Nearly all of the white colonists to enter the
Carolina
backcountry in the eighteenth century arrived from Pennsylvania through
the Shenandoah Valley into Virginia and the Carolinas. In the 1760s, Mary
Black's Scotch-Irish maternal ancestors staked out claims, cleared land,
and established farms on a few hundred acres in what would become Greenville
and Spartanburg counties. Soon they were joined in the
Tyger
River watershed by what would become the paternal side of her family,
the Snoddys, immigrants from
County
Antrim, Ireland, who came by way of Charleston in the 1770s. By the
end of the century, the Cherokee who once inhabited this area of
South
Carolina had ceded it, succumbing to the effects of smallpox, treaties,
and armed conflict.
At first, the self-sufficient farmers in this heavily wooded landscape
owned few slaves. Enmeshed in a spreading web of neighbors and kin, they
produced food, shelter, and clothing, sometimes trading for goods from
Charleston.
Communities were centered around water-powered grist and flour mills,
general stores, and small churches. Many of the original settlers, including
members of the Snoddy family, were
Presbyterian,
but in the fervor of camp meeting revivalism, the ranks of Baptists and
Methodists grew rapidly. Following the invention of the cotton gin in
the late eighteenth century, cotton as a cash crop spread from the Carolina
Low Country into the
Piedmont.
Through the growing of cotton for sale, the increasing use of slave labor,
and the purchasing of fertile land, Mary Black's grandfather Isaac Snoddy
(1770-1842) prospered, owning at the time of his death two-thousand acres
and forty slaves. Mary's father,
Samuel
Snoddy (1815-1898), and mother,
Rosa
Benson (1826-1908), grew up as members of locally prominent familes.
In 1860, when
Mary Louisa Snoddy
was born in a large, new farmhouse on
Jordan
Creek, the US Census valued her parents' holdings at $11, 617, which
included real estate of $5,000 and twelve slaves.
Samuel
and
Rosa's farm included two hundred
acres of crop land and 650 acres of meadows, woodlands, and fallows. In
addition to cotton, the major cash crop, the farm produced corn, wheat,
oats, and rye to feed the household and livestock, as well as peas, beans,
Irish and sweet potatoes, milk and butter.
Samuel Snoddy survived service in
the Confederate Army, coming home at the war's end to
Rosa,
their three children, and a devastated economy. The Snoddy house intact,
Samuel turned his labor to farming again and worked to reestablish the
family's security. The youngest of the three children,
Mary
first attended a local log school. By 1878 she was a student at the recently
opened
Williamston
Female College, some thirty miles from home, but reachable on the
newly-laid
Richmond-Danville
Railroad. In 1889,
Mary Louisa Snoddy
married
Dr.H. R. Black in the
parlor
of Mary's
parent's home
and set up housekeeping in nearby Wellford. In 1894, H. R., Mary, and
their three young children moved to a
large
house in the growing railroad, cotton trading, and textile manufacturing
town of
Spartanburg,
eight miles away. Between 1890 and 1900, Spartanburg's population doubled
from 5,544 to 11,395. Not just the town was growing; during the 1890s,
the development of scattered
textile
mill villages swelled the population of the entire county. In 1907,
Dr. Black joined with other medical practitioners to build Spartanburg's
first hospital.
The Black family kept one foot in the city and one in the country. They
participated in the social and economic affairs associated with living
in town, but they cultivated a backyard garden, managed a farm in Wellford,
and maintained close relations with rural family and friends. Mary Black
does not seem to have been involved in quiltmaking during this time; during
the early twentieth century, using quilts as bedcovers would have been
considered quaint and old-fashioned among genteel city dwellers.
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