By the Day, By the Name
A 1924 Labor Ledger from Georgetown County, South Carolina

This Labor Day, we’re sharing one of the plainest, most powerful documents in our archive: a ledger page recording who worked, how long, and what they were paid , Georgetown County, South Carolina, late summer 1924.

No time clock. No direct deposit. Just a merchant’s account book, a pencil, and a bookkeeper writing down names as workers showed up for the harvest. It’s payroll, 1924-style , and one of the few surviving records from this era that names Black day laborers individually instead of folding them into a faceless workforce.

That’s what makes it rare. Census records count people. Plantation and mill books often reduce workers to totals. This ledger doesn’t. It gives us Peter Nesmith, Sam Brown, Melvin, Jno Pringle, Eddie Varn, Charlie, Isaac Smith, Guy Briggs, Wallie Miller, Jno Gordon, Weston Pringle, Sam Morris , each one written by hand, each one paid by the day, each one present on a Tuesday in September, over a century ago.

The document

A page from the ledger, dated September 2, 1924

This page comes from a store and account ledger kept for the Rhem estate in Georgetown County , the same kind of daybook used across Williamsburg and Georgetown County to track tenant accounts, store credit, and day labor side by side. Here, the bookkeeper is settling two weeks of wages for a crew of local laborers, most paid sixty to eighty-five cents a day , the standard rate for farm labor in the South at the time.

Primary Source, Written by Hand

Community Labor Log , Tuesday, September 2, 1924

This is the actual ledger page , page 453 of the original account book, the bookkeeper’s own pencil handwriting, recording two straight weeks of day labor for the Georgetown County crew. Every name belongs to a real person who showed up, put in the hours, and got paid before the next entry was written. Documents like this rarely survive at all , and rarely survive naming the workers instead of treating them as a line item.

Archival ID: omhi-tal-1924-09-02-labor-log-01 · Georgetown Co. Labor Records · Digitized by OMHI

Transcription

Reading the page

Old handwriting isn’t always easy to read , a couple of figures below are our best reading, not a certainty. Here’s what the page records, week by week.

A couple of notes on this reading: Peter Nesmith’s day-one wage isn’t written next to his name , it may have been recorded elsewhere in the book. And Charlie’s pay looks unusually high for a half day; it’s possible he was paid at a different rate. We’ve transcribed exactly what’s on the page rather than guess.

No overtime. No benefits. No paper trail beyond this one page. But it’s enough, a century later, to put real names, real weeks, and real wages back into a history that usually only gives us numbers.

Why this document matters

102 years old, and still speaking

This page is now 102 years old, written less than sixty years after emancipation , in a labor economy still built on tenant farming, day wages, and the naval stores industry that shaped Williamsburg and Georgetown County long after Reconstruction. These wages, sixty cents to two dollars a week, weren’t small change. They paid for seed, flour, rent, and the next season.

What makes this page matter isn’t the dollar amounts. It’s the names. Black labor in the South was routinely left out of the record or reduced to a number. Here, someone wrote Peter Nesmith, Sam Brown, and Eddie Varn by hand, week after week, simply to keep the books straight. That everyday habit is the only reason we can say their names today.

Somewhere in Williamsburg or Georgetown County, a descendant of Peter Nesmith, Sam Brown, or Wallie Miller may not know their ancestor’s name survived on a ledger page for over a hundred years. That’s the point of this archive , finding documents like this one and putting them back in the hands of the families they belong to.