Historian Shepherd McKinley’s book “Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina” was named the winner of the South Carolina Historical Society’s 2014 George Rogers Jr. Book Award as the best book about South Carolina history published last year.
The editor and editorial board of the South Carolina Historical Magazine chose the book as a finalist, and an independent panel of three judges named it the winner. McKinley, a senior lecturer and undergraduate advisor in the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, was presented the honor at the 2015 annual meeting of the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston.
McKinley’s work is the first book written about how phosphate mining affected the South Carolina plantation economy. His research considered how the convergence of the phosphate and fertilizer industries held significant and long-lasting impacts for America and the South. The book explores business, labor, social and economic aspects, while detailing the influence on a variety of people in the post-emancipation American South.
Phosphate mining offered plantation owners a way to recover losses they experienced from emancipation. Mining also provided a new option for sharecroppers, which allowed freed people to obtain labor concessions, housing and other economic benefits.
“My book actually investigates three related industries – phosphate mining on private lands; phosphate mining on state-regulated rivers; and fertilizer manufacture, using that mined phosphate,” McKinley said.
“Besides the importance of industrialization in the South Carolina low country and the freed slaves’ transitions to free laborers after emancipation, a third point I try to make in the book is that those three industries and the workers and entrepreneurs – often former slave owners – who built them created the South’s fertilizer revolution,” he said. “As a result of that revolution and other developments, ‘King Cotton’ spread quickly throughout the South after the Civil War and mired the region in poverty until after WWII.”
McKinley’s interest in this topic began with his dissertation when he was a tourist visiting Drayton Hall plantation outside Charleston. “The historical interpreter who told me about these industries was the son of phosphate miners and the grandson of slaves,” he said. “I realized that there was not much written about this very important topic. And then there’s Charleston… who wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time in Charleston?”