South Carolina Crossroads

The kitchen of Borough House in Stateburg, Sumter County, South Carolina.

     Michael Twitty, cultural historian, chef, culinary re-enactor, and the pied-piper of the "Southern Discomfort Tour" once described, for NPR's Splendid Table, the intersections of multiple food tradition.  "It's about negotiation. What's important? What are you going to keep? What are you going to leave behind? What are you going to compromise on? What are you going to bring together?"

     I'm approaching obliquely the question of the influence of enslaved Africans and their descendants of Southern food.  Bear with me for a few paragraphs. A decade ago I visited the Borough House Plantation, in the high hills of the Santee, near Sumter, South Carolina.  Rain was pouring down but soon I was snug inside a 200 year old house with walls of dirt.  The house is part of a 6 building compound built of pisé de terre, rammed earth. Borough House is owned by descendants of the man who directed its construction. Dr. William Wallace Anderson caused Borough House and its dependencies, as well as the nearby Church of the Holy Cross, to be built between 1821 and 1850.

     When Anderson died in 1864, his eldest son William Wallace Anderson, Jr. inherited the Borough House. Anderson Jr. served in the Confederate Army, but it was his younger brother, Lt. Gen. Richard Heron Anderson, the ranking officer from South Carolina, who directed the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
     You might conclude that the Anderson family were slaveholders. At the time of the building of Borough House, there were 54.  In the Slave List kept by the Andersons, and maintained for a number of years after the War, the number rose to three times that.
     Pisé de terre is a labor intensive method of construction, requiring the digging and time consuming molding and pounding of earth into walls a foot and a half thick. As the Historic American Building Survey noted, it was "built chiefly by slaves under the direction of Dr. Anderson."
     Dr. Anderson learned of the method from Rural Economy by S.W. Johnson, (New York, 1809). (Dr. Anderson's copy is in the Borough House's library.) Johnson's work was actually a translation of a treatise by a Frenchman. An architect, Henry Holland, introduced it to the English nobility in the late 18th Century. The method itself was used by the Romans in Southern France, in China and in Africa.
     Historic preservationists wonder if those slaves or their ancestors knew of rammed earth houses in West Africa. Such a house form and method is seen in West Africa and Haiti, at the Judicial Center archeological site in Charleston and the Yaughan, Curriboo, Mulberry and Quinby Plantations.

Rammed Earth Slave Cabins at Mulberry Plantation

   
             So there was this a transplanted Scotsman, Dr. Anderson, with an American book translated from the French, in one hand, directing his slaves, some African born, some American born, on the other. He had the capital, the written word and the power to direct the others' skilled labor, but could not have succeeded without them.

     Borough House isn't open for tours. If there were, I'd wish the focus to be on the shared ownership of those remarkable, enduring earthen walls. Here at this intersection, at that place and time, knowledge, available materials, and skilled labor came from all over the world to make, from the earth, buildings that would last for centuries.  The name for that is American.