As I sit here with my reading assignments for the weekend (scholarship for the AALS conference — inspiring, as always) and an eye on ESPN's game day, I think I spy a monument behind the announcers! ESPN is at the University of South Carolina (or to those of us who study universities in the old South, what was then known as South Carolina College) for the Alabama-USC game. Thus, I'm led to look at some USC pictures in the files.
You may recall that I posted a photograph of Francis Lieber's house on the South Carolina campus way back in January when I wrote about George Fletcher's The Bond. In honor of the Alabama-South Carolina game, I think it's time for a couple more photographs. The image at the upper right is of a monument on South Carolina's horseshoe to Jonathan Maxcy, USC's first president, as I recall — I need to check this. Followers of antebellum educational institutions will love this: Maxcy had been president of Brown! I know, this is another of those connections that's hard to believe.
At the left is a picture of McCutchen House, which goes back to the early nineteenth century. For some reason I had I think mis-remembered McCutchen as the place where the literary societies met before the war, but a google search doesn't reveal anything about the Clariosophic and Euphradian Societies meeting there, so I must be mistaken. It's been nearly a year since I was in Columbia, so my memory is hazier than I would like.
It was the same trip I took pictures of the South Carolina capitol grounds.
It's McCutcheon house…