Museum director Les McCall, showing off a wheelbarrow cleverly crafted from repurposed scraps, wants visitors to “get their hands dirty when they come in here."
Photo by Milton Morris
It’s just an old, wooden wheelbarrow—handmade, crude, cobbled together from rough bits of discarded floor boards. The handles clearly had a previous life as shovels or hoes. Its worn metal wheel was salvaged from a seed planter.
When Les McCall kneels beside the wheelbarrow, he admires it like a work of art.
“It’s an awesome piece of machinery, and it was made out of junk that someone just happened to have lying around,” McCall says.
That gift for recognizing the history and creative engineering in old farm equipment makes McCall an ideal interpreter for the treasures at the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina.
Raised on a small cattle farm in Oconee County, McCall graduated from Clemson six years ago with a degree in history and a passion for farming. Now, as director of the state’s official agricultural museum, McCall channels his skill set into helping every child and adult who walks through the doors see how powerfully farming has shaped South Carolina’s past and how critical it is to our future.
“We have our fancy mission statement with six-dollar words in it, but it all boils down to a hands-on experience in agriculture,” says McCall, who is determined that visitors should “get their hands dirty when they come in here.”
So a visit to this Pendleton museum may include planting lettuce in an aquaponic garden fertilized by its resident goldfish, or peering into a working beehive, or separating cotton seeds from fluffy fibers. Out back, work is in progress to add raised-bed gardens, compost piles, rain barrels and chicken coops where visitors can learn how to be farmers in their own backyards.
“This is not going to be a stuffy collection museum,” says McCall.
The museum’s grand opening in June 2013 was actually a rebirth. For nearly 40 years, this same building was the Pendleton District Agricultural Museum—a 6,000-square-foot storehouse for a rambling assortment of pre-1925 tools and machinery. Thanks to the efforts of the late Sen. T. Ed Garrison, a lifelong Anderson County farmer, it was renamed by the state legislature in 2012, with a renewed mission of preserving and promoting South Carolina’s agricultural heritage. McCall started working alongside community volunteers to transform it into an attraction worthy of its calling.
As visitors stroll past old farming paraphernalia, history unfolds—how South Carolina pioneered farmland conservation, how cotton impacted the state’s economy and culture, how electricity transformed farm life.
In “The Barn,” they can sample labor-intensive farm tasks with an old-style water pump (“Kids pump it so hard, they lift themselves off the ground,” McCall says) and hand-cranked machines for shelling and grinding corn. Clarabelle, a life-size plastic cow with a squeezable udder that squirts water, gives kids a feel for daily milking chores.
But here, the future lives right alongside the past. Next to historic plows, reapers and weaving looms are iPads that connect bygone farm life with modern methods—a video of a contemporary cotton gin in operation, for example. See for yourself how back-breaking work done by men with hand tools became more efficient and productive with new inventions.
For kids who’ve had no physical connection to agriculture, discovering that their barbecue comes from pigs, their breakfast cereal from grains grown in a field, and their clothes from cotton bolls may spark an interest in farming careers.
“Agriculture shapes destiny,” McCall says. “We use the history of agriculture in the state to inform decisions on the future of agriculture. That’s our main goal.”
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Get There
The Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina is located at 120 History Lane, Pendleton, directly across U.S. 76 from Tri‑County Technical College.
HOURS: The museum is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. Open for special events as listed on website and for group tours by appointment.
ADMISSION: Free, but donations are accepted.
DETAILS: (864) 646-7271; bgamsc.org