A War Between Neighbors: New Exhibits at Musgrove Mill Battlefield

The grant

• Recipient: South Carolina State Park Service (Laurens County, South Carolina)
• Amount: $158,654
• Program: a Battlefield Interpretation Grant from the National Park Service

The battle

By the fall of 1780, British forces occupied every major city in South Carolina. Patriots tried to stop further British advances by controlling local food supplies and key transportation routes — which made Musgrove Mill a tempting target, both for its grain and for a large ford nearby on the Enoree River.

On August 19, the Patriots attacked with hit-and-run tactics and lured the Loyalists guarding the mill into an ambush on the far side of the river. In a fight lasting only about an hour, the Loyalists lost more than 130 men — over 25% of their unit — and withdrew toward the British base at the village of Ninety-Six.

Musgrove Mill is one of many such fights in the American South during the Revolutionary War. They involved no large armies or famous generals: they were small, intimately violent clashes between Patriot and Loyalist militia in the countryside — sometimes neighbor against neighbor, sometimes ending in vigilante justice and indiscriminate civilian casualties. South Carolina's state agencies are now working to interpret those hard realities in richer ways.

The new exhibits

With the grant, the South Carolina State Park Service will develop and install new museum exhibits at the Battle of Musgrove Mill State Historic Site:

• Divided loyalties: how Southerners split during the American Revolution, and how the battle and the wider war affected Southern society.
• Hard questions: visitors will be invited to explore freedom, independence and slavery.
• New technology: interactive holograms and augmented reality displays, to make these dense subjects more accessible to the public.

About the grants

Battlefield Interpretation Grants, from the Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program, help preservation partners modernize how battlefields are interpreted — creating places that inspire diverse audiences to visit, understand and empathize with the soldiers and civilians who lived through some of the nation's hardest events. The program also offers Battlefield Land Acquisition Grants, Battlefield Restoration Grants and Preservation Planning Grants, supporting community-driven stewardship of historic places at the state, tribal and local levels.

Sources

Based on "A War Between Neighbors: Using Interactive Interpretation at Musgrove Mill," American Battlefield Protection Program, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. An architectural rendering from the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism is not reproduced.