Edgefield District Research Articles

An Edgefield Planter and His World: The 1840s Journals of Whitfield Brooks ed. by James O. Farmer Jr.

Reviewed by: An Edgefield Planter and His World: The 1840s Journals of Whitfield Brooks ed. by James O. Farmer Jr. R. Nicholas Nelson An Edgefield Planter and His World: The 1840s Journals of Whitfield Brooks. Edited by James O. Farmer Jr. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2019. Pp. lxxvi, 450. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-692-8.) James O. Farmer Jr. has worked years to bring readers the 1840s journals of Whitfield Brooks. The result is an interesting look into the life of South Carolina's Edgefield District and one of its wealthy patriarchs. Whitfield Brooks lived from 1790 to 1851, during which time Edgefield District developed from the backcountry into a wealthy and politically influential region within South Carolina. These journals do not cover that entire period, of course, but run from November 1840 to May 1849. Thus, they cover most of the last decade of Brooks's life. By this time, cotton had become central to the Edgefield economy, and Brooks was an established, wealthy, and politically connected owner of a cotton plantation. Whitfield's father, Zachariah Brooks, was the first in the family line to enter the planter class, establishing a sizable tobacco plantation (he owned forty enslaved people in 1820, shortly after giving several to Whitfield as a marriage gift). Zachariah provided Whitfield with a formal education and eventually land and enslaved people. Whitfield's mother died in 1802, and he formed a close bond with his aunt, Behethland Foote Moore Butler, as a surrogate mother. Whitfield remained close to her throughout his life. This family connection may be critically important to the reader's interest, as one of her sons was Andrew Pickens Butler, who served as a senator from South Carolina from 1846 to 1857. Whitfield Brooks was well connected, not only by birth and upbringing, but also in his marriage to Mary Parsons Carroll in 1818. She was from a wealthy Lowcountry family and a significant slaveholder in her own right. The couple had five children, perhaps the best known of whom was Preston Smith Brooks. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1853 to 1857, and his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor remains a staple of many college history course lectures on rising sectionalism in the 1850s. [End Page 712] These journals provide a record of the cares and concerns of one of the political and economic elite. Whitfield Brooks's writings reflect his concerns as a plantation owner, particularly over weather, the buying and selling of enslaved people, the organization of fields, the diversity of crops, and the price of cotton. They also reflect his concerns as a lawyer, former holder of public office, and political citizen, as well as his considerations of proper behavior, religion, and honor. The journals begin dramatically with a pair of duels, between James Parsons Carroll and Louis T. Wigfall and between Wigfall and Preston Brooks. Farmer does well at creating the context for understanding these journals, particularly the familial nature of many of the connections. His introduction runs forty-six pages, much of it densely packed with family biography in addition to geographic and economic information. In some places, the introduction can be confusing, tracing the family information chronologically, abruptly shifting to geographic or political information, and then going back to where the family information left off, with little in the way of transition. Farmer may be a bit enamored of his subject, telling readers that Brooks "weathered the 1820s better than most" while also explaining that he increased his wealth from the ownership of nineteen enslaved people in 1820 to sixty-two in 1830 (p. xxxv). This increase is hardly weathering, but rather prospering. The clarifying footnotes Farmer provides throughout the journal are excellently done and make this publication accessible to those who are not thoroughly expert in the Edgefield District of the 1840s, though at times a foldout family tree would be helpful. R. Nicholas Nelson Texas A&M University–Commerce Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Jug Factories and Fictions: A Mixed Methods Analysis of African-American Stoneware Traditions in Antebellum South Carolina

ABSTRACTDuring the antebellum period, incipient ceramic industries scattered across South Carolina’s agricultural landscape. In the Edgefield district, a number of family-owned kilns contracted enslaved laborers from nearby plantations to mass-produce new stoneware forms for sale throughout the Southeast. Drawing from archival and archaeological findings from the Pottersville site, this article examines these regional potteries at various scales, moving from a panoramic exploration of the manufacturing landscape to microscopic fluctuations in ceramic style. Combining morphometric ceramic analyses with architectural, ecological, and contextual data, I illustrate the how industry and artistry convened in the ordinary aesthetics of African-American life. At various frequencies, material engagements with stoneware created a shifting spectrum of embodied experiences. The ubiquity of stoneware became a plastic medium for potters and their wares to express a kaleidoscope of dissonant feelings, desires, and aspirations in the midst of racial subjugation.

Tides of Celadon: Glaze Color Chronology from the Edgefield Pottery District, South Carolina

ABSTRACTLarge alkaline-glazed stoneware vessels from the Edgefield District of South Carolina have long been studied by ceramic historians and collectors. Manufactured by enslaved laborers in the antebellum period, these vessels were sold throughout the South. Based on extant vessels from collections, scholars have proposed that a lighter green glaze, often called celadon, was manufactured earlier than a darker green-brown glaze. This assertion has not been tested systematically using archaeological evidence. Understanding how glaze color changes over time at one kiln site allows us to better understand antebellum aesthetic and economic systems. Establishing that there is change over time is the first step toward asking why this may be the case. Was it purely an aesthetic choice, an economic one, or due to experimentation with glazes by enslaved laborers? Excavations in 2011 and 2013 at the Pottersville site (38ED11) uncovered thousands of alkaline-glazed stoneware sherds that can illuminate this topic.

Crosses, Crescents, Slashes, Stars: African-American Potters and Edgefield District Pottery Marks

ABSTRACTAlkaline-glazed stoneware developed in the Edgefield District of South Carolina in the early nineteenth century and employed a range of decorations and marks that drew from European ceramic traditions and reflected pottery factory owner’s preferences, styles, and tastes. However, Edgefield stoneware also includes symbols and marks that were used by African-American potters who worked in the District and who made many Edgefield pots. Chief among these are variations of the cross mark, a core symbol employed by African Americans and seen in other ceramics and other media. Other marks, including slash and punctate marks, also have West African associations as “country marks” used in scarification to express cultural and social identity. Employing a database of pottery marks, this article examines the types of marks employed in the Edgefield District, their locations, their use as indicators of pottery manufacturer or individual potter, their designation of vessel attributes, their use as decoration, and their role as marks of cultural identity.

Who Were the Potters in the Old Edgefield District?

ABSTRACTThis article examines the histories of stoneware pottery production facilities in Edgefield, South Carolina, and the roles of European Americans and African Americans as entrepreneurs, artisans, and laborers in those potteries in the period of 1790–1900. Based on exhaustive analysis of documentary sources, the authors present a comprehensive list of the African-American artisans and laborers at these pottery manufacturing centers. The authors also provide historical and geological contexts for the region and the genesis of these enterprises.

A Dragon Kiln in the Americas: European-American Innovation and African-American Industry

ABSTRACTArchaeological investigations at the Pottersville kiln site in Edgefield, South Carolina in 2011 sought to identify the dimensions of the kiln and any architectural features associated with that structure’s design. Locating and identifying key architectural elements would allow for a better understanding of kiln technology in the American south region during the early nineteenth century and daily operations around the Pottersville kiln. This article provides a discussion of the archaeological findings from those investigations and postulates possibilities regarding the origins for kiln designs in the Old Edgefield District. This research revealed that African-American workers and European-American entrepreneurs constructed a type of kiln at Pottersville that was never seen before in the Americas.

Manufacturing Social Class: Ceramic Entrepreneurs and Industrial Slavery in the Old Edgefield District

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the relatively understudied context of industrial slavery in the United States and on slave-owning ceramic entrepreneurs in a rural region of the antebellum South. The institution of slavery was expanded into industrial contexts such as the Edgefield District potteries of South Carolina by a number of entrepreneurs, including Reverend John Landrum, in the early 19th century. The use of enslaved laborers in lieu of wage laborers provided such business operators with a form of social capital in addition to economic proceeds. This article analyzes the results of preliminary archaeological investigations of domestic locations at the Reverend John Landrum site in Aiken County along with related documentary evidence. Industrial slavery in the rural, and primarily agricultural, antebellum South was linked in multifaceted ways with slaveholder identity and a desire to attain wealth and acceptance within particular social networks.

On Southern Things

On Southern Things Bernard L. Herman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Thinking of southern things, we are often drawn to the canonical object—an oyster po'boy or Charleston single house or Edgefield pottery or kudzu. Edgefield District, South Carolina Face Jug, ca. 1862, alkaline glazed stoneware with kaolin inserts, 6⅝ × 5⅛ in. (16.83 × 13.02 cm.). Photograph by Jim Wildeman, courtesy of the Chipstone Foundation 2012.4. [End Page 7] Material culture is best understood as the history and philosophy of objects. It proceeds from the idea that objects, tangible and imagined, locate the entirety of human experience and understanding. We are simply creatures that know and make sense of the world and our places within it through things. Southern things superintend the vast and diffuse array of objects that ground the many, often conflicted, sometimes nostalgic ideologies of a regional identity that is at once singular and plural. The question that emerges at the heart of this collection of essays, images, and poems is not what are southern things, but rather how are things southern. Each of the contributions that follow provides a fragment of an answer. Southern things are not necessarily objects with regional pedigrees discovered through metrics of makers, locales, collections, and consumers. Southern things are those objects that are shaped, molded, and presented to the world as an amalgam of many deeply conflicted identities forged in a crucible of race and class and connected to a region and its diaspora. How else can you reconcile the nascar circuit in California or the blues in Chicago or red velvet cupcakes served with claret at Selfridges in London or the unending reinvention of poverty foods (for example, shrimp and grits) as haute cuisine? To grasp how southern things do this work invites some thoughts on how we might go about the critical practices of engaging things through interpretive acts. At the outset, it is useful to draw a distinction between object-centered and object-driven approaches. An object-centered approach seeks to represent the artifact in all of its materiality. In the narrowest sense, an object-centered approach has as its first imperative something of a connoisseurial or curatorial gesture. We want to understand why an object looks the way it does, where it fits into a larger array of objects, and then where and how that array intersects with larger constellations. Among the core questions of an object-centered approach are those of maker(s), media, craft, manufacture, category, antecedents, function, and more. In essence, we want to know why the object looks the way it does. Thus, Emily Hilliard's interview and photographic essay with West Virginia broom maker Jim Shaffer epitomizes an object as a made thing via the close documentation of process through photographs and recorded interview. Handmade brooms conform neatly within long-held genres of southern handicraft. The same cannot be said for a set of bejeweled false teeth from McComb, Mississippi. Recuperating the origin story for the Rhinestone Cowboy's dentures, Jennifer Joy Jameson interviewed the dentist who fabricated the dazzling chompers. What links Jameson's and Hilliard's contributions is their common goal of documenting skill, process, and product. An object-driven approach originates from a different but parallel set of concerns about what and how things convey meaning. The core assumption is that objects operate as signs, communicating meaning and structuring social relationships [End Page 8] in ways that are infinitely variable and always contingent on contexts of circumstance and shared ideologies of everyday life. A key distinction in object-driven approaches is the recognition that things offer wellsprings of questions. Too often, material culture studies relegate objects to the role of illustration or as subjects on which imported meanings are inscribed. But, objects ask questions—and the kinds of questions they pose offer unexpected avenues of inquiry and insight. Dale Rosengarten's recitation of the fate of two silver bowls, Shana Klein's reprise of Harriet Beecher Stowe's orange grove, and Rebecca Sharpless's recounting of the place of "Dutch" ovens held in southern kitchens all begin with objects that speak to larger historical currents. Their entries in this collection remind us that...

Crosses, Secrets, and Lies: A Response to J. W. Joseph’s “ ‘… All of Cross’—African Potters, Marks, and Meanings in the Folk Pottery of the Edgefield District, South Carolina”

Crosses, Secrets, and Lies: A Response to J. W. Joseph’s “ ‘… All of Cross’—African Potters, Marks, and Meanings in the Folk Pottery of the Edgefield District, South Carolina”

“… All of Cross”—African Potters, Marks, and Meanings in the Folk Pottery of the Edgefield District, South Carolina

African Americans were integral to the stoneware-manufacturing district that developed around Edgefield, South Carolina. Enslaved African Americans worked as potters at several of the Edgefield shops, and the most renowned potter of the district was an enslaved African American named Dave, who incorporated poetic verse onto some of the pottery he made, as well as other marks including an X and slashes. A cross mark was also associated with two of the potteries in the district where Dave had once worked: the Rev. John Landrum Pottery, and the subsequent operation of this pottery by Rev. Landrum’s son, Benjamin Franklin Landrum. This cross-in-circle mark, known as the Landrum cross, resembles the African Bakongo cosmogram dikenga. The Landrum cross, as well as Dave’s use of the X and slashes, may be representations of African symbols brought to the New World and found archaeologically in other settings and contexts. This paper looks at the African American presence in Edgefield, Landrum crosses, and Dave’s use of the cross mark, to examine the meaning of these marks and their potential expression of African American identity.

Who Made Jim Crow?

Born in 1847 to an elite planter family in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, Benjamin Ryan Tillman-Pitchfork Ben as he came to be known by admirers and foes alike-went on to become a prominent architect of white supremacist politics as well as a self-styled agricultural reformer during the decades following the Civil War. As a young man, Tillman helped to lead the efforts of Democratic elites to overthrow Reconstruction in South

Riparian Rights and Manufacturing in Antebellum South Carolina: William Gregg and the Origins of the "Industrial Mind"

AT ITS 1853 SESSION, THE SOUTH CAROLINA GENERAL ASSEMBLY PASSED An Act to Declare a Certain Description of Streams Navigable, and for Purposes. This apparently innocuous statute clarified the legal definition of a navigable waterway in the state. Furthermore, it defined the obligations of mill owners on such a stream, requiring them to permit free passage of lumber or timber through their dams. Owners of dams erected prior to a declaration of navigability were required to provide access but were permitted to collect compensation from persons using the passage, at an amount agreed to by the parties involved. However, one of the Other Purposes of the act was a notable exemption: Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed to extend to the navigation of Horse Creek, above a point known as Richardson's Shoals, on said Creek. This concession directly benefited only a pair of mills on Horse Creek: the cotton factories at Graniteville and Vaucluse in Edgefield District. In fact, Graniteville Manufacturing Company's president and founder, the southern industrialist William Gregg, was in the forefront of the effort to pass the act and its concomitant exemption. But Gregg's victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. Not only did he have to fend off several counter-petitions from upstream sawmill owners, but Gregg also had to convince the General Assembly to overturn more than a half century of legal precedent and riparian custom regarding the use of Horse Creek as a public highway and common resource. His success marked a subtle but significant transformation of the state's political economy, provoking a fundamental shift in favor of large-scale manufacturing at