South Carolina Department of Archives and History
National Register Properties in South Carolina

Hopkins Family Cemetery, Richland County (Address Restricted)
S1081774015001 S1081774015002 S1081774015003 S1081774015004 S1081774015005
Overview Main Entrance Outer Brick Wall
and Fence Detail
Entrance
South Wall
North Wall Stile
with "Hopkins
Family Cemetery"
Tablet
S1081774015006 S1081774015007 S1081774015008 S1081774015009 S1081774015010
East Wall
with Fireplace
remains
East Wall
Fireplace Tablet
Detail
Cemetery Overview
Looking Northeast
Cemetery Overview
Looking Southwest
North Wall Stile
S1081774015011 S1081774015012 S1081774015013 S1081774015014 S1081774015015
South Wall
Entrance with
1960 Tablet
South Wall
Entrance
Southwest
Corner Detail
Northwest
Corner Overview
John and Sarah Thomas
Hopkins Gravemarker
S1081774015016 S1081774015017      
Brigadier General
William Hopkins
Gravemarker
Stones relocated
from the Goodwyn
Family Cemetery

The Hopkins Family Cemetery is significant as an early plantation cemetery in what later became the Hopkins community of what was then Richland District (later Richland County) and for its association with several prominent members of the Hopkins, Brevard, and Goodwyn families from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. The Hopkins Family Cemetery is significant as well in landscape architecture for its sandstone wall and stile, quite rare in South Carolina. The Hopkins Family Cemetery was established ca. 1775, with its present historic wall and stile built ca. 1835-1837, and continues to be used for burials of members of the Hopkins and related families of Lower Richland County. The cemetery is the earliest intact resource associated with the establishment of the Hopkins community centering on John Hopkins’ ca. 1764 Back Swamp Plantation, and for its association with John Hopkins (1739-1775), his son John Hopkins (1765-1832), and William Hopkins (1805-1863), grandson of the first John Hopkins, all of them of statewide significance as planters, politicians, and public figures in Richland District from the American Revolution to the Civil War. The cemetery contains sixty-nine marked graves, with headstones and footstones of granite, marble, fieldstone, or sandstone. Marble or granite ledgers, box tombs, table-top tombs, and obelisks are prominently featured, while other graves are marked by marble or granite tablets. Stones are arranged in rows, grouped by family units. The Hopkins Family Cemetery, in a lawn-like open space or field, is completely framed by a forest and hedgerows. The setting is wholly agrarian, and further reinforces the evocative quality of the site as an example of the Southern rural family cemetery as a symbolic feature of the Southern landscape. Listed in the National Register April 8, 2010.

View the complete text of the nomination form for this National Register property.

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