Rural Life In The Lowcountry Of South Carolina

South Carolina's Lowcountry is awash in history, mystery, and breathtaking beauty and is comprised of roughly 27 counties south and east of the Fall Line, a low, east-facing cliff paralleling the Atlantic coast. Over the past 300 years, farmers and their families, planters, and African Americans-both enslaved and freed-have shaped this area's culture. Through war, peace, poverty, and prosperity, the unique characteristics and customs of the Lowcountry have been woven together and form a rich, enigmatic tapestry distinct from any other.Rural Life in the Lowcountry of South Carolina contains over 200 previously unpublished images depicting life at the grassroots level during the first half of the 20th century. This volume presents a realistic and at times sobering view of everyday people and their struggles to make a living. Exploring such topics as growing crops, making syrup, and raising livestock, this volume also portrays the area's distinct architecture, evident in barns, farmhouses, and church buildings. As the state becomes more industrialized, residents are beginning to forget their agricultural heritage, and many know only the stories of elderly family members. These photographs, coupled with informative text, will bridge the present generations with the past.

South Carolina's Lowcountry is awash in history, mystery, and breathtaking beauty and is comprised of roughly 27 counties south and east of the Fall Line, a low, east-facing cliff paralleling the Atlantic coast. Over the past 300 years, farmers and their families, planters, and African Americans-both enslaved and freed-have shaped this area's culture. Through war, peace, poverty, and prosperity, the unique characteristics and customs of the Lowcountry have been woven together and form a rich, enigmatic tapestry distinct from any other. Rural Life in the Lowcountry of South Carolina contains over 200 previously unpublished images depicting life at the grassroots level during the first half of the 20th century. This volume presents a realistic and at times sobering view of everyday people and their struggles to make a living. Exploring such topics as growing crops, making syrup, and raising livestock, this volume also portrays the area's distinct architecture, evident in barns, farmhouses, and church buildings. As the state becomes more industrialized, residents are beginning to forget their agricultural heritage, and many know only the stories of elderly family members. These photographs, coupled with informative text, will bridge the present generations with the past.

Coclanis here charts the economic and social rise and fall of a small, but intriguing part of the American South: Charleston and the surrounding South Carolina low country. Spanning 250 years, his study analyzes the interaction of both external and internal forces on the city and countryside, examining the effect of various factors on the region's economy from its colonial beginnings to its collapse in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A rich portrait of Black life in South Carolina's Upstate Encyclopedic in scope, yet intimate in detail, African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont, 1780–1900, delves into the richness of community life in a setting where Black residents were relatively few, notably disadvantaged, but remarkably cohesive. W. J. Megginson shifts the conventional study of African Americans in South Carolina from the much-examined Lowcountry to a part of the state that offered a quite different existence for people of color. In Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties—occupying the state's northwest corner—he finds an independent, brave, and stable subculture that persevered for more than a century in the face of political and economic inequities. Drawing on little-used state and county denominational records, privately held research materials, and sources available only in local repositories, Megginson brings to life African American society before, during, and after the Civil War. Orville Vernon Burton, Judge Matthew J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University and University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar Emeritus at the University of Illinois, provides a new foreword.

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."

Sooner or later most life in the Southeast and well beyond finds its way to the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Water, plants, animals and people flow inexorably east to meet and mix with ocean tides, carrying remnant soils that form islands along the coast. Like other places where there exists a confluence of life, wars have ensued. People have been enslaved, armies victorious and defeated, native people extirpated, and the land used and used again for whatever would sustain people and turn a buck. Its natural history is a story of clear cutting, mining, farming, hunting, reconstruction and restoration. Its cultural history has been a stormy ebb and flow, leaving seemingly disparate bits and pieces of humanity from hither and yon. The Lowcountry is home to soldiers, the working sons and daughters of immigrants, the super rich in gated developments, a vibrant Gullah Geechee culture, and expanding thousands of nomads who exit I-95, take off their jackets and remain. Culturally, the Lowcountry is more of a rain forest than a temperate forest, as it contains many species, but few of any one.The Lowcountry, a chapbook written by writer/producer Bill Pendergraft, captures in poems and photographs a bit of the plot, character and conflict of Lowcountry life. He is the founder of Environmental Media, a company that produces environmental education content. All profits from the sale of The Lowcountry are donated to the South Carolina Environmental Law Project to celebrate 30 years of service in the public interest, www.scelp.org