Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
After years of life in a dusty, cramped and challenging to access upstairs in the historic Hunter’s Store, the extensive historical Pendleton archives will soon have a new home.
A newly renovated building on the site of the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina is being prepared to hold records and memorabilia dating back to the Revolutionary era, as well as other objects of historical interests, a treasure trove of photographs, the paperwork of a cotton mill and other evidence of life in Anderson, Oconee and Pickens counties.
Josh Johnson, the museum’s curator and archivist, expects the new facility and its research room to open in January or February. Most of the collections are scheduled to move at the end of November, with December devoted to organizing them.
For roughly 60years, Johnson said, the majority of the archival holdings have been kept at Hunter’s Store in downtown Pendleton. The move will bring them to the museum grounds, where he spends much of his working week, and give researchers a more practical way to reach both the material and the person responsible for it.
The purpose is not simply to put old things in a newer room. It is to make a collection that has been preserved more readily available to the people for whom it was preserved.
The institution’s archival work predates the agricultural museum. Established as the Pendleton District Commission, the organization began collecting and preserving the history of the three counties in 1966. Its holdings range across regional family histories, industry, agriculture, education and African American history.
Johnson describes the scope with considerably less formality: anything relating to Anderson, Oconee and Pickens, “from the Cherokee days till tomorrow.”
At Hunter’s Store, access has been by appointment. The arrangement kept the collections available, but not always easily so. Johnson’s responsibilities at the agricultural museum limited how often he could be at the downtown building. The upstairs location presented another obstacle.
“Hunter Store is a 200-year-old building with stairs,” he said.
For a researcher unable to climb them, preservation and access were two very different propositions.
The new repository will put the collections where Johnson works, with a research room in in the museum’s main building where visitors can request materials and consult inventories. The space will also give him more room to organize incoming collections and work with genealogists, local historians and people who are simply curious about where they live.
Johnson said the enclosed building that was once a pavilion with picnic tables has more square footage than the archives occupied at Hunter’s Store. Construction was completed roughly a month and a half ago, and staff have begun moving and shelving some artifacts.
“This opened up a tremendous amount of space,” he said.
The expansion is also intended to make the contents easier to discover. Johnson plans to use social media to highlight objects and documents that have rarely been seen or discussed.
For an archive, being little known can become a peculiar consequence of being difficult to visit. People do not ask for what they do not know exists.
Asked what the collection contains, Johnson began with an answer that would be unhelpful almost anywhere else.
“A little bit of everything.”
Then came the particulars.
There are documents and correspondence dating to the Revolutionary era, flags from the Civil War and Reconstruction, and hundreds of boxes relating to the Anderson Cotton Mill. Johnson described correspondence, letters, rent books and photographs—a record of an institution’s operations preserved at the scale of its daily business.
The archives’ published collection guide describes the mill holdings as extending from payroll to ledgers across the mill’s operating history. Viewing that collection requires a special appointment.
There’s even the large bell used at the mill.
Such records can begin as instruments of administration and become something else with time. A ledger is kept to account for money; later, it may help account for a life. A rent book may interest someone tracing a family as much as someone studying an industry.
Johnson said the photographic holdings include the work of Lewis Moorhead across a seventy-year career, the Horace G. Williams collection and several other large collections. The Clyde Cole Photograph Collection documents tri-county landscapes, landmarks and residents from 1900 onward.
For family researchers, the archives maintain bound genealogies collected since 1966 and arranged by surname. The T. Franklin “Hank” Acker Collection is another frequently researched resource, also available by special appointment.
The new research room is meant to help visitors move between those categories. A question about a person can become a question about a mill, a school, a street or a farm. Regional history is seldom obliging enough to remain inside the subject heading under which a researcher first approaches it.
Not everything in the collection lends itself to a comfortable account of local heritage.
Johnson said the archives hold original red shirts from the 1870s and a flag associated with the Red Shirts, whose activities in the area form part of the region’s Reconstruction history.
The Red Shirts were white-supremacist paramilitary forces associated with the Democratic campaign of Wade Hampton III in 1876. They intimidated Republicans, particularly Black voters, and sometimes used deadly violence in the campaign to restore white political control in South Carolina. They were not simply another name for the Ku Klux Klan, though they belonged to the wider history of organized racial coercion after the Civil War.
Johnson said the collection’s fragile Red Shirt material has been difficult to bring out. Its storage box is large, and handling the artifact requires care. The new arrangement should make it more feasible to show such material when appropriate.
That prospect gives the move a significance beyond convenience. An archive holds evidence of what a place has endured and inflicted, not only what it prefers to celebrate. Making those objects accessible allows the region’s history to be examined with more than recollection.
The new building is not, at least for now, being announced as a separate general-history museum. Asked whether it might become one in practice, Johnson declined to get ahead of the plans.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I don’t think I’m ready to speak on that yet.”
The immediate undertaking is substantial enough: move the collections, organize them and open a room where people can use them.
The archives’ new home sits within an institution whose own responsibilities have expanded over time.
The agricultural museum opened in 1976 under the Pendleton District Historical Commission, initially emphasizing the farming and cultural history of Anderson, Oconee and Pickens counties. Its work also included administering the South Carolina Century Farm Program, recognizing farms held by the same family for at least a century.
In June 2013, the museum reopened with a statewide mission and a new name: the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina.
The name honors James Bartlett “Bart” Garrison, son of the late state Sen. T. Ed Garrison, one of the museum’s original founders. Bart Garrison died in a silo accident at the family’s Denver Downs Farm in 1990.
Today, the museum combines agricultural artifacts with hands-on education. Its grounds include a relocated Pee Dee tobacco barn and an early twentieth-century mountain schoolhouse. Tractors, antique machinery and exhibits trace changes in farming, while live animals, a greenhouse and workshops in skills such as blacksmithing, broom-making and woodworking offer other ways into the subject.
The regional archives add a different kind of encounter. Instead of demonstrating how a tool worked, a photograph or letter may show who used it, who lived nearby or what else was happening in the community at the time.
The museum’s statewide agricultural mission and its older regional archival mission are distinct. Bringing their collections to the same site should make it easier for visitors to discover both.
Johnson expects the research facility to begin with hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday once it opens. Those hours may change. The agricultural museum’s public hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, he said.
Admission is free.
Researchers should contact Johnson in advance, particularly when seeking a specific collection. The archives’ website continues to request appointments and identifies special appointment requirements for the Acker and Anderson Cotton Mill collections.
Advance notice gives Johnson time to locate material and prepare for a visit. He has worked with genealogists, he said, who spend six hours researching once they arrive.
People who have documents, photographs or objects they believe may belong in the regional collection can also contact him to discuss a possible donation. He can be reached at josh@lakehartwellcountry.com.
