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The past decade and a half has witnessed an increasing scholarly interest in the southern colonial backcountry, the likes of which have not been seen since Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal essay on American exceptionalism and the frontier (Turner 1894). Geographers and social historians have dominated a series of regional conferences, and their dominance is re®ected in the scholarly literature (see for instance Beeman 1984; Greene 1988; Hofstra 1990; Hofstra and Mitchell 1993; Mitchell 1991; Nobles 1989; Rutman 1985). In general, studies have focused on geographic, economic, political, and, in some cases, environmental aspects of early colonization of the southern frontier. Little work has been published on what a backcountry settlement looked like on the ground, on how ethnic diversity shaped settlements, or, at a tighter scale, on the internal organization of an individual backcountry farm. This chapter describes a farm located in New Windsor township, the westernmost of the South Carolina settlements founded in the late 1730s. The colonial townships of South Carolina were relatively short-lived settlements. Various schemes were proposed in the early years of the eighteenth century to protect the western borders of Carolina. However, it was Governor Robert Johnson’s proposal for ten such settlements along the Fall Line that met with proprietorial approval, primarily as a result of damage the colony suffered during the Yamasee War of 1715–1718 (see Green et al. this volume), coupled with fears of Spanish and French invasion and a slave insurrection (Figure 7.1). The townships were to be peopled with immigrants recruited in Europe and would serve both to protect the vital rice plantations of the Lowcountry and to furnish raw materials for the English mercantile market. The Carolina townships met with varying degrees of success (Meriwether 1940). Some, like Saxe-Gotha and Orangeburg, became the bases 7 An Open-Country Neighborhood in the Southern Colonial Backcountry David Colin Crass, Bruce Penner, and Tammy Forehand for modern settlements. Others, like New Windsor, attracted just enough settlers to become recognizable as farming communities, but never coalesced into the backcountry urban centers envisioned by their planners. The lack of development in New Windsor meant that the archaeological deposits dating to its initial settlement have remained undisturbed; a characteristic that made it attractive for investigation when the ¤rst site was reported in 1993. This chapter examines several archaeological sites in New Windsor with an eye toward their context within the larger settlement and with a special focus on the home of three Swiss Meyer brothers. We use the concept of an “open country neighborhood,” ¤rst employed by geographers of the Shenandoah Valley, to describe the settlement pattern in New Windsor. Although the architecture of the site re®ects the struggle to establish a family on the frontier and the impermanence typical of that time and place, the material culture of the Meyers tells a different story, one of rapid integration into a worldwide mercantile system. The relatively impermanent nature of the sites investigated also has important rami¤cations for ¤eld surveys and emphasizes the need for exhaustive archival research and local Figure 7.1. The South Carolina townships. 94 / D. C. Crass, B. Penner, and T. Forehand informant interviews before efforts are made to locate eighteenth-century frontier settlements on the ground. The “Discovery” of New Windsor Township In the spring of 1993, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology ’s Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, based at the Savannah River site in Aiken, received reports from landowner Jackie Bartley in nearby Beech Island that she had been collecting pottery from the surface of one of her plowed ¤elds. Curious, she had dug a hole in the area of greatest concentration and had discovered what we later determined was a pit feature full of burned clay and colonial period domestic debris. Bartley had tried for years to interest professional archaeologists in the site; however, she had been unsuccessful in persuading anyone with knowledge of eighteenth-century artifacts to visit her small farm. Jackie Bartley and her husband, Benny, had compiled a treasure trove of primary documents from courthouses in the area, including plat maps, genealogical information, deeds, wills, and probate inventories. After looking over her information, we realized that her contention—that her property was owned in the eighteenth century by three Swiss brothers named Leonard, Ulrich, and Michael Meyer—was probably correct. Moreover, when she took us out to the ¤eld where she had gathered her collections, it became apparent that there was a site located in...

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