Mapping Forest to Furniture: Sumter, SC’s Hidden-in-Plain-Sight Wood Industries History

Jessica Elfenbein, University of South Carolina
Wright Kennedy, University of South Carolina
Lynn Robertson, McKissick Museum
Kate Foster Boyd, University of South Carolina
Katie Hoskins, University of South Carolina
Leeam Stein, Sumter Museum
Kelly Goldberg, University of South Carolina
Kyle B. Kelly, City of Sumter
Mark Canavera, University of South Carolina
Gracie Bellah, University of South Carolina
Nathan Saunders, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina

By the late 19th century, Sumter, South Carolina, emerged as the state’s “lumber capital,” fostering a diverse wood products industry. Unlike many Southern towns that focused on textiles, Sumter leveraged its old-growth hardwoods, supporting furniture factories, cooperages, and veneer and finish manufacturers. This industry’s century-long influence on labor, race relations, and environmental change remains largely unexamined in scholarship and in the public memory. Mapping Forest to Furniture, part of the broader Wood Basket project (https://digital.library.sc.edu/woodbasket/), seeks to illuminate this overlooked industrial history. With support from the NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute, we are developing a public-facing webmap integrating spatial, historical, and material culture data. We are mapping the locations of timberlands, industrial sites, and associated social spaces—including worker housing, union halls, and business districts—revealing the industry’s economic and racial dynamics, particularly in the Jim Crow South. We aim to engage audiences across multiple scales, both temporally and spatially. Our project experiments with new forms of interactive embedded content, such as 3D models of furniture linked to specific factories, machines, and even the forests from which the wood originated. We envision immersive digital pathways that integrate historical documents, oral histories, and social context from the first phase of the project with interactive map components. Furthermore, we are exploring ways to connect Sumter’s industry to broader national networks, tracing relationships with other major wood product hubs such as High Point, NC, and Grand Rapids, MI. Mapping Forest to Furniture not only reconstructs a significant but overlooked industrial-urban history but also presents a model for digital storytelling, integrating environmental, labor, and design histories. Through innovative mapping techniques, we seek to make Sumter’s legacy accessible to diverse public audiences, fostering new understandings of the wood products industry’s lasting impact.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 119. NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute 2