Clemson plays Alabama in the College Football Playoff National Championship. This is Round IV for the two Southern titans. You may be familiar with Alabama’s location, as Tuscaloosa’s among the more famous college towns in the country.
Where the heck is Clemson? In a lovely little town
It’s not obvious where the football powerhouse is located. Let’s have a quick geography lesson.
Photo by Mike Comer/Getty Images
But Clemson’s a little bit more low-key, and with a public school without the state in its name, you might be hard-pressed to realize where it is on the map.
First of all, don’t overthink it.
Clemson University, home of the fighting Clemson Tigers, is in Clemson. Clemson, South Carolina to be exact. It’s a quaint town tucked into the northwest corner of the Palmetto State.
It’s got a population of around 14,000 people and is the prototypical college town. The origins of the university tell us why the school is where it is.
Clemson was founded in 1889 through a bequest from Thomas Green Clemson, a Philadelphia-born, European-educated engineer, musician and artist who married John C. Calhoun’s daughter, Anna Maria, and eventually settled at her family plantation in South Carolina. A longtime advocate for an agricultural college in the Upstate, Clemson left his home and fortune to the state of South Carolina to create the institution that bears his name.
That agricultural lineage is a direct reason why the Tigers and the South Carolina Gamecocks wage one of the fiercest rivalries in college football. If you hear a Gamecock tell it, then it’s the doctors and lawyers and politicians that go to Carolina, while the country bumpkins go to Clemson.
That was the underlying political tension when the school was created, according to the University of South Carolina.
The rivalry began with the escalating tension within South Carolina’s government. The objective of University of South Carolina was to bring the Upstate and Lowcountry of South Carolina together through a place of higher learning. However, critics like Benjamin Tillman saw the university as elitist with a subpar agricultural program and pushed for a college that focused on more practical education. After some political back and forth, Tillman was able to create Clemson Agriculture College.
The late Southern humorist, Lewis Gizzard, referred to Clemson as Auburn with a lake.
It’s a nod to the fact that both of those towns are strikingly similar.
God, last year in Death Valley. The heat was nearly unbearable. People fainted. And I was stuck, as are all Georgia fans when they venture to Auburn-with-a-lake, deep in the end zone.
They’re public schools in southern states without clear names to give you a hint as to where they are. Auburn’s also agrarian in nature, and deals with a similar little brother syndrome to the elitist Alabama. There’s some truth to the joke, and it’s why it works.
Maybe take a visit some time?
It’s a lovely little town.
And the football team’s really good, too.
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