South Carolina’s historic roots in the lumber industry are on full display in a new website launched by University Libraries. The new site features materials from the Williams Furniture Company collection. The website, “Wood Basket of the World: Lumbering, Manufacturing, and Conserving South Carolina’s Forests,” has a little bit of every Library department on display.  

The site showcases an extensive collection of materials related to the Williams Furniture Company, a unionized lumber plant in Sumter, South Carolina. The full collection contains photographs, contracts, sales catalogs and other items associated with the company and its consolidated corporations. Collectively, these materials tell a richly detailed story about the furniture and lumber industries in South Carolina in the 20th century and about the lives and work experiences of the many people employed in these industries. 

The Williams Furniture Company collection has been central to the work of a number of USC researchers as well as an Honors College seminar taught by history department chair Jessica Elfenbein. “University Libraries are an integral part of the multifaceted ‘Wood Basket’ project that seeks a much deeper understanding of the importance of lumbering, wood products, and forest conservation to the history of South Carolina,” said Elfenbein.

While the collection belongs to the Sumter County Museum, University Libraries undertook the work of digitizing it. As a major public research institution, one mission of University of South Carolina Libraries is to preserve the historic record of the state. One thing that entails is helping other local institutions make their collections accessible to a wider audience. For the Williams Furniture Company collection, multiple Library departments came together to make that a reality. 

The collection, which was primarily in a position that rendered it unable to be used effectively by inquiring researchers and students, was transferred from the Sumter County Museum to the South Caroliniana Library. Once at the Caroliniana, the collection was processed and rehoused by Stevie Malinowski, one of Elfenbein’s Public History graduate students. Malinowski processed about 27 boxes of material relating to the Williams Furniture Company, as well as created a finding aid for the collection. 

The collection then moved to University Libraries Digital Collections, where Malinowski began digitizing a portion of the collection so that it could be accessible to the public online. Katie Hoskins, Digital Collections Librarian, assisted Malinowski with digitizing the materials, creating the metadata for the collection, and uploading the finished material to the digital repository. With the digitization of the materials, the collection can be accessed by a much larger audience, including scholars and students outside of the University. 

“So many students have had the opportunity to explore South Carolina's lumber and furniture industries through the Williams Furniture Company's records. Digitizing the collection opens it up to the public in a way that the physical collection isn’t,” Hoskins said. “The digitized manuscripts and publications can be handled, viewed, and interpreted by as many people who are interested, anytime and anywhere.” 

The digitized items were made available through the libraries’ digital repository, but the work did not end there. 

Collections like the Williams Furniture Company provide scholars like Elfenbein and her students with archival artifacts that they can experience firsthand. This collection led to a larger conversation that revolved around evaluating the lumber-related history in the state of South Carolina, as Williams Furniture Company would become a woodworking hub for much of the state. The idea of a more comprehensive and all-encompassing online experience based around the woodworking industry in South Carolina began to take shape.   

Part of the new website is dedicated to oral history interviews surrounding this history. Elfenbein’s class worked to collect these interviews, seven of which are from people associated with the Williams Furniture Company. Andrea L’Hommedieu, the Director of the Oral History Department at University Libraries, visited Elfenbein’s class to teach the students how they could collect these oral histories. 

“It’s about giving voice to people’s experience,” said L’Hommedieu. “The paper records and documents tell the official story, but oral history is about first-person experiences. How people feel about things can be more important than the board meetings.” Once these interviews were collected, the students learned how to organize and preserve the histories so that they could be put onto the website and become accessible to everyone along with the collection. 

The website, “Wood Basket of the World: Lumbering, Manufacturing, and Conserving South Carolina’s Forests,” was created as not only a landing page for the Williams Furniture Digital Collection, but also to expand the ideas that Elfenbein and her classes have been exploring through their research. University Libraries Web Manager Brandon King was tasked with taking the various elements of this sprawling project and tying them together in an accessible, and interactive way. The aesthetics of the site invoke themes of seventies antique furniture catalogs from Williams Furniture, combined with the industrial backbone of the lumber industry in South Carolina. 

“I was given images to add to the gallery, but I also went through the photographs in the collection. I wanted the elements of the industry to be embedded in the site. The transition on the homepage is a silhouette from a photograph in our collections, the images and furniture designs are taken directly from Williams Furniture catalogs,” said King. Not only does the website tell researchers the history, but it shows them through the various design choices and methods used by King. 

But overall, the site was made for the simple purpose of enhancing student research opportunities, and to make this information accessible to the public where it might not have been previously. University Libraries greatly impacted the creation of this accessible experience and the impending travelling exhibition. 

“The diversity and strength of University Libraries is an enormous asset to statewide projects like "Wood Basket." That small communities and organizations across South Carolina can receive the world-class expertise of librarians, archivists, oral historians and other committed staff members is invaluable to projects like this,” said Elfenbein. “Their efforts have also enriched the experiences of hundreds of USC students. As an historian, I could not be more grateful for the partnership of my library colleagues.”