Page 77 →Naming the Enslaved of Hobcaw Barony

Francis Marion University, like other universities in South Carolina and throughout the South, is built on a former plantation. The university also is a founding partner with Coastal Carolina University of the Belle Baruch Institute for South Carolina Studies, a research center for the humanities and social sciences based at Hobcaw Barony, where rice plantations and enslaved people once contributed to the region’s phenomenal wealth. The forced labor of enslaved communities, in fact, generated much of the wealth that made Georgetown District the second richest in the state, per capita, by 1860.³ These geographic locations create an imperative for Francis Marion University’s participation in the Universities Studying Slavery initiative and motivate our research on the history of slavery on the property where our institute is based (Figure 4.1).

Now a stunningly beautiful research reserve, Hobcaw Barony is owned and operated by the Belle W. Baruch Foundation near Georgetown, South Carolina. As the daughter of financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, Belle established the Foundation in 1964 to manage her property for environmental research and protection.⁴ The Foundation’s mission includes conserving the natural and cultural resources of Hobcaw Barony, encouraging research, and providing educational programs.⁵

Page 79 →In accord with its mission, the Belle W. Baruch Foundation provides tours and public programs to showcase its coastal environment and historical significance. Although scholars have pursued a range of studies on Hobcaw’s history from Native American activities through the 1960s, the greatest historical attention on the Foundation’s tours often goes to Bernard M. Baruch, most famous for his role in advising US presidents during both World Wars.⁶ In 1905, Bernard Baruch began purchasing the former rice plantations that previously subdivided the original Hobcaw Barony land grant. By 1956, his daughter Belle Baruch had purchased the entire acreage from him to maintain its coastline, marshes, and forests as she had enjoyed them throughout her life.⁷

In contrast to the property’s twentieth-century significance, the African and African-American influences on Hobcaw Barony during previous centuries have not been as well explored. Few artifacts and little documentation are available regarding the enslaved people who lived and worked on Hobcaw’s former rice plantations.⁸ Although the Foundation’s tours include remnants of the remaining villages where the enslaved lived, until recently, the names of only a few former enslaved people from the property were known, even to locals knowledgeable about Hobcaw Barony and the broader area.

Under the auspices of the Belle Baruch Institute for South Carolina Studies, our research group—which comprised academics, librarians, student interns, and public historians—has been working to recover the names of enslaved people on the property. Our goal is to promote a more comprehensive historical perspective of the region and the lives of the enslaved people who lived there. We hope that this work will help provide resources for families, genealogists, and scholars and help them to unpack the full measure of the Barony’s past and gain insights into the lives of the enslaved on the Waccamaw Neck.

Every day in South Carolina, we live, work, and walk on land where enslaved Africans and African Americans were once held against their will, legally declared property, and forced to endure involuntary labor and Page 80 →dehumanizing conditions. These realities make acknowledging our full history painful. In addition, historical records of those who lived outside the public eye are often scarce, incomplete, or inaccessible. Going further back in time compounds the challenges. People move from place to place, and sometimes their names change. Families begin, merge, split, and sometimes end. Over time, the names of places themselves often change. Even a shallow dive into genealogical research can quickly reveal that the pool hides many perils. Tracing the history of the enslaved at Hobcaw Barony reflects these challenges.

According to reports from the Low Country Digital Library, many enslaved Africans were imported because of their skills in cultivating rice, coming from the Angola (40.0%), Senegambia (19.5%), Windward Coast (16.3%), and the Gold Coast (13.3%), as well as other countries in smaller percentages.⁹ The cultural and regional names that identified them in their home countries were denied them when they were kidnapped.¹⁰ Even before their arrival in South Carolina, merchant and shipping records inventoried the enslaved only by gender and age brackets, rarely mentioning names. Imprisoned in plantation labor camps, the enslaved used cultural names and family names only in private and among themselves.¹¹

The usual difficulties of tracing enslaved people’s movements and places of origin are exacerbated by their dehumanized position in the American colonies. As property, enslaved people had value, but not as persons. For the 1850 federal census, population records named only “free inhabitants,” tallying enslaved men and women in separate slave schedules, in much the same way as the agricultural records tallied cattle, horses, sheep, and chickens.¹² The identities and humanity of the enslaved were systematically disregarded, marginalized, and neglected. Even the occasional records that do mention names reflect this devaluation, often only noting their tasks as laborers or their estimated age and market value. Furthermore, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recordkeeping was haphazard and literacy rates lower. Not all vital records were committed in writing, and much of what was written down has been inevitably and irretrievably lost. Births, deaths, and other important events were only recorded sporadically, if at all.

To know someone’s name, and to say that name, is to acknowledge their existence—their right to be known. In this project to recover the names of any formerly enslaved people, we make a first step toward rediscovering and honoring those names—the names signifying those lives.

Whereas those with privilege and power have always had the means to record their struggles and accomplishments, accounts describing enslaved individuals and their contributions are few and far between. Authors such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are among comparatively few exceptions.¹³ Tiya Miles’s recent study, All That She Carried, reveals both the challenges and importance of researching the lives of enslaved African Americans. Miles chronicles the difficulties of tracing an African-American family’s history when little has been recorded and much has been erased. “Archives,” she notes, “do not faithfully reveal or honor the enslaved.”¹⁴ Important details remain unrecoverable, and accounts are always incomplete. Still, seemingly inconsequential items and records can provide vitally important information, as Miles shows through her heart-rending account of Ashley, a nine-year-old girl sold away from her mother, Rose, in the 1850s. Using the only items that Rose could give her daughter before parting—a simple cloth sack holding an old worn dress, several pecans, a lock of hair, and “my Love always”—Miles adds layers of research about the material life of the enslaved, the harsh conditions that women especially endured, the systems that imprisoned them, and the environments surrounding them.¹⁵ Through her meticulous research and thoughtful contextualization, Miles shows the significance of the ostensibly trivial. She uses each artifact, the handmade sack, the worn dress, the meagre pecans, and the lock of Rose’s hair, as a series of lenses through which the reader can see, however faintly, the profound horrors of enslavement and some of the contours of Rose and Ashley’s lives. Acknowledging both her limitations and purpose, Miles writes, “We cannot enter the consciousness of a girl born into slavery who matures to give birth into slavery and can have no reasonable hope of escape. We cannot know Rose, but we can draw on the resources at our disposal … to picture the woman she might have been and summon the shape of her daily life.”¹⁶

Miles’s work reminds us that uncovering the history of people held in captivity is always a daunting task, but never an inconsequential one. Meaning is often evasive and sometimes must be found where it seems most unlikely. In our study, the slave schedules of the 1850s and 1860s provide headcounts, but very little identifying information. An 1850 ledger page enumerating the “slave inhabitants” of Lower All Saints Parish, for example, provides only the age and sex of eighty-four enslaved men and women. The only person named is the white landowner, William A. Alston, who claimed these people Page 82 →as property. Records such as these provide sobering evidence of the many enslaved individuals who were considered chattel, unnamed in the population census, and forgotten. Because of such omissions, other primary sources have proven more fruitful for recovering the names of the enslaved, including wills, deeds, plantation inventories, contracts, and court, military, and church records. Letters, newspaper notices, and advertisements also provide valuable information. To locate these documents, we first needed to trace the history of Hobcaw’s shifting borders from its 1663 land grant inception through bequests to heirs, private sales, and the multiple plantations that subdivided the peninsula into the Reconstruction era. Limiting the study to Hobcaw plantations also required learning the boundaries of proprietary counties in 1682, the Anglican parishes of 1767, and the districts and counties in 1785, many of which no longer exist.¹⁷

The former labels and boundary lines of districts, counties, and parishes help us distinguish the relevance of the records we encounter, but the geographical challenges are even more complex. Over the course of many years, Hobcaw Barony’s sixteen thousand acres were divided into as many as fifteen plantations with twenty different names.

In addition, wealthier landowners held properties in several locations, some within the original Hobcaw Barony land grant and others outside it, which greatly complicates searches of landowner names. Suzanne Cameron Linder and Marta Leslie Thacker’s Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of Georgetown County and the Santee River has proven immensely valuable.¹⁸ Not only does this exhaustive work trace the ownership of rice plantations within the area; it also documents the shifting property lines of those plantations. The first thirteen chapters identify each known tract of land that resulted from the many subdivisions and sales of the original land grant. The most useful transactions span from John, Lord Carteret’s sale in 1730 through Bernard Baruch’s Hobcaw acquisitions between 1905 and 1907.

Page 83 →We combed the Historical Atlas and other sources for locations, landowners, dates, and events. Compiling over two hundred sixty rows of data in a spreadsheet, we developed a contextual timeline of the period (Table 4.1). Supported by maps and contextual research such as this, we could pursue the most important goal of our study: to recover the names of the thousands of enslaved people who toiled on this particular land.

Table 4.1. Sample Timeline Entries

Note. — = information not applicable.

A single event description, such as the one describing William Alston’s land purchases, would lead us to search the archives for William Alston at Annandale, Youngville, and Crab Hall plantations from 1808 forward. We could then seek his personal records, such as letters, wills, tax bills, and clothing allowances, all of which might provide information on the laborers who toiled on his properties. Identifying landowners, we discovered, is crucial for uncovering the names of enslaved people. In addition, the spreadsheet allows us to organize information by date, enslavers, and location. As shown in Table 4.1, organizing by date renders a sequence of events within an historical context. Then by isolating enslavers, we learned that at least sixty-nine individual landowners held captive thousands of people of African Page 84 →descent on Hobcaw soil from 1729 until 1865 when the Civil War ended.¹⁹ Those enslavers’ names are listed in Appendix A. Sorting the spreadsheet by sublevels—to include enslavers, dates, and locations—associates enslavers with plantations within estimated timeframes. For instance, twenty dated entries for William Alston reveal that from 1785 to 1865, he enslaved over six hundred seventy people. To date, we have found the names of sixty enslaved people who labored on his Hobcaw plantations. When we encounter a primary source that does name enslaved people, we record and tally those names in the spreadsheet also. For example, a timeline entry derived from a reward notice refers to two runaway adults, Fortune and Dinah, and an infant (Figure 4.2). Because only the enslaved parents are named in the reward notice, the “Count” column for the running total of recovered enslaved individuals’ names increases by two (Table 4.2). Additional columns in the spreadsheet provide places for source information and notes, ensuring the collection of all relevant details for verification and suggesting further research, as needed. Drawing on these primary and secondary sources, our research team can then conceive a potential narrative for Fortune, Dinah, and their child.

Page 85 →Table 4.2. Tallying the Recovered Names

Page 86 →Paul Michau had mortgaged his property on the southern end of Hobcaw Barony three times between 1795 and 1809, according to Linder and Thacker’s Atlas. Michau died in 1812, leaving five children, one stepdaughter, and twenty-seven enslaved people “valued at 10,233.84.”²⁰ The death of an enslaver often created intense anxiety for the enslaved, who were subject to sales and relocations that split their families and communities.²¹ The complexities of Michau’s unresolved debts and multiple heirs would have intensified these threats for the enslaved people on his property. After Michau’s death, any number of people could have taken possession of Fortune and Dinah and sold or traded them away.

Subsequent searches on Caleb Lenud reveal that he had inherited his uncle Andrew Guerry’s plantation in the Charleston District at the death of Guerry’s wife.²² Perhaps at some point, Lenud purchased Fortune and Dinah. Then, in late 1818 or early 1819, Fortune and Dinah escaped from captivity with their child. Suspecting that the runaways might return to the Georgetown area where Dinah’s mother remained, Lenud placed the reward notice in the Winyah Intelligencer every two weeks, from March 13 until August 18, suggesting that the family might have had some success avoiding capture.²³

Research on Laura Carr provides new insights about how Hobcaw’s formerly enslaved can be discovered but also how evidence can be misleading. During the Baruch Era of Hobcaw Barony (1905–1964), Carr lived in Friend-field Village and was known as a midwife and medicine woman for her community.²⁴ Until her death, she occupied a small, two-room, former slave dwelling that was built before 1860 from “‘recycled’ material” and never had plumbing or electricity.²⁵ The staff and volunteer docents for the Belle W. Baruch Foundation have long known about a Laura Carr through oral histories that had been passed down from and about the residents of Friendfield Village. These stories included the names of several people who were born into slavery, including Bedford Carr (born ca. 1829), Tim McCants, (born ca. 1840), and Columbus Sands (born ca. 1861). In addition, Hobcaw’s oral tradition indicated that Bedford Carr married a woman named Laura in 1891.²⁶ Our team encountered differing accounts of Laura Carr’s lifespan, including her birth date, which would determine whether she, too, had been born into slavery. Our strategy for working with the uncertainty was to record each account and continue searching for additional clues that might verify others.

One piece of evidence generated significant excitement in February 2023. While cleaning away dirt, dust, and overgrowth in the Marietta Cemetery, Hobcaw Barony staff member Patricia Mishoe and a volunteer discovered Page 87 →Laura Carr’s gravesite.²⁷ They wiped off a metal marker posted by the Manigault Funeral Home, revealing that Laura Carr died at eighty years old on October 12, 1937, which means that she was born either 1856 or 1857, well before emancipation. The scrawled handwriting on the marker encouraged us to posit a fuller story—that Laura was a child of about six when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and that by the end of the Civil War in 1865, she would have been eight or nine years old. Like the tattered sack at the center of Miles’s narrative, this long-neglected grave marker seemed to provide new insights to a forgotten life.

At first, we trusted the grave marker, even though the mottled paper beneath the glass was likely added years after Laura Carr’s death. We imagined that a relative might have requested the marker and provided the information to the Manigault Funeral Home. Months later, however, another handwritten document, the 1900 US Census, brought a corrective surprise.²⁸ In the record for the Waccamaw area of Georgetown County, Bedford Carr was listed as the head of a household that comprised six people, including Laura, his wife of nine years, age fifty-five, and four children: daughter Hanna, age twenty-seven; William, age twenty-five: Robert, age sixteen; and Nial, age ten. The census also recorded Laura Carr’s birth date as March 1844, information that surely Bedford or Laura offered themselves. This self-reported date altered Laura’s story once again, placing her at about age fifty in 1891 when she and Bedford married. The 1900 census also reveals that, in her lifetime, Laura Carr had eight children, five of whom were still living at the time. Perhaps the children identified in the 1900 household inventory were her own.

The 1910 census, instead of verifying the information from the previous decade, further complicated Laura Carr’s story.²⁹ By this date, Carr was living alone as a widow. Despite the passage of a decade, her recorded age had decreased from fifty-five to fifty-two. Also, the total number of her children had decreased from eight to seven, leading us to wonder if one of the children whom the Carrs reported in 1900 had been stillborn or died in infancy. Ten years earlier, the loss of a young child might have been more fresh, warranting affirmation in a census count. A decade later, a woman alone could be excused for revising her losses. In either case, Laura’s given age in each census places her birth before emancipation, whether in 1844 or 1856–1857.

The more information we find, the more questions we generate. By including even contradictory information in the timeline and adding cross-references in the Notes column, we have flagged the conflicting details for further study. As we search for additional evidence, Laura’s story might alter Page 88 →again, resulting in revisions to recorded history and the stories we tell in our communities. More important, our information might fill in gaps for descendants who have incomplete family histories passed down through oral traditions, family Bibles, and other documents.

This project from its inception has sought to discover as much information as possible about the people who were once enslaved on Hobcaw Barony. As the previous examples show, some information is retrievable but inconclusive. To find the names recorded below, we traced a path through a complicated landscape of time, geography, and culture to identify slave-owning families whose economic fortunes rose and fell through marriages, deaths, inheritance, legal disputes, bankruptcy, and civil war. Emancipation of the formerly enslaved and an undermined Reconstruction era resulted in further economic, social, and political dislocation. However, postemancipation records are both more plentiful and more detailed. Postbellum census records, for example, name formerly enslaved people with first names and surnames, list their occupations, and identify them as heads of household, spouses, and children. Freedmen’s Bureau contracts list the names of people who chose to remain as paid workers on plantations. Additional civic records include birth dates, death dates, and marriages, many of which are now accessible in online genealogical databases, such as the South Carolina Historical Society Collections, or the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.³⁰ Using these resources, our team recorded data through the period of Reconstruction to collect the names of formerly enslaved people and compare those lists with earlier inventories.

Through this process, we have transcribed seven hundred thirty-one names of enslaved people held in bondage on Hobcaw Barony’s former rice plantations. Appendix B lists the names of those individuals, many of whom were forgotten until now. During the next phase of the project, we hope to bring those names back where they belong—to their families and communities, to connect the past to the present. Today, the surnames of the enslaved and those who enslaved them are often still Georgetown names, the families are Georgetown families. We hope to connect with living descendants of the enslaved, share with them the histories we have found and hear their own oral histories to expand upon and enrich the work we have begun. In addition, we will compare enslaved names on a single plantation across several years to identify similarities and changes. By referring to our contextual Page 89 →timeline, we might then posit potential narratives for specific people, families, or communities. These insights would be most welcome in an environment where the paucity of historical detail has held firm for centuries. Using academic research and archival information in this way, we are partnering with the Baruch Foundation and area communities to raise awareness of the names and lives of the enslaved who lived on the southern end of the Waccamaw peninsula. If we work to ensure that their stories are told as part of the histories of Hobcaw Barony and Georgetown County, we can help the public hear the echo of voices from the past.

Like much of the American South, Hobcaw Barony is a landscape haunted by beauty and violence. Driving north toward the property from Georgetown on US 17, one is drawn in by the vast expanse of water, woods, and sunlight. The natural beauty arrests the senses when looking across Winyah Bay. Yet, nature alone does not define the view from the road. In the still-visible contours of the old rice fields, there is a scarred landscape that was once transformed into a wealth-generating machine through the forced toil of enslaved communities. Building and maintaining a rice plantation involved back-breaking work, with enslaved laborers moving tens of thousands of cubic yards of miry earth under the threat of the lash and amid the equally lethal dangers of wildlife, disease, and the unforgiving Carolina weather.³¹ Slavery left scars on the land and its people.³² The lines in the old rice fields should remind us that the brutality of the old South is not as long gone as we might hope. The pain it left behind has never completely subsided.

We do not presume that this project will heal all that needs to be healed, or make right that which was made wrong, but there is a responsibility to recognize the names and remember those communities whose history has been forgotten, neglected, or dismissed. As Pat Conroy wrote, geography can be a “wound,” an “anchorage,” or a “port of call.”³³ At Hobcaw, we share the same land as thousands whose eyes opened and closed between the same waters and beneath the same skies that still define this place. We live and work in a place where freedom and dignity were “dreams deferred” for too long.³⁴ Yet, amid toil and terror, love was given, life was sustained, and people endured past the days of slavery. The survival of the enslaved and their descendants on Hobcaw is a history we must acknowledge. Although brought here as captives and forcibly held as property, these communities made the land called Hobcaw and Lowcountry, and many still call the area home.

Page 90 →Our work offers an intentional step to acknowledge these communities’ proper place in what James Baldwin memorably termed “a more beautiful and more terrible history” of this property, state, and nation.³⁵ In doing so, we hope to reaffirm Baldwin’s belief that this history belonged to people like his family and, by extension, to those descendants of the enslaved at Hobcaw Barony as well. The documents we discover and the stories we hear convey these difficult, resilient legacies. The lives and voices of those who came before us do indeed echo across the years. It is our duty to listen.

This list chronologically presents the recorded names of enslaved people on Hobcaw plantations beginning in 1739 through the early years of Reconstruction when Freedmen’s Bureau records listed emancipated laborers. Further research is needed to determine whether any of the repeating names in the latter years refer to single individuals.

Richard A. Almeida is John Monroe Marshall Holliday professor of political science at Francis Marion University, where he has been on the faculty since 2007. His research and teaching interests include elections, interest groups, and political thought. He lives in Conway, SC, with his wife and daughter.

Patti Burns is director of the Marion County SC Library System. In her previous position as the head of adult services at the Georgetown County Library, Patti was able to assist many African-American patrons with their genealogy and document several African-American cemeteries. Patti is currently working to recover local African-American genealogy resources and document African-American cemeteries in Marion County.

Madison Cates is assistant professor of history at Coastal Carolina University and the co-director of the Belle W. Baruch Institute for South Carolina Studies. His research examines the environmental history of the American South and has appeared in publications such as Southern Cultures and The Journal of Southern History.

Greg Garvan is an avid public historian who has served as a volunteer at Hobcaw Barony, Middleton Place, the International African American Museum, The Slave Dwelling Project, and the McLeod Plantation Historic Site.

Page 97 →Megan Hammeke received her undergraduate degree in history from Coastal Carolina University in 2023 and is currently completing a master’s degree in library and information science. She has always loved history and research, and her experience with Hobcaw Barony has inspired a wider love of cultural heritage and personal histories.

Lynn Hanson is professor emerita from Francis Marion University, where she taught in the English department and served as a founding co-director for the Belle Baruch Institute for South Carolina Studies.

Adam Houle is the author of Stray, a finalist for the Colorado Books Awards. His work has appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Post Road, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at Francis Marion University and coeditor of Twelve Mile Review.

Steven C. Sims-Brewton is Head of Access Services librarian/associate professor in the James A. Rogers Library of Francis Marion University.

1. 1. King Charles II established the Charter of Carolina on March 24, 1663, to reward his supporters during his family’s restoration to the crown. The original Hobcaw Barony land grant was assigned to Sir Charles Carteret, a knight and baronet. The bequest later passed to his great-great-grandson, John Carteret, in 1718. See Charles H Lesser, “Lords Proprietors of Carolina,” South Carolina Encyclopedia (https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/lords-proprietors-of-Carolina). See also the transcribed text of the charter in Yale Law School Avalon Collection of documents in law, history, and diplomacy (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc01.asp).
2. 2. “Last Will and Testament of Charles Cogdell, 1776,” South Carolina County, District and Probate Courts, 1670–1980, database with images, Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com.
3. 3. Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 286.
4. 4. “Last Will and Testament of Belle W Baruch,” March 23, 1964, 9.
5. 5. The Belle W Baruch Foundation officially approved a mission revision to include “conservation of natural and cultural resources” [italics added] on May 9, 2011. A subsequent mission revision in 2016 further emphasizes the importance of history and culture. For the most recent mission statement, see https:///www.hobcawbarony.org.
6. 6. Published studies include Cameron Moon, “Timber-Framed Dwellings of the Enslaved and Freedmen in the South Carolina Lowcountry: Continuities and Innovations in Building Practices and Housing Standards,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 28, no 1 (2021): 9–131; Lynn Hanson, “The Wealth of Information in Belle Baruch’s Checkbooks.” Page 98 →Interdisciplinary Humanities 36, no 2 (2019): 21–53; Heathley A Johnson, “Archaeology on the Widdicom Tract at Hobcaw Barony,” Legacy 23, no 2 (2019): 24–27; Christina Brooks, “Enclosing Their Immortal Souls: A Survey of Two African American Cemeteries in Georgetown, South Carolina.” Southeastern Archaeology 30, no 1 (2011): 176–186; Mary Miller, Baroness of Hobcaw: The Life of Belle W Baruch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Lee G Brockington, Plantation Between the Waters: A Brief History of Hobcaw Barony (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2006) Additional research reports are accessible through the Belle W Baruch Foundation, such as James Liphus Ward, “Back to the Land, Back to its People: A Strategic Response to Researching the Cultural Landscape at Hobcaw Barony” (Unpublished manuscript, 2015, Hobcaw Barony, https://hobcawbarony.pastperfectonline.com/archive/51B83865-C879-4459-9150-112329083656); Carolyn Dillian, “Holocene Sea Level Rise and Shell Midden Development and Destruction” (Unpublished manuscript, 2019, Hobcaw Barony); Allison Steadman, “An Inventory and Archive of Garments Removed from Belle Baruch’s Basement” (Unpublished manuscript, 2019, Hobcaw Barony); Elizabeth Howie and Melissa Hydock, “Art Historical Research on Works of Art in Hobcaw House” (Unpublished manuscript, 2019, typescript); and Thomas McConnell, “Bernard Baruch Library: An Annotated Bibliography” (Unpublished manuscript, 2008, https://hobcawbarony.pastperfectonline.com/archive/EDEEF599-CAB0-4C28-9429-366406311966). See also James L Michie, “Search for San Miguel de Gualdape,” Research Manuscript Series 1, Waccamaw Center for Historical and Cultural Studies (Conway, SC: Coastal Carolina University, 1991) SCETV’s interactive website, BetweenThe Waters.org, provides a virtual tour of Hobcaw Barony and showcases additional studies, interviews, and programs on the property. See also SCETV’s associated blog, Making History Together: A Collaborative Blog for SCETV’s “Between the Waters” at https://makinghistorybtw.wordpress.com.
7. 7. Miller, Baroness of Hobcaw, 169.
8. 8. SCETV’s interactive website, BetweenTheWaters.org, allows visitors to explore conditions of enslaved Africans and their African-American descendants Although some details refer specifically to the enslaved people on Hobcaw’s former plantations, the information drawn from contributing scholars describes the generalized conditions of rice cultivation in South Carolina.
9. 9. Mary Battle, “Africans in Carolina,” Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (Charleston, SC: College of Charleston). See also the South Carolina Maritime Museum exhibit, “The Atlantic Slave Trade,” curated by Justin McIntyre, https://www.scmaritimemuseum.org. Although there exists some debate on the “Black rice thesis,” the works of Dan Littlefield and Judith Carney provide support for these claims. See Dan Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Judith A Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For an accessible discussion of the Black rice thesis in relation to early American culinary culture, see Hendricks, “The Multicultural Nature of Eighteenth-Century Cooking in British America: The Southern Rice Pie,” in Carolina Currents: Studies in South Carolina Page 99 →Culture, vol 1, “New Directions,” edited by Christopher D Johnson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2024), 28–42.
10. 10. See Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community [25th anniversary edition] (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 221.
11. 11. Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 221.
12. 12. “1850 Census: The Seventh Census of the United States,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1853/dec/1850a.html. Compare with “United States Census (Slave Schedule), 1850,” database with images, FamilySearch, https://www.familysearch.org.
13. 13. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Bedford, 1845), was published in 1845 and became one of the most influential abolitionist texts. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009) was published in 1861 after Jacobs escaped to New York. For a guide to these and other slave narratives, see Audrey Fisch, editor, The Cambridge Companion to The African American Slave Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
14. 14. Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021), 18.
15. 15. Miles, All That She Carried, 77.
16. 16. Miles, All That She Carried, 77–78.
17. 17. See the “Maps Tracing the Formation of Counties,” South Carolina Department of Archives & History https://www.archivesindex.sc.gov/guide/County Records.
18. 18. Suzanne Linder and Marta Thacker, Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of Georgetown County and the Santee River (Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2001), 3–73. See also Julian Stevenson Bolick, Waccamaw Plantations (Clinton, SC: Jacobs Press, 1946), 1–2.
19. 19. One of the earliest known enslavers on Hobcaw Barony was Samuel Masters, who purchased two hundred acres of Cogdell Plantation in 1729 from Lewis John to raise cattle and run tar kilns for ships. Within three years, he mortgaged his Cogdell land and home, along with all of his tar kilns and associated equipment, his livestock, and two unnamed enslaved people. The records pertaining to Samuel Masters provide evidence of enslaved labor on Hobcaw properties before landowners cultivated rice. See Linder and Thacker, Historical Atlas, 13.
20. 20. Linder and Thacker, Historical Atlas, 8.
21. 21. See Miles, All That She Carried, 92.
22. 22. As established in Andrew Caleb Guerry’s will, August 3, 1796, Guerry’s wife was granted a life estate on his Charleston area plantation until her death. At that time, the property transferred to Caleb Lenud, who was Guerry’s nephew. The exact year is currently unknown. Guerry’s will did not include his wife’s name, and the 1790 US Census did not even count women. See “South Carolina, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1670–1980,” database with images, Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com.
23. 23. See the series of Winyah Intelligencer newspapers in the Georgetown County Digital Library’s Historical Newspaper Collections, beginning with the March 10, 1819, issue; http://www.gcdigital.org/digital/collection/p163901coll8.
24. 24. Page 100 →Bernard Baruch began purchasing South Carolina estates in 1905. He agreed to sell five thousand acres to his eldest daughter, Belle, in 1935; by 1956, she owned all her father’s Hobcaw holdings. Her death in 1964 precipitated the transfer of her property to the Belle W Baruch Foundation to protect and manage in perpetuity. See Miller, Baroness of Hobcaw. Friendfield Village is a former slave-dwelling community on Hobcaw property where several buildings still stand, including a church and a doctor’s office. Many of the Baruch family’s African-American employees continued to live in Friendfield Village until the 1950s, despite the absence of electricity and plumbing.
25. 25. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, submitted for Hobcaw Barony, September 19, 1994, 18.
26. 26. Former staff member Lee Brockington, “African Americans at Hobcaw,” file folder, currently held at Hobcaw Barony.
27. 27. Richard Lancaster, the volunteer who assisted staff member Patricia Mishoe.
28. 28. “US Census Records,” database with images, Ancestry, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com.
29. 29. Ancestry’s transcription of the handwritten 1910 census was another obstacle. The transcriber misread the first letter as a “B” rather than an “L,” recording her name as Baura Carr, rather than Laura Carr. See the “1910 United States Federal Census,” database with images, Ancestry, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com.
30. 30. See the South Carolina Historical Society and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, https://www.schistory.org/archives; and https://www.scdah.sc.gov.
31. 31. According to historian Mart A Stewart, enslaved laborers preparing an eighty-acre rice plantation worked “with shovels in ankle-deep mud and water [and] had to move well over thirty-nine thousand cubic yards of fine-grained river swamp muck to construct an eighty-acre plantation, in addition to clearing the land and leveling the ground in the fields.” See Mart A Stewart, “Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the Lowcountry, 1790–1880,” Environmental History Review 15, no 3 (1991): 47–64, especially 50.
32. 32. This idea is most clearly explored in David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2022); Erin Stewart Mauldin, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of the Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Stewart, “Rice, Water, and Power.”
33. 33. Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 1.
34. 34. Langston Hughes, “Harlem,” 1951 Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoun dation.org/poems/46548/harlem.
35. 35. James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963.

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