Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold ─ Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina

South Carolina Historical Society George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award

“A finely layered and important study that fills in gaps in the industrial history of the New South and especially low-country South Carolina.”—Sidney Bland, author of Preserving Charleston's Past, Shaping Its Future: The Life and Times of Susan Pringle Frost

“Skillfully blurs the old, comfortable line between Old and New South economies and paints a nuanced picture of the new labor relations in the post-slavery era.”—Charles Holden, author of In the Great Maelstrom

In the first book ever written about the impact of phosphate mining on the South Carolina plantation economy, Shepherd McKinley explains how the convergence of the phosphate and fertilizer industries carried long-term impacts for America and the South.

Fueling the rapid growth of lowcountry fertilizer companies, phosphate mining provided elite plantation owners a way to stem losses from emancipation. At the same time, mining created an autonomous alternative to sharecropping, enabling freed people to extract housing and labor concessions.

Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold develops an overarching view of what can be considered one of many key factors in the birth of southern industry. This top-down, bottom-up history (business, labor, social, and economic) analyzes an alternative path for all peoples in the post-emancipation South.

Shepherd W. McKinley, a senior lecturer in American history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is the coauthor of North Carolina: New Directions for an Old Land