The Fairfield News and Herald of Nov. 1, 1882 reported – “Capt. Hayne McMeekin was in town Monday. He reports that things are quiet in the Monticello area. The academy is doing well and the teachers are giving satisfactory work.”
City Directories and History: The Monticello Store and Post Office is an unusually intact example of an antebellum rural store. Stylistically, the building appears to date from the mid-nineteenth century; however, local tradition suggests that it could have been built as early as 1820. It was reportedly owned by the Reverend Jonathan Davis, a prominent
minister and state legislator from Fairfield District in the early nineteenth century. According to local tradition the rear portion of the store was used
as a dormitory for the Jefferson-Monticello Academy in the 1820s. The building was used as a store and post office after the Civil War until the mid-1960s. The Monticello Store and Post Office is a one-story, frame, weather boarded, T-shaped building. The front portion of the building has a gable roof with the gable end facing the road. The rear portion has a transverse gable roof. The main feature of the façade is an undercut gallery with a pedimented gable supported by octagonal wooden columns. The façade is sheathed in flush board with a chair rail and has a double-leaf, center entrance with plain surround flanked by windows with paneled wooden shutters. The roof is wood shingled. Listed in the National Register December 6, 1984. [Courtesy of the S.C. Dept. of Archives and History]
Monticello, the earliest village established in western Fairfield, is located on Highway 215, about thirty miles north of Columbia. Local tradition maintains that Monticello was established in 1800 and named for the Virginia plantation home of Thomas Jefferson, who contributed $100 toward the founding of the Jefferson Monticello Academy in Monticello. In 1802, when the trustees and founders of the Academy petitioned the legislature to be incorporated as a school, they reported that a “handsome and commodious Building” had been erected and asked the state for pecuniary aid “to procure a Library and other Apparatus necessary for the education of learning and science.” The Academy, according to local historian William Edrington, who attended the school in the early 1820’s, offered a diversified curriculum including Latin, the classics, geography and religion. There appears to have been great expectations for Monticello’s growth and expansion. An undated village plan called for the laying out of streets and sixteen squares, to be subdivided into lots, with the Academy to be situated in the center. The Monticello Methodist Church was incorporated in 1819 and its present structure was dedicated in 1861. Monticello is the only village in western Fairfield to be included in Mills’ Atlas and described in Mills’ Statistics of S.C., Bypassed by the railroads, both before and after the Civil War, Monticello had only one mercantile establishment and a post office in 1883. Today, Monticello remains a small but distinct community.
*** The store was operated late by the Chappell family but owned by Sam Burley. The store closed in 1934 and now belongs to the Robertson Estate (2013).
*** Historian, Harvey S. Teal’s S.C. Post Office History, 1989 states: the “Monticello Post Office as operated by the first Postmaster Mr. Jonathan Davis, from ca. 1809 – Civil War.”
Click on the More Information > link to find additional data – A Fairfield County Sketchbook, by J.S. Bolick, 2000 (Courtesy of the FCHS)
Open the MORE INFORMATION link (found under the primary picture), to view an enlargeable, 1896 Postal Map of Fairfield County, S.C.
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