Odd Fellows documents helping Hartsville Museum build black-history treasure

Matthew Perry (back center) at an event surrounded by Hartsville locals, including Alice Butler, wife of H.H. Butler (front left), and Sadie Brewer (back row). COURTESY OF HARTSVILLE MUSEUM

By Bobby Bryant, Editor
editor@newsandpress.net

Hartsville Museum manager Andrea Steen is grateful that H.H. Butler of Hartsville was good at record-keeping.
Butler, a pastor and educator for whom Butler High School was named, was also District Grand Secretary for the Grand United Order of the Odd Fellows, an African-American fraternal group. As secretary, he was a funnel for tons of correspondence for the group.
That material, along with a vast amount of other Odd Fellows correspondence and records, some of it dating back to the 1800s, is now in the safekeeping of the Hartsville Museum at 222 North 5th St. It’s steadily being scanned into computers for digital archiving in the South Carolina State Library’s computer system.
It takes up 15 file cabinets, Steen said. “We have tens of thousands of documents,” she said. “We have 100,000 or 200,000 pieces of paper.”
For anyone researching African-American history or tracing their lineage, Steen said, it’s a treasure beyond price. “It gives me goose bumps,” she said. “It’s so rewarding” to sift through the material.
Right off the bat, Steen said, they turned up a July 1953 Odd Fellows application from a Spartanburg lawyer who would become a civil-rights attorney and, in 1979, become South Carolina’s first black federal judge – Matthew J. Perry.
Perry, then 31, had to certify three times on the application that his health was good – “free from disease,” and had not been recently under a doctor’s care, as the form said.
Why so many health questions to join a fraternal group? Because membership in the Odd Fellows also served as a type of life insurance, Steen said. Members’ dues were redistributed to a spouse or other family member if they died. (On the application, Perry named his wife, then 30, as his beneficiary.)
The Odd Fellows applications are a “glimpse into the individual,” Steen said.
The material had been stored in a Hartsville church, Mount Pisgah Presbyterian Church, which Steen described as the first Presbyterian African-American church in the area. The project kicked off with a $10,000 grant from South Carolina Humanities. Work began in March 2020 (just as the COVID crisis began).
How many years the project may take largely depends on additional grant money, Steen said. She added: “It is a privilege to be able to work with these types of documents.”
The Hartsville Museum is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, call 843-383-3005.

Author: Stephan Drew

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