Black Lives and Whitened Stories: From the Lowcountry to the Mountains
Whisnant DE and Whisnant AM. 2020. Black Lives and Whitened Stories: From the Lowcountry to the Mountains. CARL HRS. National Park. Atlanta, Georgia
This Historic Resource Study (HRS) explores the history of African Americans and the larger white-black racial dynamics at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site (CARL) over a period of more than a century, beginning in the 1830s. CARL staff further observed that some previous studies and reports had identified and evaluated the park’s cultural resources, but they had not offered the needed historical context to understand social relationships between white land owners and enslaved persons of color (before or during the Civil War) or African American servants who lived and worked on site after the war. This study aims to reframe the history of the site to encompass its entire post-1830s history, focusing both on specific aspects of Black life at the site and on the larger involvements and commitments of the white property owners that, in turn, shaped Black lives there. The plan and parameters for the study were initially developed in 2017 through discussions among CARL staff NPS Southeast Region staff, Organization of American Historians (OAH) staff and the authors For NPS, the stated central concerns driving this project were: •To complete a focused body of research on the social history of (primarily) African American life at the site, beginning with the Memminger period in the 1830s, continuing through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and continuing as far beyond Ellison Adger Smyth’s death in 1942 as seemed useful for CARL’s current and future development. •To shape this research into an HRS useful for cultural resource management and interpretive purposes. •To make the research, writing, and some relevant recommendations useful to inform expanded documentation of the site’s National Register information to be undertaken later as a separately contracted project. While working on the project, the research team made several discoveries that necessitated adjustments in the project framing and work plan. •They became aware of the contradiction of designating the Memminger/Rock Hill site after Carl Sandburg given that Sandburg had never had any connection with either the site itself or the larger western North Carolina region prior to moving there in 1946. •They encountered a significant amount of useful data on Black life and Black workers in a substantial number of previous studies dating from pre-CARL documents to recent scholarly material. •Researchers found that what had been reported as a bi-polar process of demographic interaction had actually been a sophisticated multi-polar one which had after 1947 become romanticized to where the receiving pole came to be called the “Little Charleston of the Mountains,” an untenable formulation that has grown increasingly so over the years. •One of the four families that had owned and occupied the Rock Hill property had been wrongfully eliminated from the CARL narrative almost completely. An omission that required correction.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Whisnant, David; Whisnant, Anne
- Date of Issue
- 2020-11
- Publisher
- National Park
- Units
- CARL
- Keywords
- African Americans, Alberta Jowers, Appalachia, Appalachian region, Balfour Mills, Belton Mills, Black, Black churches, Black History, Black schools, Blacks, Camp Sorghum, CARL, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sandburg Farm National Historic Site, Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, Chicken House, Civil War, Confederate prison, Connemara, Cotton Mills, discrimination, East Flat Rock, Ellison Adger Smyth, Emancipation, Enslaved workers, escape, Georgia, Georgia LowCountry, Greenville News, Grenville, Henderson County, Historic House Tours, Historic Resource Study, household servants, HRS, internal slave trade, James Fisher, James Robinson, Jim Crow, John Parris, Johnnie Simmons, Jr., Kingdom of the Happy Land, Little Charleston, Little Charleston of the Mountains, Louise Bailey, Low Country, Lynching, Memminger, Mills, National Park Service, North Carolina, NPS, Pelzer, Pinckney Transcripts, race relations, Racism, Reconstruction, Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge, Robert Cuthbert, Rock Hill, Sadie Patton, Sally Markely, servants, Seven Months a Prisoner, Simpson Dogan, Skyland Hosiery, Slavery, slaves, Smyth’s Balfour Mills, Society of Necessity, South Carolina Lowcountry, St. John in the Wilderness Register, Swedish House, The Red Shirts, Ulysses Ballard, Union Soldier, Wash House, Western North Carolina, William Gregg, William Slattery