|
This 1929
page in Walter Gregg Wallace’s farm record book gives a
glimpse into the labor system that still prevailed at Mars
Bluff as late as 1929. The
first eight lines list the plowmen and the next twelve
lines list the hand laborers; both groups worked as gang
labor on the landowner’s land. This
is significant when one considers that, in 1865, the goal
of the freedmen was to own small plots of land to farm for
themselves. What they did not
want was to continue the gang labor system.
Here, over sixty years after slavery ended, while
several of the people listed on the payroll were also
doing some sharecropping, all of them were still doing
gang labor. This ledger was
given to the hewn-timber cabins collection in 1995 by the
estate of Amelia M. Wallace, and it is in the Arundel
Room, Rogers Library, Francis Marion University. (Photo 1999) |
|
