Ninety Six National Historic Site

Ninety Six National Historic Site preserves one of the most intricate Revolutionary War landscapes in the Carolina backcountry. Here, a prospering 18th-century village became a Loyalist bastion, witnessing South Carolina’s first land engagement of the war in November 1775 at Savage’s Old Fields. The later British decision to fortify Ninety Six in 1780 turned this rural crossroads into a strategic node in their southern campaign, culminating in Nathanael Greene’s 28-day siege in 1781 against the earthen Star Fort. The star-shaped fortification, still legible in the groundworks, offers an uncommon opportunity to study field engineering, siege approaches, and the limits of Patriot operations against entrenched Loyalist defenses. Spread across more than a thousand acres of rolling South Carolina terrain, the landscape retains traces of the original town, its defensive works, and associated historic features, making it a rare, continuous outdoor record of backcountry civil-military conflict. For those interested in command decisions, fortification design, and the contested loyalties of the southern theater, Ninety Six serves as a case study in how a seemingly small frontier community assumed outsized operational significance during the American Revolution.