Recovering the Past: Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century Upcountry South Carolina History Edited by Timothy P. Grady and Melissa Walker (review)

When one hears the words “history” and “South Carolina” mentioned together, what often comes to mind is “Charleston” and “Civil War.” Yet South Carolina is not a monolithic, homogenous entity; regional nuances distinguish the history and culture of the Lowcountry, Midlands, and Upcountry from one another. While the history of Charleston and the Lowcountry are well documented, the history of the Upcountry—the fifteen counties in the northwestern corner of the state—is an underrepresented field that remains ripe for development.

Thus, this collection of essays offers an important contribution to the scholarship of Upcountry South Carolina history. The book begins with a foreword from longtime scholar of South Carolina and southern history, Vernon Burton, who emphasizes the value of this book not only for the historical content it offers in correcting the “imbalance” of scholarship on the state’s history but also as a testament to the value of local studies, which “provide the evidence for historical generalizations, sometimes verifying and sometimes challenging popular interpretation” (vii). He argues that while community histories were at the heart of the field of social history that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and cultural historians have for decades utilized material culture to test the broad assumptions of social history, southern history has been slow to embrace such modes of inquiry. While he lauds several successful examples, Burton also acknowledges the challenges inherent in local studies and addresses the common criticism that local history as microhistories or case studies suffer from intellectual fragmentation and lack a broader context. This compilation of local histories within the Upcountry, Burton writes, “highlights regionalism at its best” (xi).

The book’s eight essays have a strong social and cultural history focus, with specific attention given to the history of education, race, and religion. Most of the essays concentrate on a specific community, such as Grady and Katherine Cann’s studies of schools in Reidville and Abbeville, respectively; Diane Vecchio’s examination of the Reconstruction era in Spartanburg; Nancy Griffith’s focus on the Presbyterian Church in Clinton; and Carol Loar’s research on the justice system in Spartanburg. Others, such as Andrew Myers’s study of the Seventh US Cavalry, Walker’s history of tourism, and Robert B. McCormick’s analysis of the Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina, survey the Upcountry more broadly and are topically driven. The essays are fairly chronologically well balanced in their treatment of the entirety of the nineteenth century.

One of the book’s strengths is that it offers geographic diversity throughout the Upcountry; essays focus on Abbeville, Clinton, Reidville, Spartanburg, and several smaller towns. A weakness, however, is the lack of attention given to Greenville, currently the region’s largest city, as is the lack of a concluding essay providing a synthesis of specifically how these essays, as Grady and Walker write in the introduction, “add depth and complexity to our understanding of nineteenth-century southern history” and “challenge accepted narratives about a homogenous South” (3).

In conclusion, this book successfully “recover[s] the Piedmont past.” It provides a history that challenges not only the “South” that is often presented in studies of American history but also treatments of South Carolina as a homogenous, cohesive designation. It is an important contribution to the cache of scholarship on South Carolina history and is also a work that testifies to the value of regional and local history. It is recommended as a model for future efforts.