Sarah Friday's 1810 Granby Drawing
Tobacco Inspection and Warehouse
In 1786, Wade Hampton, Thomas Taylor, and Urich Goodwin were made commissioners of the State Tobacco Inspection station at Granby. A tobacco warehouse there was washed away by the 1796 flood. This happened in January, and 150 hogsheads of tobacco were also swept away. The warehouse was not near capacity in January, so it probably could have handled two or three times as much. Given the size of a hogshead, each weighing 1,000 pounds, you would need 2,700 to 4,000 square feet to store that much tobacco and have extra room to move around. The warehouse may have been nearly 5,000 square feet in size.
The fact that all this was washed away in the flood also confirms that the warehouse was near the river. They would have built it as close as possible to the river because water moved most of the area’s tobacco.
Below is David Brinkman's Granby computer model looking over the Samuel Johnston house (Granby dig site) and the Tobacco Inspection warehouse. Wade Hampton’s bridge is also shown crossing the Congaree River. The documented cornfield and church are also shown.
The Tobacco Inspection and storage facility: Status: Metal detector scans show a high density of iron hits, probably nails from the old building. Archaeology is possible in the Riverland Park neighborhood (Click here to see this location on a map)
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