Our Fathers' Fields

by Kibler, James Everett

• ISBN13: 9781570032141
• ISBN10: 1570032149
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Pr

Summary

When James Everett Kibler purchased a dilapidated South Carolina plantation in 1989, he had no idea that his rehabilitation of the distinguished but deteriorated property would include the unearthing of a remarkable saga about the land and the people who had lived on it. But as he refurbished the Great House and restored its nineteenth-century garden, he felt the pull of the place to uncover and record its past. Kibler faithfully took part in an act of cultural reclamation, piecing together the story of the Hardy family, who purchased the tract along the Tyger River in 1786 and farmed it for two centuries. Part epic, part history, part memoir, the resulting tale is a comprehensive, ambitious, and eminently readable chronicle that spans six generations of a family in pursuit of the agrarian ideal.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Prologue	1	(3)
1 A Land Called Amoy-es-chek	4	(8)
2 The Sweet Fields of Eden	12	(11)
3 A Brave New Century	23	(6)
4 More Gold Than Grace	29	(32)
5 Paterfamilias	61	(28)
6 In Tune with the Music of the Universe: A Southern Countryman's Villa Garden	89	(17)
7 The Forest	106	(6)
8 Their Fathers' Fields: The Working Plantation in 1850	112	(24)
9 Works and Days in the Quarters	136	(46)
10 In the Way o' Finery and Style: The Decade before the War	182	(24)
11 The Plantation Neighborhood	206	(57)
12 A World Kicked to Pieces	263	(61)
13 New Giants in the Land: The Last Young Master	324	(23)
14 Captain Dick	347	(9)
15 Holding on in a World We Did Not Make: After the Boll Weevil and the Great Depression	356	(11)
16 High Times with the High Sheriff	367	(8)
17 The Ruined Land	375	(6)
18 Interlude: Ghosts (January 1990)	381	(8)
19 Choices: A Rare and Bearing Vine	389	(10)
Notes and Sources	399	(40)
Index	439