"...A comprehensive compilation of records from the Edgefield County Archives pertaining to the purchasing and selling of slaves. The records include estate records, wills, inventories, appraisals, deed transfers, sheriff sales and other miscellaneous records, with approximately 29,000 listings and over 58,000 slave names. Many of the records contain information on gender, age, physical description, occupation and family relationships. The names are listed alphabetically by slave owner." --From press release.

This book provides family sketches and genealogical information on the first families to settle in Edgefield County, SC. The earliest settlers date back to the early 1700s. This area is particularly significant as the "end" of the Great Wagon Road from the New England States. Generally the area was not populated by white settlers until just prior to the Revolutionary War, but immediately following the war, thousands of people passed through as they pushed into Georgia, Alabama, and points west. By the time of the 1790 census, Edgefield county had families with 763 surnames listed. This volume focuses on the families which were apparently in the area as early as 1750. Families Profiled: Hammond, Dillard, Williamson, Thomas, Pickens, Abney, Brooks, Dobbins, Galphin, Pope, Harrison, and Bonham.This volume also includes Civil War rosters for the following units formed from Edgefield County.-1st Infantry Regiment (Gregg's) Company C - Edgefield Rifles-1st Infantry Regiment (Gregg's) Company G - Hamburg Volunteers-1st Infantry Regiment (Gregg's) First Company H - Cherokee Ponds Guards-1st Battalion Sharpshooters-2nd Cavalry Regiment Company G - Bonham Light Dragoons-2nd Cavalry Regiment Company I - Edgefield Hussars-2nd Infantry Regiment State Troops Company B-2nd Infantry Regiment State Troops Company I Other volumes in this series focus on other families. Visit our website at www.researchonline.net/first for a listing of available volumes.

"He is known today, as he was then, only as Dave. His jugs and storage jars were everyday items, but because of their beauty and sometimes massive size they are now highly sought after by collectors. Born about 1801, Dave was taught to turn pots in Edgefield, South Carolina, the center of alkaline-glazed pottery production. He also learned to read and write, in spite of South Carolina's long-standing fear of slave literacy. Even when the state made it a crime to teach a slave to write, Dave signed his pots and inscribed many of them with poems. Though his verses spoke simply of his daily experience, they were nevertheless powerful statements. He countered the slavery system not by writing words of protest but by daring to write at all. We know of no other slave artist who put his name on his work." "When Leonard Todd discovered that his family had owned Dave, he moved from Manhattan to Edgefield, where his ancestors had established the first potteries in the area. Todd studied each of Dave's poems for biographical clues, which he pieced together with local records and family letters to create this moving and dramatic chronicle of Dave's life - a story of creative triumph in the midst of oppression. Many of Dave's astounding jars are found now in America's finest museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Charleston Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston."--BOOK JACKET.

"Listed in deeds of gift, deeds of sale, mortgages, born free and freed."

A timely reissue of Fox Butterfield’s masterpiece, All God’s Children, a searing examination of the caustic cumulative effect of racism and violence over 5 generations of black Americans. Willie Bosket is a brilliant, violent man who began his criminal career at age five; his slaying of two subway riders at fifteen led to the passage of the first law in the nation allowing teenagers to be tried as adults. Butterfield traces the Bosket family back to their days as South Carolina slaves and documents how Willie is the culmination of generations of neglect, cruelty, discrimination and brutality directed at black Americans. From the terrifying scourge of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction to the brutal streets of 1970s New York, this is an unforgettable examination of the painful roots of violence and racism in America.

"Watson's voice is an artistic triumph. . .[Bone by Bone] may well come to be regarded as a classic." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen speaks in the extraordinary voice of the enigmatic and dangerous E. J. Watson, whom we first saw, obliquely, through the eyes of his early twentieth-century Everglades community in Killing Mister Watson. This astonishing new novel, calling to account the violence, virulent racism, and destruction of the land that fueled the so-called American Dream, points an accusing finger straight into the burning eyes of Uncle Sam. Here is the bloodied child of the Civil War and Reconstruction who dreams of recovering the family plantation. He becomes the gifted cane planter nearing success on a wilderness river when he gives in fatally to his accumulating demons. Powerfully imagined, prodigiously detailed, Bone by Bone is a literary tour de force as bold and ambitious as Watson himself. "Like a true tragic figure, [Watson] knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin," said The New York Times. "This is a work of genuine dignity."