Editors’ Preface

Page ix →By the late 1880s “big” lumber had arrived in the Palmetto State, brought by well-established Northern lumbermen like Chicagoan Francis Beidler and his partners, whose enterprises here and elsewhere in the South were made possible by a perfect storm of devalued land, improved transportation, and technological advances that allowed large-scale wage-labor operations to flourish. Established by 1890, the Santee River Cypress Lumber Company (SRCLC) quickly grew to include the outright ownership of or timber rights to about 200,000 acres across the Santee, Wateree, and Congaree River valleys. Though the SRCLC closed after only a quarter century, its legacy is found today at Congaree National Park, the National Audubon Society’s Francis Beidler Forest, and Santee-Cooper, a New Deal hydroelectric project called “Little TVA” that drowned Ferguson, the purpose-built SRCLC corporate headquarters and company town, among other places.

The centrality of the SRCLC in the pages that follow has everything to do with the origins of this volume. In 2017, Mark Kinzer published his book, Nature’s Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park. At the same time, Jessica Elfenbein and Tom Lekan, historians at the University of South Carolina, led a team of researchers in documenting the human history of the park and its environs via a Historic Resource Study (HRS). One of the newer parks in the National Park System, Congaree’s establishment was made possible by actions that Francis Beidler, one of SRCLC’s founders, took more than a century ago. While the concurrence of the HRS with the publication of Nature’s Return was inadvertent, the multifaceted Wood Basket of the World initiative that followed has been deliberate, indeed. Our goal is to reveal the hidden-in-plain-sight history of lumber, wood products and forest conservation in South Carolina in the period from the post–Reconstruction era to the early twenty-first century.

From the seeds of the HRS and the Congaree monograph grew not only undergraduate and graduate courses, but a broad network of historians, scholars, and community stakeholders who came together for a 2023 Wood Page x →Basket of the World conference in Sumter, South Carolina. Five of the conference speakers have essays in this volume: Jordan Davis (whose work began in one of Elfenbein’s graduate courses on the subject), Al Hester, Rob Hart, Lekan, and Elfenbein. Maggie Kemp’s contribution also originated in one of Elfenbein’s classes. Kent Germany, whose essay closes this volume, was a commentator at Wood Basket. Mark Kinzer, while not a conference participant, has a vested interest in South Carolina forests, as demonstrated by his previous scholarship on the topic.

This anthology is just one piece of an array of public scholarship and historic engagement that has emerged from the ongoing Wood Basket project. A dynamic team of emerging and established scholars and practitioners has developed a travelling and virtual exhibition, “From Forest to Furniture”; an ongoing oral history initiative; a digitization project of the Williams Furniture archival materials owned by the Sumter Museum; a community deep mapping project; Wikipedia entries; a “Made in Sumter” collection of wood products manufactured there; and a series of new historical markers on wood products, forestry, and conservation related topics. The majority of this work has been done by University of South Carolina students, faculty, and staff in sustained partnerships with the National Audubon Society, the Sumter Museum, the Sumter Development Board, the South Carolina Humanities Council, the National Park Service, and Friends of Congaree Swamp, among other community partners. This edited collection, then, is part of a larger set of collaborations to make the history of forestry and wood products in South Carolina legible, accessible, and useful.