This is a Sandy Island plantation journal written inside of The South Carolina and Georgia Almanac for the year 1792. The plantation journal documents the planting of crops (rice, corns, and potatoes), the maintenance of ditches and drains, slave records, complications with the hiring of an overseer, livestock, and business relations with Laurel Hill Plantation.
Work on paper in watercolor. View of distant fields, sheep, and shepherds in foreground. Hills and pond to right and center left. Rice fields in background.
1850-1859, 1870-1879, 1860-1869, 1840-1849, 1830-1839, and 1820-1829
Description:
This is the plantation register by Mathurin Guerin Gibbs (1788-1849) for Rice Hope Plantation (January 1, 1824 to December 1844) and Jericho Plantation (December 1844 to 1875). Gibbs, a lawyer before becoming a planter, used the first several pages of the manuscript dating January 1824 to May 1829 for summarizing legal cases. The plantation register primarily documents daily labor activities on the plantation including cultivation and harvesting of staple crops such as corn, cotton (Sea Island Cotton and Santee black seed cotton), rice and potatoes, livestock, and building fences. Gibbes also writes about the use and management of slave labor, the movement of enslaved people between the plantation and Charleston, and selling and purchasing of enslaved people. Slave names are included in portions of the register. Gibbs notes throughout the register the struggles he encounters as a planter including being unable to pay the mortgage of Rice Hope Plantation and the property going into foreclosure. Most of the entries at the end of the register are regarding slave births, slave deaths and distribution of blankets. Gibbs died in 1849 and the management of the plantation was carried out by his son.
The Direleton Plantation Memorandum Book was kept by James Ritchie Sparkman beginning in the 1850s; changes in handwriting indicate additional authors and additional uses into the 1900s. The book contains slave records. Records includes slave births, slave deaths, purchases of slaves, sales of slaves, family seperation, measurements for clothing, distribution of blankets, and labor tasks. The book also contains lists of first and last names of agricultural workers after the American Civil War and figures, likely wages paid. There are account records kept for purposes of the Internal Revenue Services, Confederate taxes and bonds, personal and agricultural work purchases, and financial transactions with B.M. Grier, Eliza S. Heriot, Dr. R.S. Heriot, A.G. Heriot (with signed receipts), M.E. Heriot (with signed receipts), and G.A. Thorne. There are transactions with other plantations recorded including Cornhill Plantation, Northampton Plantation, and Birdfield Plantation. There is information on livestock, wines removed from the plantation, and rice sales.
Three black and white prints of a photograph taken at T. Farm in 1919. One of the prints is cropped while the other two are full-size. Caption on cropped print reads, 'Luxuriant growth of cotton & corn on old Rice Field. At E.W. Durant's T. Farm-1919.' The other two prints both have the caption, 'T. Farm 1919.'
A color photograph of J.F. Maybank waving his hat in a rice field. A caption on the back of the photograph reads, 'We start out [?] 12th [?] on this field 1951.'
A stereoscopic image of an African American man using a rice trunk to tend rice. The bottom text of the picture states that the field is being flooded at high tide.
A stereoscopic image of an African American man posed along side a a stone mill to hull rice. Text at the bottom of the image states: "Large Stones for Hulling Rice; the Hulling Stone for Removing Chaff."
A stereoscopic image of African American women and children posed on a large raft with rice plants. In the backgroud is a large body of water. One person holds a bail of rice.
Memorandum of agreement between Charles B. Lucas and former enslaved persons, now freedmen and women. The agreement outlines Charles Lucas's and the freed persons duties on Wappahoola Plantation. The signatures of the freed persons are an "x", and the last page includes a note about the foreman and the freed persons receiving bushels of rice and corn.
The Robert F.W. Allston 1860 Almanac is a Miller's Planters' and Merchants Almanac for the year 1860 repurposed as a journal. Personal entries include account pages for bushels of rice, a list of enslaved men, women and children who were born and died at Chicora Wood Plantation, the purchase of enslaved people, a presentation of a billiard table to the Lunatic Asylum, a meeting with Laymen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and work on the Georgetown Railroad.
Volume Two in the Cote Bas and Mepkin Plantations Collection is a Miller's Interleaved Almanac for 1886 repurposed as a journal by Peter Gourdin. Entries pertain to rice planting, livestock and social activities. Other information includes newspaper clippings on various topics such as General Order No. 1, January 1, 1866, issued by Federal authorities to govern the employment of freedmen as plantation laborers as well as other rights and liberties given to freedmen.
Bound papers written by Anne Simons Deas in 1900 describing the harvesting and planting of rice by freed men and woman. The pages also discuss the atmosphere of the rice fields, describing how the workers sing hymns and converse with one another.
