T. Eston Marchant served as the Adjutant General of South Carolina from 1979 to 1995. His career in the military spanned almost fifty years. He also was an attorney and active in his community. Marchant served on the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina from 1965 to 1978. In 1990, he was named South Carolinian of the Year.

James Madison Waddell, Jr., represented Beaufort and Jasper Counties as a Democrat in the South Carolina General Assembly for over thirty-five years. He was particularly interested in coastal conservation issues, and was founder and chairman of the South Carolina Coastal Council (now the Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management). In 1992 he resigned from the Senate to serve as an appointee of Governor Carroll Campbell on the state Tax Commission