Hi. Im jessica, and it is a pleasure to be here today with the Honors College students and the university of South Carolinas 421 course with the south made exhibiting South Carolinas industrial past. I want to start with a quote. This quote comes from a very prominent american historian. A guy named ed ayres who wrote, while the coal mines and textile mills have become a visible and memorable part of southern history, the souths largest industry has remained virtually ignored. Lumbering is often written off as if little consequence and little dramatic interest. Yet, lumbering more often than any other industry captures the full scope of economic change in the new south. Its limitations as well as its impact. And we are about i dont know, a third of the way through the semester and i think you guys are already convinced of this. But, i thought it might be interesting to share with you a little bit more about how we got to this place. So, about five or six years ago the National ParkService Reached out to uscs department of history, and asked us to help them by writing something called the Historic Resource survey for the park. So, congaree National Park is one of the youngest parts in the National Park service. It has become a monument in 1976 during the bicentennial year, and it only became a park early in the 21st century. It really is one of the very newest parks. So, the goal of this Historic Resource survey is to tell the Human History of the park, and its environment. How have people interacted with the Natural World . And we did that. We did that in about seven or eight chapters. We called we talked about the importance of transportation. And we talked about a lot of different topics. But, the chapter on extractive industries, particularly lumbar was one that he raised many, many questions. About the role of lumbar Wood Products, and far as conservation in South Carolina. So, probably helpful to talk a little bit about the broad outline of South Carolinas story postcivil war, post reconstruction. And i think the way i would describe it is perfect storm. Perfect storm. Youre not looking at any images of storms. Youre looking at images of really beautiful yellow pine, and really beautifully old growth cyprus. But, the perfect storm was this. There of course was lots of old growth. Hardwood, and yellow pine in the south. But, prior to the ends of reconstruction both because of technological implementations, and the way labor was deployed this was not the highest priority of the folks who owned the land on which the timber group. The blood, at the same time there was a sort of a rediscovery of all of this timber. The upper midwest, and new england managed to get themselves clearcut by lumber men who werent particularly concerned with permits, right . So, then those folks were very interested in what the south had to offer. Lumber men from those places were hungry for new timber, and lounge plant in South Carolina like all other places was also devalued. Its value was Something Like 1 25 of what it had been pre civil war. So, what happens . Well, big lumber comes. I dont really like featuring i mean, these guys are our friends. But, its the arrival of big lumber. You guys know that lumbar factors came from places like lake michigan. Sort of cool thing of buying got the amalgamated small tracks of land. Big trucks of land, and then using parliaments from 2023 they flipped the land. Which in turn they sold to really big lumber men like these guys here. So, Benjamin Franklin ferguson and Francis Beidler were they were really big lumber men from chicago. And they came down kind of lord by stories of these big traps tracks full of cypress, and yellow pine, and other great trees. And they bought up gigantic tracts of land. Multiple tracts of land, but gigantic tracts of land. They were especially captivated by cypress. Okay. So, they come these guys come. Franklin, and ferguson. I mean, ferguson, and beidler came together in the late 1880s with some other partners. It wasnt just the two of them. It was a little gang. They came down by railroad. They explored areas around the congaree, the santee, and the watery rivers. And they were very taken by what they saw. And they decided that they would start buying up the land. In time, these guys came to control Something Like 200,000 acres. This one company only in South Carolina came to control Something Like 200,000 acres. Most of which they owned, and some of which they only owned the timber rights to. But, in any case they controlled the tumor growing on Something Like 315 square miles. That is a lot of land. A lot of land. So, they built on the banks of the santee river. They built a company town, and Corporate Headquarters for their business. Their business was called the santee river cypress come in a. And they built it for permanence. They expected to stay for a very long time. This was not a cut and run operation. They had so much land they really thought they would stay a long time, and they started out only by cutting oldgrowth cypress. They left Everything Else, and they built this pretty sophisticated, pretty expensive, highly capitalized company town. It had a company store. Thats a picture of some script that was used in the store. But, it also had lumber mills, and hotels, and company housing. At hospitals, and schools, and artesian wells, and all kinds of other things for the health and safety of workers. But, it was a segregated place. It was not a perfect place. And despite the fact that these guys wanted to be there for the long haul, the Company Really only operated for about a quarter century. They operated from about 1890 to about 1916. And at the peak in the ferguson , the company and the town, and everybody who was in that place was there only because of the company. It had not been atoned previously. So, at its peak there were about 2500 people who lived and worked in ferguson. And they manufactured. They didnt just cut timber. They also manufactured a whole bunch of Wood Products there before cardboard they did the boxes. They did lots of roof shingles, and illustrates, and other architectural features. And then world war i came, and this company shuts down. So, the question became what happened to their land . And some of their land, and again they controlled like 200,000 acres of land. Some of theres their land was leased on the clubs. That preserves the timber. Another land the timber rights were sold. For various Wood Products. Their lives became a big user of the trees. Furniture became a big user of the trees. And dated terms out. Sumter, South Carolina had a very special to cure your role in all of this. Which were not want to talk about. Some had great ambition in post reconstruction. In the postreconstruction south. Really thought he was going to be something very, very special. And it turns out to become the center of the Wood Products industry in South Carolina. Which was no small thing. It was a major, major industry. And the Timber Industry today continues to be a major industry in our state. So, im going to turn over the mic to graham duncan. Who oversees the manuscript collection at carolinian the library. A worldclass special Collections Library that has been a very, very helpful in getting processed the papers of the Williams Furniture corporation. Which is one of these sort of beneficiaries of the land that had been assembled. At least indirectly by people like Francis Beidler, and benjamin ferguson. And all the workers who were there. And i would be remiss if i didnt stop by saying that what Williams Furniture built was really quite unusual for the american south. We will talk more about in a few minutes. But, it was a major, major, major, major employer. And it had an interracial workforce, and a unionized workforce. And this was in sumter, South Carolina. And thats really interesting. But, theres a very good set of reasons why almost nobody knows this story. In the story of the archives will help us to better understand. So, graham. Carolinian, the lib. So just briefly, the southe lib. Carolinian library, as she all right. My name is graham duncan. Im the head of collections at the south carolinian library. So, just briefly. The South Carolina library she mentioned was one of the special collections units here at the university of South Carolina. We particularly collect markable Research Material about the state of South Carolina, and its inhabitants. Documenting its history, geography, culture. So, those sorts of things consist of manuscript materials. Which might be personal papers, organizational records. Right . Like these types of materials. Business records. That sort of thing. We also have a published materials collection. Books, newspapers, magazines. Things you would expect. Maps. Then a large visual materials collections. That includes both photographs, and owed old photographic processes. Postcards, and fine art. That sort of thing. So, the south carolinian building you can see here. Through most of its history has kind of engaged its Research Audience in a kind of traditional manner. We are a special Collections Library. So, we are close to circulating. That means you cant just go into the stacks like you could in Thomas Kuyper library. Look up and down the shelves. Look at the book you want. Check it out, and go home. You must tell us what you want to see. We will play for you. You come sit in the quite gorgeous reading room, and use it. And thats a plug. We are reopening our builder on october 6. Everyone come check out the building. None of you were here when it closed for renovations. Thats exciting. So, yes. We engaged folks in a kind of traditional manner. You let us know what you want. You come here. You look at the materials. Kind of the work we do behind this with collections is in some ways its very kind of tedious set of things. We take large amounts of material. We organized in a way that makes sense for researchers who say this is the folder of material i want to see. Been kind of a hierarchal goal arrangement on there. What made this a project really interesting. This is not a product that was held by the south carolinian library. We were able to kind of lend some expertise in helping stevie, who you will see here in a minute do some of the physical arrangement of the material. Make a finding. Make a list. A box list so people know what the request is when they want to use this. But, the large part of this project is digitization of a lot of the materials. I dont think its going to encompass the entire collection. So, digitization of course makes things available online. So, we take these physical records that are only available in the library. In between 8 30, and 5 00 under our supervision and we make them freely available online. Its a lot of work. The scanning is one part of it. Scanning all the materials. But, stevie will talk about letter data creation. Which is a lot of work compared to just the scanning. Its not as simple as taking all these boxes come in scanning, and putting them online. But, the amount of labor required in projects like this is worth it. Right . Because we can really engage with audiences outside of usc. And its not just through our own kind of content Management System that usc hosts here. We are also kind of harvesting out through South Carolina digital library. Just harvested through the National Digital library of america. All of these things are searchable beyond, and in different portals than just these things here. Im not going to talk for too much longer about archives in general. I could go on for a while. If anyone wants to talk archives come find me later. We can do that. But, i do want to say this project has been very satisfying for me, and i think i can speak for my usc colleagues too. As a large estate, flagship university. Its very nice what we can partner with institutions like the Sumter County museum to kind of leverage some of the resources, and capacity we have to make their collections more discoverable as well. This is a collection that is held by the Sumter County museum. And thanks to the resources that came through the various grants. That i was able to get, but also uscs faculties, and experts here kind of working. Its been a really great partnership. I hope its something we do more of. Im going to let stevie talk for a while now. Or, i dont know how long hes going to talk. It may not be for a while. But, he will tell you more of the nuts and bolts hes been doing on this project. Yeah. Okay, awesome. Hello. As many of you know i am stevie malinowski. I am the guy whos actually gone through these many boxes we have here. So, my plan right now. Im going to talk a little bit about what weve done here, and how we do it. Then were going to talk Broad Strokes of what we have here. As many of you have seen again, we have a lot of stuff here. Talking very specific. We would be here all day. To start off, we went through a few stages in this process. First, we started by reading just about everything here to see what we have. It got dry at times. You know . You can only read the same 1920s tax returns so many times before it starts to get old. But, that helped us get a good idea of what needed to be digitized versus what we can get over. When not going to digitize everything here. Such is the box of letter has over there. Would i need to digitize 40 copies of the exact same letterhead. That gave us a good idea of what we had. We did some reorganization. Theres actually two collections here in a weird way. We have the old williams collection. Its scattered through the wins right now. But, we have the ol williams collection. Which encompasses stuff pre Williams Furniture company, and then we have the Williams Furniture company collection. Which is post1931, 1932. We did some cleaning, and rehousing. That put a picture up there is what my desk has looked like for the last week at the end of the day. A lot of this has not been cared for in a few years. So, we have to remove paperclips, and staples. Its going to write the paper. We have to switch over some of the folders. A lot of stuff. There is boxes here that were completely unprocessed. So, we had to do some reorganization. Had to make sure they found their homes in places that made sense. A little cleaning up to do before we ever got into digitizing. When we did get into digitizing, these are the machines were used. Two on the left are what we primarily used. One of the right i think i only ended up using wantz. But, its so cool. So, i figured id throw it in here to show you guys the whole scheme of whats going on. The one of the left, good luck picking looking it up. Is this massive overhead scanner. We use it for oversized materials. Something like a large map or one of these big, thick books right here. They dont fit in a regular scanner. We up to you something oversized to do it. That thing on the right there is just a normal flatbed scanner. Thats where we put most of the stuff through. You just like something into it, close the top, scans, done. Then this thing here, again i only used it once. But, its a kyle dennis. Its like two camera straps at either side to take pictures of books. I think its the coolest thing ever. I wanted to let you guys see it. But, yeah. So, we have to choose which of these things is going to suit the needs of the documents we have. We have a lot of documents of varying sizes, materials, colors. Photo negatives, photo positives. Totally insane amount of things here. So, we cant just use one object. We can just use one technology. This is what we do next after we are done actually physically scanning it. This is called metadata. Some of you guys crossed different disciplines, and have interacted with metadata before. I dont know about my business students. But you probably have a good idea of this. Its basically just large amounts of data. This is how we make sure that you are able to find what we scan. So, we put in the title. We at the date. Yet anyone who contributed to the making of the object. Length. Any sort of thing thats going to help in your search for these objects goes here. And it looks very overwhelming. But, this is what gets turned into this. Which is what you see on the librarys website. It obviously gets only endowed. The next to it is what a traditional skin looks like. How many of you have looked to the librarys website, youre going to be used to this. This was produced by those scanners we went through. So, then going into kind of what we have to start with. We have things that the companys operations behindthe scenes stuff. This is the vast majority of what we have in the collection. I have some objects in going to show along the way. We have Company Operations like this from really going on. These big huge ledgers that contain a variety of materials in them. We also have stuff like this. We talked about this in class yesterday. This is the sale to <