By Andy Brack
Mules, phosphate and asparagus share something for South Carolina. One hundred years ago, they were pretty common. Today? Not so much.
Around 1925, the Palmetto State’s mule population was at its peak at about 210,000 animals. As related by the South Carolina Encyclopedia, they were fixtures of rural life in a state that had more than 192,000 farms and 200,000 farmers, the majority of whom were Black. (Today, there are around 38,000 farmers.)
Mules plowed and hauled crops to market as well as took timber, turpentine and phosphate – three of the state’s big exports – to ports to ship out of the state. But when was the last time that you even saw a mule, a blend of a male donkey and female horse?
Same with phosphates. At the turn of the last century, South Carolinians mined the mineral for fertilizer and it was big business. The state produced more than 500,000 tons, mostly in the Lowcountry, in 1893. But by the 1920s, that dwindled to 44,000 tons. About the only remnant left today is a Charleston byway named Ashley Phosphate Road.
And then there’s asparagus. Back in the 1880s, South Carolina’s truck farm industry was the most robust in the nation, Florence’s Libby Wiersema writes in a coming edition of the Charleston City Paper’s Dish magazine. South Carolina, in fact, was known as the “Asparagus Capital of the World,” growing 125,000 crates of the spring vegetable in 1920. The state’s farmers developed a strategy to be the first to ship the chunky Palmetto hybrid to New York each spring, which put farmers in the enviable position of being able to get higher prices.
Unfortunately, as food historian David Shields told her, South Carolina’s thick-stalked variety of asparagus fell victim to the flapper craze of the 1920s when people started thinking thinner asparagus would help make people thinner. As Wiersema amusingly wrote, “skinny was in, chubby was out and asparagus ‘fat shaming’ became a real thing. The Palmetto didn’t just hide in shame. It became virtually extinct.”
Much has changed over 100 years, including with newspapers, which ruled media back then. Radio was emerging. Television was a dream. The first full-length movie with sound didn’t come out until 1927. Science fiction hadn’t even thought of hand-held communicators.
According to the N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Guide and Directory from 1925, the state had 18 daily newspapers, 15 that published semi-weekly and 84 weeklies for a population just over 1.6 million. Several small towns, such as Abbeville, Barnwell, Darlington, Easley, Edgefield, Sumter and Union, had two newspapers. Larger communities like Charleston and Columbia had a blend of college newspapers, Black-owned weeklies and dailies.
These days? Newspapers are drying up. Just about every county still has a weekly that’s hanging on. But there are few true dailies – The Post and Courier in Charleston just went to printing five days a week instead of seven. The handful of dailies still left generally publish less than seven times a week.
If you want to get an idea of the rapidity of the changes that America has gone through, look more closely – to, say, 30 years ago. Ask kids today if they know what the Yellow Pages are. Or what Blockbuster was. Or what a landline is. You’ll probably get a blank stare.
Just three decades ago, the Internet and cell phones were not ubiquitous. The media weren’t in your face at all times. There weren’t hundreds of television channels.
The point of all of this is that America has changed dramatically over the last 100 years and change is accelerating. The future likely means more change at an even more rapid pace.
We beat a Great Depression and the Nazis. We built the strongest economy and nation in the history of the world. And now we’re seeing lots of volatility again.
Despite junk going on to dismantle government and shake up our markets, let’s keep betting on America. There’s no telling what will happen, but as Georgia writer Billy Chism reminded recently, keep the words of Winston Churchill in mind: “For myself, I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else.”
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to feedback@statehousereport.com.
