Field Trip #1

Just coming off of my learning vacation last week, I started another class here in town yesterday. This time we're studying US History from Reconstruction to 1920. This is an area that I really don't know very much about at all....so, I am learning a tremendous amount of information each day.


Part of the purpose of this class (it is sponsored by the SC Dept. of Archives) is to encourage the utilization of primary sources in our lesson plans. One of the requirements is that we complete two plans from this time period and actually teach them.


We meet every day, all day, through next Friday and then have a fall retreat in October and a mid-year, overnight retreat in February. Each day we have a session with a professor from Clemson (content), a session with a master teacher (utilization in the classroom, ideas, etc.) and then a cultural institution session. Yesterday we met at the state library (which I didn't even know existed) for our cultural institution and our learning was about DISCUS, the database of information available to SC residences. Today, we met for our sessions at St. Phillips School, a three room school house and then we toured Kensington Mansion, a restored 1800s planation located on the Wateree River and viewed some primary sources about the slaves, tenants and sharecroppers from the property. It was a beautiful property and the historical information was was great.

As you can see Kensington Mansion is not the typical "Gone With the Wind" plantation-style house we associate with the 1800s antebellum home. This is actually in the Italianate style.

St. Phillips School was opened in 1938 and was founded after the original St. Phillips from the Reconstruction era.

We viewed census records from 1870, 1910 and 1920, as well as maps from varying years. The bonus, we were given a copy of My Life in the South, a narrative written by a slave on the property who gained his freedom at the end of the Civil War. Unfortunately I have too much class reading to devote a night to reading it cover to cover, but I'm grabbing snippets on the van to the locations.


Other places we will visit/study at include a couple of days at the Archives, a couple of days at the Caroliniana Library at USC, two days at the SC State Museum and, tomorrow's visit, the SC Railroad Museum (I'm sure I'll have a post about it tomorrow night!)