Randolph Cemetery

Randolph Cemetery is a South Carolina historical marker in Columbia, Richland County.

Richland County · at the W terminus of Elmwood Ave., Columbia, Columbia

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Front: Randolph Cemetery, founded in 1871, was one of the first black cemeteries in Columbia. It was named for Benjamin Franklin Randolph (1837-1868), a black state senator assassinated in 1868 near Hodges, in Abbeville County. Randolph, a native of Kentucky and a free black before the Civil War, had been a chaplain in the Union Army, an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a newspaper publisher before he was elected to represent Orangeburg County in the S.C. Senate in 1868. Reverse: Eight other black lawmakers from the Reconstruction era are buried here: Henry Cardozo (1830-1886), William Fabriel Myers (1850-1917), William Beverly Nash (1822-1888), Robert John Palmer (1849-1928), William M. Simons (1810-1878), Samuel Benjamin Thompson (1837-1909), Charles McDuffie Wilder (1835-1902), and Lucius W. Wimbush (1839-1872). Randolph Cemetery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.

TodayHistorical map

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David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries

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under a mile from where William Gabby lived in the 1760s

what this marker records spans 1777 to 1789, overlapping William Gabby's years here

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Marker data: South Carolina Historical Marker Program, SC Department of Archives and History
Sponsored by Downtown Columbia Task Force and the Committee for the Restoration and Beautification of Randolph Cemetery

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