S.C. Agricultural Museum Makes Harvesting Agricultural History a Priority
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The first thing that may surprise a visitor to the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina is not the size of the tractors or the age of the tools. It is the persistence of the work.
A plow, an incubator, a tobacco barn, a schoolhouse, a diesel engine and a tiny, preserved insect can seem, at first, like little more than the familiar furniture of rural nostalgia. But the museum in Pendleton is less interested in treating agriculture as a vanished world than in showing how thoroughly it remains embedded in the state’s identity.
The museum begins with the long history of agriculture in South Carolina, Cherokee cultivation, colonial farms, tobacco, cotton, corn, livestock, machinery, labor and the complicated systems by which people made a living from the ground. It ends, at least for now, with hydroponics, agricultural drones and the questions that arise when farming is conducted by fewer people on less land.
In between are tens of thousands of objects, accumulated through attic cleanouts, barn discoveries, family donations, historical research and the increasingly urgent work of collecting stories before the people who remember an agricultural way of life are gone.
Josh Johnson, the museum’s curator and archivist, describes the task without much sentimentality.
“Agriculture has been and to some capacity always will be the major driving factor of Anderson County,” he said.
That claim is not a promotional slogan. It is a historical fact of the region. For hundreds of years, Anderson County was farmland. Farming shaped its economy, politics, culture, landscape and family histories. There were, Johnson said, very few people not involved in agriculture unless they worked at La France mill almost 200 years ago.
“It has been the cultural, political, and economic motivator of Andersonians since the Cherokee were here,” he said.
It remains a driving economic force in Anderson County today. Agricultural product sales reached $84.3 million in Anderson County last year, a up 12 percent over a the past five years.
The museum opened in 1976 as the Pendleton District Agricultural Museum, created to preserve the farming history of Anderson, Oconee and Pickens counties. It emerged from the Pendleton District Historic Commission, which still owns, manages and operates the institution.
For nearly four decades, the museum’s work focused on the three-county region. But from the beginning, it carried a statewide responsibility: the South Carolina Century Farm Program.
The program honors farms that have remained in the same family for at least 100 years. It costs nothing to participate, through owners must provide evidence of continuous family ownership, and qualifying farms are added to the historic register. The museum hosts an annual dinner for the families, set for Sept. 17 this year, a gathering that turns those legal record of ownership into an honorific acknowledgment of endurance.
In 2013, the museum underwent a grand reopening and broadened its mission to represent the agricultural history of the entire state. It was renamed the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina in honor of James “Bart” Garrison, the son of the late state S.C. Sen. T. Ed Garrison.
Sen. Garrison had been among the museum’s founders in 1976. When his son Bart died in a farm-related silo accident in 1990, the renaming gave the museum a personal connection to the risks, losses and commitments of agricultural life.
The museum now works across the state while continuing to serve as steward of the Tri-County Archives for the Pendleton District Historic Commission. Materials relating to Anderson, Oconee and Pickens counties fall under its purview: documents, photographs, family records, farm records, artifacts and the stories that attach themselves to objects long after their practical use has ended.
Johnson travels often to work with century-farm families. There are about 500 century farms statewide, with Anderson County leading the state with more than 100.
“Some of them have been in the same family since the late 1700s,” said Johnson.
The century-farm designation is an achievement, but it also records a challenge. Farms that have survived war, inheritance, drought, changing markets and generational shifts may not survive development pressure or the simple fact that a family’s children choose other lives.
Anderson County’s agricultural history is not confined to the past. Clemson University operates large local areas in connection with agricultural experimentation and use. Beef cattle remain an important part of the region’s economy and, Johnson said, a significant part of South Carolina agriculture. Poultry houses are common around the county’s outer areas. Row crops remain possible in suitable places.
But the direction of the larger story is clear. South Carolina has fewer farms than at any point in its history.
“In the last five years, we’ve lost about 5,000 South Carolina farms,” Johnson said.
The state now has between 20,000 and 22,000 farms, he said. The losses come through development, infrastructure expansion, changing family economics and the difficulty of keeping agricultural land in production.
Greenville County, for example, once had more than 30 century farms. It now has nine.
The numbers give the museum’s work a different urgency. A century farm is not merely an old farm, it is a place where ownership, labor and memory have passed through generations. When a farm leaves a family, its story does not necessarily disappear, but someone has to collect it.
“That’s one of the things I try and do, is collect these stories for people that the farms may not be in the family in 10 years,” Johnson said. “Who’s to say?”
The museum’s role, then, is not simply to preserve agricultural objects, it is to make sure that the people who used them do not become indistinct.
The collection at the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum arrived in the way many local-history collections do: one barn, one attic, one shed and one conversation at a time.
“People bring things in,” Johnson said. “I go clean out barns or attics or, you know, just someone says: ‘Hey, I’ve got an old shed, you can take whatever you want out of it.’”
The museum has collected agricultural equipment for nearly every kind of crop and livestock operation imaginable. Its holdings include objects specific to other regions of South Carolina, artifacts that do not originate in the Upstate but help tell the wider agricultural story of the state.
The collection contains tens of thousands of objects, Johnson said, before one begins counting the documents, photographs and other archival materials.
Some objects produce an immediate reaction. The 1935 schoolhouse, moved from Oconee County, was carefully deconstructed and reconstructed on the museum grounds. It gives visitors a building-sized artifact, a place where the past can be entered rather than merely viewed.
Outside stands an enormous diesel engine from the 1920s that still operates on special occasions.
But Johnson is often most interested in the quieter objects — tools, household items, improvised repairs, a piece of equipment strapped, bolted or taped together until it could be made to work again.
“It may not look interesting, but you can always tell that this was someone’s,” he said.
A patched object contains evidence of its owner’s ingenuity, economy and refusal to discard something that still had life in it. Agricultural history, Johnson said, is not just crops, livestock, barns and machinery. It is the people who did the labor and the tools that became part of their lives.
One object, however, is both small and historically immense: the first boll weevil discovered and confirmed in South Carolina.
The insect is displayed in the tobacco exhibit, preserved in resin since 1917. It was found on Daufuskie Island, where the state entomologist removed it from a cotton bloom and sealed it in place.
Within five years of the boll weevil’s arrival, Johnson said, 70 percent of South Carolina’s cotton crop was gone.
“It was obliterated,” he said.
The insect changed the state’s agricultural and economic life for generations. And now it sits in a museum case: a tiny object more than a century old, offering a concise reminder that a vast economic transformation can begin with something small enough to fit beneath a fingernail.
“That’s probably one of my favorite things here,” Johnson said.
The museum also contains a large chicken incubator, a machine that caused a small scandal in Horry County around the turn of the 20th century.
A woman in Aynor acquired one of the incubators before her neighbors did, allowing her to hatch chicks without relying on hens. Her neighbors, observing the sudden appearance of chicks without the usual avian participation, came to an curious and incorrect conclusion.
“They thought she was a witch,” Johnson said.
The story is funny because the device now seems ordinary, but it captures the pace at which agricultural technology changes rural life. A machine enters a community, alters a familiar process and looks, for a moment, like magic.
The museum is filled with such moments. Its farm equipment, house artifacts, tobacco implements and corn tools are all records of people adapting to what they had, repairing what broke, learning new methods and making decisions that would once have appeared as consequential as the arrival of an incubator.
The museum’s exhibits are arranged roughly as a walk through that history. Visitors first encounter the Century Farm area, which is being expanded with a large wall recognizing qualifying farms across South Carolina. Other sections trace Native American and early colonial agriculture, tobacco, cotton and corn. A large exhibit hall holds agricultural artifacts. Another room contains household objects. There is an exhibit on African Americans and agriculture, and a smaller display on the future of agriculture.
That future-oriented exhibit will soon be refurbished to include discussions of hydroponics, drone use and other changing technologies.
The museum’s narrative therefore runs from Cherokee agriculture to aerial surveying and controlled-environment growing, from hand tools to data, from a place where an apple came from an orchard to a world in which, as Johnson said, many children have no idea about apple trees.
“You ask a kid where an apple comes from, and it’s Ingles,” he said. “Not an orchard.”
Objects are durable, but voices are not.
The museum runs a continually active oral-history program, looking for farmers, mill workers and others who can describe how people lived and worked in the region. Johnson’s informal target is anyone over 70.
“My bracket is pretty much anyone over 70 we want to get an interview with,” he said.
The urgency is obvious. Agriculture did not disappear from South Carolina long ago, but it has receded quickly enough that younger people may have no lived connection to the routines of family farms, mill employment or rural labor. A family may have operated a large farm for generations, only to see the children decide not to farm. The house may remain. The acreage may be sold. The stories, if they are not recorded, may leave with the people who lived them.
The museum’s archival website is being rebuilt so that oral histories can eventually live online, with digital access, transcriptions and audiovisual records that can be watched and heard by future researchers.
For some interviews, Johnson said, the recordings will make voices accessible for the first time in 40 or 50 years.
The museum’s educational work is broad. School groups, church groups, homeschoolers, garden clubs and families regularly visit. Guided tours carry a modest fee, but individual visitors and families are generally admitted free. The museum can accommodate groups of many sizes and has hosted farm days, children’s activity days and summer camps.
The goal is partly instruction and partly reintroduction: to show people that agriculture is not a distant antique, even when the people who know its daily details are becoming fewer.
The museum is looking ahead while preserving what came before.
If money allowed, Johnson said, it could do much more. But even within its current resources, the museum is expanding programming. Blacksmithing classes are expected to begin in the next two months. Exhibits are being refurbished. Community outreach is increasing. The Pendleton District Historic Commission is moving into publishing as another way to share the region’s history.
“There’s a lot to look forward to and a lot going on now,” Johnson said.
The website reconstruction is part of that effort. Once complete, it will include sections for the Century Farm Program, the historic archives, museum exhibits and guidance on how to access the institution’s resources.
The Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina is a place where the state’s agricultural heritage is preserved, but so much more happens there.
The museum collects. It retrieves. It scans. It reconstructs. It interviews. It listens. It persuades families not to throw away the photographs, ledgers, tools and stories that appear in the aftermath of a death or a move. It reminds visitors that a small bug can change a state’s economy, that an incubator can look like witchcraft, that a repaired tool can reveal a life, and that a farm can endure for a century without any guarantee it will endure for another decade.
The museum’s work is not really about nostalgia. It is about evidence.
The tractors, barns, animals, schoolhouse, engine and preserved boll weevil are there because the people who used them mattered. The century farms are there because continuity is a form of history. And the oral histories are there because no archive, however extensive, can fully explain a place without the sound of someone who remembers.
