News

Evening Post Books Releases “The Santee Delta: Waters and Voices”

Published

2 years ago

March 21, 2023

Press Release

Evening Post Books has released the book The Santee Delta: Waters and Voices.

Every day, people drive across the Santee Delta, unaware of the bountiful natural resources and complex history surrounding them. Bob Raynor paints a portrait of the fertile grounds that fostered the development of tidal rice culture with an enslaved labor force to carry out brutal and often fatal work. Raynor utilizes his personal investigations on the water and on foot to highlight the Delta’s crucial role in the environmental and economic development of South Carolina.

The Santee Delta: Waters and Voices takes an in-depth exploration of this area through a narrative, including the storytelling of significant historical events and Raynor’s experiences in this fascinating Lowcountry world.

“This book is as movingly evocative as it is informative,” said Kerry Taylor, Associate Professor of History, The Citadel. “Bob Raynor brings the same deep sensitivity to the people of the Santee Delta as he does its waterways and marshlands, as well as what remains of its rice fields and ancient swamp forests. The sound of the region’s waterways rings as clearly in Raynor’s writing as the voices of the people he documents through oral history interviews.”

Additional information may be found at www.eveningpostbooks.com.

Bob Raynor published his first book, Exploring Bull Island: Sailing and Walking Around a South Carolina Sea Island, in 2005. It combined his interests in adventure, natural history, and the human history of the Lowcountry. In a similar approach, his second work, Tracing the Cape Romain Archipelago, expanded his fieldwork and research to the entire Cape Romain area. As part of the research for the current work, Raynor initiated, coordinated, and was the interviewer for the oral history project Voices of The Santee Delta, archived at the Lowcountry Digital Library. He has regularly posted on his blog, Raynor on the Coast, for over a dozen years “Exploring the Lowcountry and Beyond.”