Willington reflects the role of the railroad in rural South Carolina community development at the close of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. It was a thriving village during that period, then declined in the years between the two World Wars. Its remaining buildings represent that railroad boom in upstate South Carolina, with a historic core that includes a row of commercial buildings, a church, several residences, the old Willington School, and related resources. South Carolina Highway 81 passes through Willington and was designated the Savannah River Scenic Highway in the mid-1980s, and a movement has sought to restore and reuse residences and commercial buildings along this corridor. Nearby stood New Bordeaux, one of seven French Protestant Huguenot settlements in South Carolina and the only one in the upstate, first settled in 1764 and again in 1768; a granite marker erected in 1937 is its only visible remain. Near Willington, Dr. Moses Waddel, a Presbyterian minister and one of the most eminent American educators of the nineteenth century, opened the Willington Academy in 1804. Called "the American Eton," it taught the classics to many prominent South Carolinians, including a U.S. Vice President, nine governors, three U.S. Secretaries of War, two U.S. Secretaries of State, a U.S. Secretary of Treasury, five U.S. Senators, and at least nineteen members of the U.S. House of Representatives, while other pupils became ministers, lawyers, bankers, and railroad presidents. The Green Olive School, an African-American schoolhouse built around 1920 by the Green Olive AME Church, was donated to Willington on the Way in 2000, moved, restored with a Heritage Corridor grant, and now serves as an African-American Cultural Center. Willington also grew as a cotton boom town after the Savannah Valley Railroad arrived in 1886; its brick store buildings, built circa 1912, later fell into disrepair and were listed in 1995 and 1997 among The Eleven Most Endangered Historic Sites in South Carolina, prompting the McCormick Historical Commission to form the non-profit Willington on the Way to raise money and supervise restoration. Other notable places include the Gibert-Moss House, a large two-story frame home built around 1856 for Edwin Calhoun and designed by William Jones of Atlanta, Georgia; Noble Cemetery, near J. Strom Thurmond Lake, where Patrick Noble, a South Carolina legislator and governor from 1838 until his death in 1840, is buried; the Mims Community Center, built about 1906 for the Willington School and renovated in 1994; and the Gibert-Calhoun House, a classic revival home completed in Bordeaux in 1867 by Dr. John Albert Gilbert.