The Wylie Homeplace is a descendant-led documentary and public history project built around an ancestral house in Catawba, South Carolina: the former sharecropping house where our grandparents raised their family, in our family since the early 1900s, and now owned by us, their grandchildren.
The house sits on land our family has worked for generations, back to an ancestor born around 1800 and enslaved in York County. It is one of the few surviving structures in this part of the county that tells the story of Black rural life in the South Carolina Piedmont from slavery through emancipation, sharecropping, and homeownership. In the 1960s a highway widening moved the house across the road, part of a wider pattern of mid-century road-building that displaced Black homes, schools, and churches across the South. The same widening moved the nearby Catawba Rosenwald School, built by Black families for their children in 1924 to 1925 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. The house and the school tell parallel stories, and part of our purpose is to connect them.
The project has three parts. A photographic series will document the house as it is today, the work of preserving it, and the people involved, from family and tradespeople to the neighbors who remember it. A book will combine the photographs with family history from our archival research, oral histories from older relatives and neighbors, and an account of what it takes to save a place like this one. And the house itself is being prepared as a place people can visit: interpretive text in each room covering our family's history, the Catawba community's, and Black history in the region, with the house open to the public several times a year and by appointment to school groups and researchers.
Your support funds the photography and archival work, the research and writing for the book, the interpretive materials, and the professional assessments that will guide the preservation of the house. Over the longer term, we hope to establish the house as a small, permanent site for public history in York County, alongside the Rosenwald school that already is one.
Learn more at wyliehomeplace.org.
Learn More: http://wyliehomeplace.org