James Lide Coker

Coker, James Lide (Jan. 3, 1837 - June 25, 1918), manufacturer and philanthropist, was born on a large plantation near Society Hill, S. C., an old Welsh settlement, the son of Caleb and Hannah (Lide) Coker. He early manifested fondness for agriculture, which remained one of the primary interests of his life. After preliminary training at a local academy and at the South Carolina Military Institute of Charleston, he entered Harvard in 1857 for special work in soil analysis and plant development. His courses under Agassiz and Asa Gray delighted him, but when he was given by his father a substantial estate near Hartsville, he returned the following year to undertake actual farming. He organized at once an agricultural society for the dissemination of scientific ideas. On Mar. 28, 1860, he married Susan Stout of Alabama. At the outbreak of the war he volunteered and was commissioned captain of Company E, 6th South Carolina Infantry. After two years of hard fighting in Virginia, he was transferred to Tennessee, wounded at Lookout Mountain, promoted major, and at Missionary Ridge was captured. Paroled in July 1864, he returned to his ruined plantation.

A brief experience in the legislature, 1864-66, taught him that he had no desire for public life. He thereupon devoted himself to business. His ventures were varied and uniformly successful. He continued to farm for fifty years after his return and never once had an unprofitable season. In 1866 he opened a small country store at Hartsville which grew in time into one of the largest department stores of the state. From 1874 until 1881 he was a member of Norwood & Coker, dealers at Charleston in cotton and naval supplies. In 1884 he organized the Darlington National Bank. Five years later he built a small railroad from Darlington to Hartsville, subsequently purchased by the Atlantic Coast Line. In the same year he organized, with the aid of his son, James L. Coker, Jr., the Carolina Fiber Company, first corporation to make on a practical scale wood pulp from the pine wood so common in that section. A few years later he promoted the Southern Novelty Company, manufacturing from paper the cones and parallel tubes used by yarn mills for shipping the yarn. In the nineties he organized the Hartsville Cotton Mill, the Hartsville Cotton-Seed Oil Mill, and the Bank of Hartsville. Meantime, cooperating with his son, David R. Coker, he developed on his farm one of the South's principal experimental agencies for seed-testing and plant development. With the exception of four years spent in Charleston from 1877, he lived at Hartsville.

Deeply though tolerantly religious, Coker was interested in all phases of social welfare, particularly in education. In 1908 he made an initial subscription of $85,000 in land and $150,000 in cash for the establishment of a college for women in Hartsville. He added further donations; and it was due almost exclusively to his efforts that this institution, now called Coker College, was able to meet the requirements for standard colleges for women. Virtually bankrupt at the close of the war, he accumulated one of the largest private fortunes in the history of South Carolina. He was the state's most versatile business man, one of its most cultivated gentlemen, and the foremost South Carolina philanthropist of his generation.