Seeking Mary Smith…through historical context

Beginning my archival research exposed a larger problem. When it comes down to it, I just don’t know that much about the Revolutionary War or life in the 1780s. My own scholarly expertise is in the British nineteenth-century, so just a few decades away from Mary Smith’s arrival in Charleston. But the prosperous Londoners of 1850 rarely paused to describe the lifestyle of the poor Scots they’d sent to colonize northern Ireland—which, before America and India, had been the far-flung frontier of British civilization. Victorian literature did not help me to picture the life of Mary Smith.

In particular, I needed to better understand how a South Carolina settler would have perceived the American Revolution, and how a Scots-Irish settler would have perceived the American frontier. One of the lessons I learned from Tiya Miles in All That She Carried is that, when you lack details about a specific event, you can understand that event through deep context. If I cannot know exactly what Mary Smith thought and felt, I can find out what other women in her situation thought and felt.

As my background entertainment for the past couple of weeks, I’ve thrown myself deep into that rabbit hole. During my drives to and from work, I’m listening to a series Great Courses lectures on the American Revolution by Allen Guelzo, and it has helped me understand the reason why Mary’s community sided with the patriots. I am also reading a couple of books about the Scots Irish immigrant experience, one written by an anthropologist in Northern Ireland and the other by a history professor at Western Carolina.

My most fun pieces of context are a bit silly, but help me make a personal connection to the time period. I’m watching a YouTube channel called Early American. The couple that produces the channel do colonial lifestyle reenactments, so I can see how Mary Smith would have baked a pie or cleaned her house. I’m also rewatching a PBS reality show I love: Colonial House. It was one in a series of early 2000s reality projects in which people volunteered to spend a few months living the lifestyle of a previous era. The Colonial House cast had to live as early American colonists, as the name implied, and it helped me ponder the many differences between Mary Smith’s understanding of a comfortable life vs. my own.

Getting context has also involved some legwork. I ran across a reference to an authentic log house, the Obediah Shirley House in Honea Path, built during Mary Smith’s lifetime about 20 miles from where she lived. This is probably the closest I’ll get to seeing what her house looked like. Mary Smith might even have met the Shirley family. So, I stopped to take some pictures.

The lower left-hand section is the original home from the 1790s: this building started as a two-room, one-story log cabin. The rest of the house was added in the early 1800s, around the time Mary herself was building wealth and expanding her own comfort.

Mary didn’t live in this particular house, and none of these histories mention Mary Smith herself, of course. However, all of them deepen my ability to understand who she was. I can picture her walking in and out of a cabin like this and visualize the life she would have lived.

Finally, to see a place where Mary herself DID live, I used the location data from the land deeds I found last week in the SC state archives to find the land she owned, and I went for a drive to explore. At least, that’s true if I calculated my GPS coordinates correctly. Only a couple of miles from my house, the nearest border of Mary’s land lay just across the lake. Some of it is still in use as farmland and probably looks much the way it did when she looked out at her own domain. Other portions have been covered by second-growth forest—as seemingly dark and impenetrable as when she bought it—and they helped me imagine Mary as the trailblazing settler she was, carving a thriving farm out of the wild American frontier.

Side note: Part of Mary’s land encompassed the area where Anderson’s legendary “Crybaby Bridge” now stands—a good research project for another summer.

In my final research attempt and blog post, I’ll make a stop by the Anderson County Museum and reflect on what we can (and can’t) know about Mary Smith.