HERU

MCCORMICK COUNTY, S.C. (WJBF) – McCormick County is home to a lesser-known African-American museum. With the community’s help, longtime educator Georgia Scott created a museum in Clarks Hill. Her goal was to create a place for future generations to see and understand the contributions of local black and brown people.

“She was a person of that was very generous. She was also what I would call assertive,” Scott’s nephew Alex Kenner told NewsChannel 6’s Aiken Bureau Chief Shawn Cabbagestalk.

Georgia C. Scott was born in 1916 on a sharecropper’s farm. She was one of two teachers in her family. “Most of them didn’t go past the third grade, but they went to school here,” museum curator Kenneth Carmichael Wells shared.

She had a vision for a museum. “This museum will be a beacon of learning and inspiration of remembering and understanding, a place that stimulates a dialogue of our race and an environment that fosters spiritual reconciliation and healing,” Georgia C. Scott said.

Georgia C. Scott’s museum is on Hwy 28, just steps from Bethany Baptist Church in Clarks Hill, South Carolina. Its pieces are carefully selected. “She went back and found slave trades and things like that, where her great grandfather was sold into slavery, and how he had to have a pass to move from one plantation to the other. We have those posted on the wall,” Wells shared.

The building was previously used for storage. “Ms. Scott said, ‘I want the museum done while I’m still alive’. So we hired more people to come in and help us finish the remodeling of the museum,” museum trustee William Dunn added.

She started collecting items before its transformation.”I don’t know where she kept all this stuff at, but when we open the museum, all of it showed up,” he said.

Each wall tells the story of the African Americans in the area. “The African-American story does not stand apart from American history. Instead, it is intricately woven into the fabric of American life and is a part of all of us,” Scott said.

Intricately woven like the quilts on display there. “She put up the wall and she said that, if you think that we couldn’t, wasn’t smart enough to write, but we could sew and make quilts to tell our story,” Dunn said.

Clarks Hill native Army Specialist Frazier Dixon was killed in the Vietnam War. He inspired a wall for veterans.

“And when Frazier Dixon passed, his son came back from Oklahoma. He came here to one of our Veteran’s Day dinners just to honor Frazier Dixon. And he brought this flag here for Frazier,” Dunn said. “We had the black Buffalo soldiers and they was all local from Clark Hill was in the Buffalo Soldiers,” he added. “Another lady here. she’s Ms. Scott, she’s from Aiken. When she was a little kid in the cotton field, she used to always said, ‘I want to fly one of those planes there’. When she got older, she went to college and she came to be a two-star general in the Air Force,” he showed Shawn.

It also has a display devoted to the family who donated the property. There’s also church furniture and cotton. “So my buddy one day he went to some white man field and picked his cotton here, cut the stalks off and he gave it to me. He said, ‘give it to Ms. Scott’. And I took it and gave it to Ms. Scott. She said, ‘don’t give it to me and it’s gone to the museum’,” Dunn recalled.

The collection includes statues of prominent African Americans. It also includes the history of the area’s black churches, books, pictures, and artifacts from the former school.

“This is the bell that Reverend Kennedy used to allow us in class in the morning. And he ended of recess with this bell. This is his original,” Georgia C. Scott told museum visitors on tape.

Donations fund the museum and a scholarship fund set up by Ms. Scott. It’s part of the Historic Sites for McCormick County.

The museum is open by appointment only. Call Trustee William Dunn at 706-951-6284 if you would like to visit. The location is also accepting donations for maintenance work at the building.