Morgan Collection
of Country Life

Moving your cursor over the images will identify the objects.

Clearing the Land

The early settlers who arrived in modern day Sumter County from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and coastal South Carolina were faced with vast forests and the need for shelter. Their first duty was to clear 5 or 6 acres of land for a space to build a home and plant crops.

The ax was the most necessary tool. Settlers used it to clear the land, trim logs, cut wood for fuel and to make fences. The crosscut saw cut transversely through a tree when it was drawn back and forth. A saw set and clamp set the teeth on the crosscut saw.

Building a Home

Planting

Even before starting the construction of their homes, early settlers in the area concentrated on planting their first crop so that the family could have food. After clearing the land, the farmers then turned the soil using hand tools like a hoe or hand plow. Over time, and as their acreage grew, farmers obtained horse drawn plows to prepare the soil for planting and to keep their crops weed free.

Harvesting

Grains like wheat and rye were staple crops that farmers used for cash, bread, animal feed, and distilling. For this reason, the farmer's harvesting implements were important hand tools. These tools included cutting tools like the hand scythe, the grain sickle, and the grain cradle. Farmers also used flails to thresh the ripened grain and separate it from the straw or husks.

Another staple crop was corn. Until about 1850, farmers still planted corn the way the Native Americans had taught the first colonists to do nearly two and a half centuries before. Planting was done by hand or with a pointed dibble stick. During the 1850s, the hand corn planter appeared on the market. It consisted of two wooden slats with handles and a seed canister attached. Two metal pieces formed a point on the bottom. Workers thrust the point into the ground and the handles closed. This action caused the seeds in the slide to drop to the point of the planter and fall into the ground. Farmers then covered the hole with their boot. Although hand planters were popular, agriculturalists primarily used them to seed small fields or gardens or for reseeding spots where poor germination had occurred. By the 1900s, pushed planters that could dig a trench and plant seeds became popular.

Household Chores

Washing clothes was a day-long event for farm women. For them, the day began by filling buckets of water from the well or creek to fill the black iron wash pot. They scrubbed the clothes clean using a washboard and then boiled them over an open fire. A laundry agitator was used to stir the garments. Then, they had to bring more water to rinse the lye soap out of the clean clothes. Some used a hand cranked wringer to press the water out. Afterwards, the women hung the clothes to dry in the sun. Lastly, they heated irons to starch and press the clothes.

Other household chores included cobbling (the making of shoes), milking the cows, and making butter and cheese.

Food and Textile Production

Farmers in rural South Carolina produced or processed many different types of goods for both private consumption and to sell at the market. Although early farmers in the Sumter area raised sheep for wool and grew cotton and flax, the quantities were small. The farmers used most of what they produced for their own spinning wheels and hand-looms. Since cloth and ready-made clothing was readily available, many of these families used their woven cloth to make household goods.

The Revolutionary War, by cutting off the importation of cloth, stimulated the growth of cotton and flax for domestic manufacture, and by 1790 "home spinning" was in general use throughout South Carolina. Usually spinners produced the yarn at home and then sent it to a local weaver to be woven into cloth.

Although sheep were not as plentiful in South Carolina as in other areas, farmers often kept a small herd. Once or twice a year, the farmer would shear the sheep to obtain wool.

Processing flax, which is used to make linen, was a more labor intensive operation. After harvesting, flax was "retted", a process that aided in the partial decomposition of the plant stem. This allowed the separation of the fiber from the woody core. After retting and removing any flax seed, the fibers were crushed, broken, cut lengthwise, and combed. Then, the spinner spun the flax into thread.

Cotton was another labor intensive crop. It was only with the invention of the cotton gin, which solved the problem of efficiently removing the seed from cotton, that the crop could be grown profitably in the state's upland areas. Cotton became a poor man's crop; families that did not own a single slave could raise it profitably. These early profits stirred farmers into buying more land and acquiring slaves. Soon many of the small farms grew into large plantations and the plantation system spread throughout South Carolina and to every state in the Deep South.

Farmers placed cotton in bales after it was ginned. The scale ensured an accurate weight.

Farmers used shears to cut the wool off the sheep. Spinners used carders to straighten tangled cotton and linen fibers for spinning. They used heckles to comb flax fibers. The rice flail removed the heads off the rice grain.

Rice production

The abandoned rice dams along the Wateree stand in mute testimony to the extensive rice cultivation practiced by planters in the Sumter area in the 1700s. African and African American slaves used traditional African methods to care for the rice crop. They tilled the fields and then flooded them to form a paddy. After the rice matured, the slaves drained the paddy and harvested the rice, which was then carried to the thrashing yard on a flatboat.

The African Americans then tied the harvested rice into sheaves and thrashed them with a flail to remove the heads off the grain. Next, they placed the rice in a sieve and fanned it in the wind using a coiled "fanning" basket. Finally, the rice was placed in a mortar (a hollowed out stump) and pounded with a pestle to remove the thick outer husks and cuticles from the rice.

Hog Butchering

Hog meat was a necessity for farmers in the Sumter area. Farmers used "everything but the squeal" of the hog. Cured pork could feed the family for an entire year. Farmers quartered the hog and cut it into ham, shoulder and side meat. Farm women used the fat of the hog for cooking, for making soap, and for making candles. They ground the remnants into sausage, used the entrails to make sausage casings, and turned the lights (lungs) and liver into hash. The hog's head and feet became souse meat.

Farmers killed hogs by shooting or hitting it in the head with an axe. The hog was then stabbed with a butcher knife, allowed to bleed freely, and gutted. Next, the hog was placed on a beam and lowered into an iron pot of boiling water to scald off its bristles. Any remaining hair on the pig was scraped off using a hog scraper.

Draft Animal Tack Room

Horses, oxen and mules provided an invaluable source of labor for the farmers of the area. These animals pulled the plows and cultivators, hauled the harvested goods to the barns for storage or to market, and carried the families to visit distant friends and relatives. Without these animals, the farmers' lives would have been immeasurably more difficult.

A variety of harnesses, hames (collars), and braces were necessary for controlling the animals and joining them to plows, cultivators, and wagons. Here are a few examples of these tools.

The early farm or plantation often had a small forge for repairing or creating ironware. Here, farmers repaired wagons, mended tools, and shod horses, until the welcome development of the village blacksmith. The center of the blacksmith's work was the anvil. On its surface, smiths shaped iron into latches, tools, and other useful implements. They used its horn to bend heavy iron into chain links or to bend bar iron into shoes for horses and oxen.

In shoeing a horse or ox, smiths usually only used secondhand shoes, or "removes." They shod the hooves one by one with the blacksmith holding each leg between his thighs. The smiths removed the old shoe with pincers, after which they cleaned and pared the hoof and frog with a knife while preparing the new shoe in the fire. Then, they used a medium-sized hammer to beat the shoe into shape. The smiths beat a toe clip up from the edge of the shoe on the point of a blacksmith's anvil. Finally, the smiths drove the nails into the hoof at an angle so that they emerged some distance above the shoes.