Sternberger-Welch-Hamer House

Emanuel Sternberger was born in 1859 to a schoolteacher and a homemaker in Neidlingen, Germany. At the age of 14, he immigrated alone to the United States with $250.00 given to him by his father. He made his way to South Carolina, working in Florence and Darlington. At the age of 19, he organized the E. Sternberger Mercantile Company in Marlboro County, three years before the town of Clio was incorporated. Sternberger rented a small building, where he lived and operated a dry goods business buying and selling cotton. With his profits, he began investing in land and eventually acquired a shirt factory in Philadelphia, which temporarily took him away from South Carolina.

After selling the shirt factory, he organized the Revolution Cotton Mills in 1899 with Caesar and Moses Cone in Greensboro, North Carolina. Sternberger served as president until his death. In 1900, Emanuel Sternberger married Bertha Strauss and built a magnificent Queen Anne Victorian home for his new bride on Red Bluff Street in Clio. However, shortly after its completion, the couple moved back to Greensboro. The same year that Emanuel married Bertha, another South Carolina transplant, Joseph Strauss married Jennie Welch in Florence, South Carolina. Joseph was born and raised in New York City by German immigrants and moved to Sumter County around the turn of the 20th century. Soon after, he settled in Clio with his wife and began managing E. Sternberger Company while Emanuel focused on his other business ventures.

In 1904, the E. Sternberger Company general store in Clio caught fire and was destroyed. As a result, Emanuel Sternberger built a large two-story brick building on the corner of North Main and Society Street. Reportedly, it was one of the largest general stores in the area at that time, with large showcase windows on the ground floor and arched brickwork around the second-story windows.

Emanuel Sternberger died in 1924 at the age of 65 at his home in Greensboro. Shortly after his death, the E. Sternberger Mercantile Company was dissolved. Mrs. Bertha Sternberger succeeded her husband as president of Revolution Cotton Mill at Greensboro, becoming the first woman cotton mill president in the South. In 1929, her daughter, Mrs. Edward Benjamine, a prominent resident of New Orleans, endowed and presented the former home of her late father, Emanuel Sternberger, to the city of Greensboro to be used as a children’s hospital. Emanuel Sternberger’s former store manager, Joseph Strauss, went into politics and served as magistrate of Clio from 1934 to 1937. The home in Clio would later be added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Sternberger-Welch-Hamer House.

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