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Movie-going was an important source of entertainment during the 1920s and 1930s, and every town of any size in South Carolina had a movie theater in the downtown shopping district. The Rex Theater in...H. Ordinary People & Everyday Life | History of SC Slide Collection
Many of the images in the three sections of the collection preceding this one ("Economic Activity in South Carolina,""Transportation in South Carolina," and "South Carolina Towns and Cities") are also about the everyday lives of ordinary people: the work they have done, the places they lived, the means by which they moved back and forth between home and work, or home and play. But this section is intended to focus particularly on the people themselves. The organization of this section is a mixture of category and chronology. Because South Carolinians have taken sports seriously, the first images here are of competitive sports. These are followed by images of outdoor recreation; of ceremonies, parades and demonstrations; of the making of music and of dancing, as well as other forms of the art of entertainment; of cooking and cleaning; of creating crafts. The final group of images is one of portraits: people in groups, and people as individuals. In some cases, we know their names. In many cases, we do not. For all, their smiles, their poses, their surroundings are memorable: from the anticipation of a group of teenagers about to board a bus for a trip, to the serenity of a young Civil War wife to travel to Charleston to see her soldier husband - these are all people to whom we respond in recognition and delight.
Photo of the Laurens Football Team circa 1909 courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
Within this Series
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Festival Day in Sumter, a fall celebration of the cotton crop, was held in front of the Farmer's Bank and Trust Company building around 1913. The building was originally built as Sumter County's...Photo
Hunting wild turkeys has been a sport and a means of providing food in South Carolina since before the arrival of the first European settlers. This turkey was shot by Calder W. Seibels of Columbia...Photo
Manly Field, Furman, 1929--the first football stadium in the South Atlantic to be lighted for games at night. A newspaper account of the first night game played there reports that the lights were on...Photo
"Indian Pottery for Sale." This photo was taken by Louise Jones Dubose when she visited the Catawba reservation in connection with her office as assistant director of the WPA Writers Project in the...Photo
The members and guests pose for a photograph at this Knights of Columbus dance held in Columbus Hall of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville in 1923. Courtesy of the Greenville County Historical...Photo
A traditional skill of the mountain and Piedmont areas is the crafting of baskets out of carefully split white oak. Here, Franklin Deloach shows the first stage in the making of a white oak basket...Photo
This Jasper County woman proudly displays the new shelves she has built in her home to store her home canning, early 1950s. Courtesy of the Jasper County Chamber of Commerce.Photo
The Marquee for the Rex Theater on Liberty Street in Sumter. Photo around 1930, by Lecoq Studios. Courtesy of the Sumter County Museum Archives.Photo
The chariot of a circus parade rolls through the Main Street of Rock Hill amid the crowd in 1897. Courtesy of the Winthrop University Archives.