![]() Because of the pressing need for a stable set of laborers to dig roadbeds, to complete timberwork, and to perform repairs and other laborious tasks under any set of conditions, the company purchased some 89 enslaved persons between 18. SCCRC soon found itself in a bind after white workers refused to deal with the risky nature of the job when the swamps became especially dangerous in the summer. Matthews established its first completed track in 1833 to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution, which had a marked financial impact in the US North, with the railroad helping to propel the growth of the textile industry. ![]() The South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company (SCCRC) in what is now St. A major sign of American progress and technological advancement, the presence of the railroad and increased interactions between southern and northern citizens must have given the sense that changes-wanted and unwanted-were afoot. Railroad companies and their attendant industries owned slaves as well as entered “hiring out” contracts with local plantation owners. The labor of enslaved and poor white people built and expanded South Carolina’s railroad lines. Did any of them attempt to feel their way through the darkness and wade through what they viewed as life-giving rather than dismal swamps-or the train toward freedom and away from the state of living death that was enslavement? How did they survive? What other pathways and strategies did they use to get free? In letters and journal entries, visitors referred to the town and its floodplain/swampland as “dismal” and as a “death hole.” The potential for revelry at the end of daylong meetings or after a day’s work on the railroad line was apparently minuscule in Kingville.Īs I read these complaints, I wondered about whether and how my ancestors negotiated their bondage. While Kingville boasted a reportedly decent hotel, a post office, stores, businesses, and homes, most of the town’s white visitors did not appreciate its proximity to this portion of the Congaree River. ![]() ![]() The majority of my maternal line was enslaved near what became the town of Kingville, which was a site of an important train depot in the 19th century, particularly after its connection on the Southern Railroad Line was expanded in 1848. Here’s something I know about the experience of my ancestors: exerting two centuries worth of generational labor on Lower Richland soil under the most brutal and corrupt circumstances must have involved herculean physical and mental strength. For 20 years, my grandfather has stared directly back into the eyes of the museum’s viewers, refashioned into a superman of sorts. Recently, I discovered that a duplicate version of the india-ink portrait that Larry Francis Lebby created, which he had exhibited during his travels as far away as the Vatican, had been given the title “Steel Man” and sold to the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. ![]()
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