"F" is for Farrow, Samuel (1759-1824)

"F" is for Farrow, Samuel (1759-1824). Congressman, legislator, reformer. Born in Virginia, Farrow’s family moved to South Carolina in the 1760s. Although he had little formal education, he had a successful career as a lawyer. Farrow was elected lieutenant governor in 1810 and a U.S. congressman in 1812. In 1816 Spartanburg District elected him to the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he pursed a goal he had conceived several years before: the creation of a state lunatic asylum. He chaired a legislative committee that reported the state contained numerous lunatics who needed the care and protection an asylum would provide. Farrow tried, but failed to get an asylum act through the legislature in 1820. An act authorizing an asylum was passed in 1822, but Samuel Farrow did not live to see the building completed.