Laurel Horton, An Upcountry Legacy: Mary Black's Family Quilts

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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