In the previous post I described how a mule kick killed eight people, and we explored the Little Stevens Creek area. In this post fellow singer and explorer Tommy Thompson and I ventured further into Edgefield County seeking out pottery and abandoned churches.
Edgefield has long been known for its amazing pottery. ETV’s History Detectives even did a segment on one of the “face jugs” from the area. Of course, I was not as interested in the pottery itself as in the town that grew up around the industry. Landrumville, aka Pottersville was located just north of Edgefield. Robert Mills’ 1825 Atlas shows its location.
I wanted to see if I could find it. The site is on the National Register of Historic Places. However, since it is still an active archeological dig, all of the location information has been redacted. There are lots of scholarly articles on the site. But, just like the NRHP listing, any article I could find said that the kilns were on private property, and that the address was restricted.
As a workaround, I took the Mills map and tried to overlay it onto Google Earth. Matching the roads and landmarks from 170 years ago was not an easy task, but in the end I came up with an approximate set of coordinates. Even if I couldn’t reach Pottersville exactly, at least I would be able to take a photo of the area.
Read More “A Feud, a Mule, a Senator, a Potter, and a Ghost Town or Two – Part Two” »