And it is a pleasure to be here today with the Honors College students in the university of south. Here today with the Honors College students at the university of South Carolina for 21 course exiting South Carolinas industrial patch. I want to start with a quote. This quote comes from a very prominent american historian. A guy named ed harris, who wrote, while the coal mines and textile mills have become a visible and memorable part of southern history, the south as an industry has remained virtually. Lumbering is often written off as of little plants and little dramatic interest. Yet lumbering, more often than any other in the, captures the scope of economic change in the new south. Its limitations as well as his impact. We are about 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 the u. S. Department of history and the us to help them by writing something called a Historic Resource survey for the park. Congaree National Park is one of the youngest in the park service. It became a monument in the bicentennial year. Only in the 21st century. It really is one of the newest parts. The goal is to tell Human History of the park and its environment. People interacted with the Natural World . We did that with about seven or eight chapters. We talked about the importance of transportation. We talked about a lot of different topics. The chapter on extracted industries. Raised many, many, many questions about the role of lumber with product as far as conservation in South Carolina. So, probably helpful to talk about the broad outline of South Carolinas story percival work, post reconstruction. The way i would just drive it is perfect storm. Perfect calm. Not looking at images of the storm. The yellow pine and oldgrowth cypress. The perfect story is this. Of course, lots of oldgrowth. Hardwood in yellow pine in the south. Prior to the construction, both because of technological limitations in the way labor was deployed, this was the highest priority of the folks who always land on which the timber grew. At the same time, that there was sort of a rediscovery of all of this timber. The upper midwest and new england managed to get themselves clearcut by lumber men who were not particularly concerned with permanence, 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 land in South Carolina, like other places in the south, was also devalued. The value is Something Like 1 25 of what it had been pre civil war. So what happens . Lumber comes. I mean, these guys are our friends, but its the arrival of big lumber. You know that lumber factors came from places like michigan and they did this to us in 2023, a sort of cool thing of buying up now committed a small tract of land to a big track of land and in 2023, they flipped the land which until they sold to lumber men like these guys. These two were really big lumberman from chicago. They came down and lowered by big tracks, yellow pine, other trees. Follow gigantic tracts of land. Not little tracts of land but gigantic. They are especially captivated by cyprus. So ferguson and he came together in the 1880s with some other partners. Its a little gang. They came down the railroad. The explored the areas around the concrete and they were very taken by what they saw. And they decided that they would start buying up the lands. In time, these guys came to control Something Like 200,000 acres. This one company only in South Carolina can to control Something Like 200,000 acres. Most of which they owned and some of which they only owned the timber rights to. In many cases, they controlled the timber drawing on Something Like 315 square miles. Thats a lot of land. Thats a lot of land. And so they built on the banks of the river Corporate Headquarters for the business. Cyprus, lumber company. The expected permanence and a very long time. So much land that they really thought there was a long time. They left everything out but the oldgrowth cypress. Pretty extensive highly capitalized down. Thats a picture of some script that was used in the store. It also had lumber mills, hotels, company housing, haas does, artesian wells, all kinds of other things in health and safety of workers. Its a segregated place, not a perfect place. The fact that these guys wanted to be here for the long haul. The company only operated for about a order century. They operated from 1890 to 1916. At the peak and ferguson, the company and the town only because of the company. At its peak, there is about 25 people 2500 people who lived and worked in ferguson. They did not just cut timber but manufactured what product there. Before cardboard they did the boxes which were called sharks. Shingles and lots of other architectural features. Then the company shuts down in world war i. The question is what happens to their land . Some of their land again, the controlled 200,000 acres of land. That preserves the timber. Other land, another land, the timber rights were sold. For various Wood Products. Girls became a big user of the trees. Furniture became a big user of the trees. It turns out that sumter, South Carolina had a special, peculiar role in all of this which will not talk about. But some had great ambition and post reconstruction in the south. Really thought it was going to be something 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 microphone to graham duncan, who oversees manuscript correction at a worldclass special Collections Library that has been very, very helpful and getting the paper of the Williams Furniture corporation, which is one of the beneficiaries of the land that had been assembled by people like Francis Beidler and ferguson and all the workers who were there. And i would be remiss if i did not start or stop by saying that what furniture was built was very unusual for the american south. We will talk about that more but it was a major, major, major employer and it had an interracial workforce and a unionized workforce. This is in sumter, South Carolina. Thats really interesting. There is a very good set of reasons why almost nobody knows this dory. The story of the archives will help us better understand. Graham. All right. Thanks. My name is graham duncan. Im the head of collections at the South Carolina hannah library. One of the special collection units here at the university of South Carolina. We particularly collect Archival Research material about the state of South Carolina, inhabitants, history, geography, culture. Those sorts of things consist of manuscript materials, personal papers, organizational records like these types of materials. Business records, that sort of thing. We also have published materials collections, books, newspapers, magazines. A large visual materials collections including photographs, postcards, fine art, that sort of thing. So the building, you can see, appear, through most of its history, has kind of engaged this Research Audience in a very traditional manner. Close to on circulating. You cant just go in the stacks like you can the library, look up and down the shelves, pick up the book you want, check it out and go home. You must tell us what you want to see. Report for you. You come sit in the quite gorgeous reading room and use it. Thats a plug. We are reopening the building october 6th. Everybody come check out the building. Interviewer closed for version. We engaged folks and a traditional manner. Let us know what you want. You come here. You look at the materials. Kind of the work we do behind this with collections, you know, in some ways, we take large amounts of material and organize it in a way that makes sense for researchers looking to say this is the folder of material i want to see, putting the hierarchical arrangement on their. What made this project really interesting of course, this is not something that was helped by the library, but one of the great things we were able to do was learn from expertise in helping stevie, how you will see in a minute, do some of the physical arrangement of the material. But in the know what to request when they want to use this. The longest part of this project was digitization of materials encompassing the tax collection. Digitization, of course available online. These physical records that are only available laura very between 8 30 and 5 00 under our supervision and available online. Its a lot of work. The scanning is one part of it. Scanning all of the materials. Stevie will talk about metadata creation which is a lot of work. Its not just as simple as taking all the boxes and scanning and putting them online. The amount of labor required for projects like this is worth it. We can engage with audiences outside of u. S. The. Its not just for our own kind of constant Management System that usc posterior. They are harvested out through South CarolinaAdditional Library which is in turn harvested through the National Library of america. All of these things are searchable beyond and in different portals than these things here. Im not going to talk for too much longer about archives. I could go on for a while if anyone wants to talk archives. Come find me. We can do that. I do want to say that this project is going to be satisfying for me. And i think my colleague, too. As a large state flagship university, its very nice when we can partner with institutions like the Sumter County museum to kind of leverage the resources and capacity that we have to make their collections more discoverable, as well. In the county museum. And thanks to the resources that came through the various grants that i was able to get, but also faculties and experts youre kind of working. It has been a really great partnership. Its something that i hope we do more of. I will let stevie talk right now. I dont know how long he is going to talk but he will tell you the nuts and bolts of what he has been doing on this project. Okay, awesome. Hello. As many of you know, im stevie. Im the guy who has actually gone through these many boxes that we have here. My plan right now, im going to talk a little bit about what weve done here and how we do it right then we will talk Broad Strokes of what we have here. As many of you have seen again, we have a lot of stuff here. Wed be here all day. To start off, we went for 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 can only read the same 1920s tax returns so many times before it starts to get old. That helped us get a good idea of what needed to be digitized versus what we can skip over. We will not digitize everything here like the box of letterheads over there. We dont need digitize 40 copies of the exact same letterhead. This gave us a good sense of what we had. We did some reorganization. Theres actually two collections here in a weird way. Its scattered to the winds right now. We have the olowo williams collection which is pre Williams Furniture company and then the Williams FurnitureCompany Collection which is post 1931, 1932. We did some cleaning and rehousing of the bottom picture of there, what my desk looks 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, staples. You have to switch over some of the folders. There is boxes here that were completely unprocessed. Had to do some renovation and make sure they found their home. A little cleaning up to do before we got into digitizing. These are the machines reused. On the left are what was primarily used. The one on the right, i only ended up using one but its so cool i will show you guys the whole scheme of what is going on. The one on the left, good luck looking it up. It is this massive overhead scanner that we use for oversize materials. Like a large map, one of these big thick books right here. We have to use the over side to do it. The thing on the right wrist there is a normal flatbed scanner where we put most of the stuff through. Slide something into it. Scan, done. Then this in here, i only used it once, but its very neat. Its like two cameras strapped at either side aura takes pictures of books. I think it is the coolest thing ever. Just 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 document that we have. A lot of documents of varying sizes, materials, colors. Photo negatives, photo positives. Total insane amounts. Cant just use one object or one technology. This is what we do next after we are done physically scanning it. This is called metadata. Some of you guys across different disciplines have probably interacted with metadata before. I dont know my business students but you probably have a good idea of what this is. Basically large amounts of data. How we make sure that you are able to find what rescan, so we put in the title, we have the date that anyone who contributed to the making of the object. Any sort of thing that will help in your search for these objects goes here. It looks very overwhelming, but this is what gets turned into this which is what you see on the library website. It obviously gets me in and out. Next to it is what the traditional scan looks like. How many of you have looked in the librarys website. This is produced by the scanners we went through. Going into what we have to start with, we have things like the companys operations of behind the scenes stuff. This is the vast majority of what we have. I have some things that i will show along the way. We have Company Operations like this. From really early 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 georgia pacific. If anyone wants to do that and find the handshake agreement of the plant for 15 years, be my guest. So we have a lot of these appear. We have marketing material that showed exactly how they want you to market the furniture. Showing exactly the acreage and footage of the amount of timber that they have on hand throughout their entire time. Talking more about the timber in the lumber. Talking Different Things there. We have a lot of pictures of what the lumber operation looked like. We have land showing where it is physically located and then going back to operations, we have estimates of all, we want to buy this bit of land. How much is on it . We have stuff like that i believe read here. This is a traditional with about 1 billion of postage on it. Titled to real estate and we have a lot of deeds in here. Whole boxes filled with about 200 land deeds. All which encompass different lands that they are making. But a lot of land. We have a ton of these if youre interested. Talking more about the land, there is a lot in how they use the land that we have. Mainly in that map there being the location factory. Getting a good setup. Good sense that i trust. Theyre using the forest. Talking more about the land. We have this, as well. Let me pull it out. Kind of weird at first why this matters. It is an insurance policy. The entire crop of timber, very large. I dont know if anyone knows lloyds of londons, but very large object. You can kind of get a sense i forget what famous thing the insured. I believe love canal for all my history people out there, environmental people. You get a sense of the scale and where they were operating with their timber. Going off timber, we have stuff on the equipment they were using. I believe we talked about this yesterday. A lot of the sale wins involve act tester equipment. We have so many pictures. So many pictures of old equipment they were using. Materials, guys using them. Manuals on how to use them. People breaking down their jobs and saying i use this every day. Or is this one as much. If your interest in and to logic, we have so much on it. The people who use the Tech Knowledge he, we have a good amount on workers. As i mentioned yesterday, this is a Management Center collection. We dont have as much on workers as we would like. Some need rings in here like in series a 16 over here. Some will document that workers were printing and showing exactly what they were doing their free time. What company life was like and how workers interacted with each other. So we do get some good glimpses as to what worker life was. We also have some pictures. These are two of them. A lot more on the actual faces that we know. And the workforces himself was an integrated workspace. Overwhelmingly black. This is reflected in all the pictures. Whenever we have, you know, 35 year awards, fortyyear awards, as overwhelmingly black workers. Pretty unique for the south. Going off of workers, we had a lot of the labor stuff. That on the right is one about 10 to 15 photos that we have which are containing or cente