Local history alive and well
Meeting in the Middle: Material Culture from South Carolina's Fall Line Region, 1700-1900

Artifacts on display at the Columbia Museum of Art for the exhibit Meeting in the Middle: Material Culture from South Carolina's Fall Line Region, 17000-1900

Silver goblets celebrating a physical assault. A quilt that spans a river. Foreboding northern sentiments scrawled onto a Lower Richland County planter's furniture. Rare glimpses of antebellum Columbia.

These artifacts and other fascinating examples of local material culture have been assembled by the Fall Line Consortium, a group of scholars representing nine Midlands museums and archives. The group's first collaborative exhibit, Meeting in the Middle: Material Culture from South Carolina's Fall Line Region , 1700-1900 , is on display until November 19, 2006, at the Columbia Museum of Art. Located in one of the CMA's focus galleries, this exhibition is the first effort of its kind to focus solely on South Carolina's Fall Line region.

The Fall Line region is a geographic zone that runs through the center of the state and has often been overlooked by historians who prefer to research the lifestyles 18th and 19th-century coastal residents. "Historically, many people have simply dismissed Columbia in favor of other South Carolina cities as a place with important local culture, but there's a considerable amount of history here we have grown up with but have yet to fully appreciate," says John Sherrer, director of Collections and Interpretation for Historic Columbia Foundation. This unique exhibit seeks to generate more interest in local material culture by displaying artifacts that provide insight into local 18th and 19th-century history.

Meeting in the Middle is a result of the combined efforts of Historic Columbia Foundation, the Columbia Museum of Art, the Lexington County Museum, McKissick Museum, the Scarborough-Hamer Foundation, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Museum, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the South Caroliniana Library, and the South Carolina State Museum.

These organizations joined together in 2002 to form the Fall Line Consortium in order to study and promote a better understanding of Fall Line artisans' contributions to the state and to the South in general.