Field to Forest

Field to Forest. . , The evidence of slavery and tenant farming at Rose Hill has been obscured by the trees, but it has not been erased from the history of the land. From the 1800s into the 1900s, enslaved people, and later tenant farmers, grew cotton here. The white Gist family prospered from cotton, while the land suffered as the crop took nutrients from the soil., In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the United States Forest Service purchased the 2000-acre Rose Hill Plantation and other old cotton estates. The Civilian Conservation Corps then planted pine trees on acres of depleted soil. The pines grew to become Sumter National Forest., (captions) , Starting in 1866, Black tenant farmers made agreements with the white Gist family to raise and pick cotton on the plantation. They often received minimal pay. In 1939, the plantation era of Rose Hill ended when the U.S. Forest Service purchased the land., The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) formed in the 1930s to build parks and preserve America's natural resources. Here CCG recruits plant pine seedlings in nearby Newberry County. These seedlings grew into the trees that make up part of Sumter National Forest., As these pine trees grew in nearby Newberry County, they slowly concealed the damage cotton plantations had caused to the landscape.