(1) Richard Carroll Papers, 1908-1977, Manuscripts Collection at South Caroliniana Library, USC, http://library.sc.edu/socar/uscs/1998/carrol98.html (September 2014).