Freedmen's Bureau Field Reports, Summerville, Colleton County, SC

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865 (13 Stat. 507).

The Bureau was responsible for the supervision and management of all matters relating to refugees and freedmen, and of lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War. While a major part of the Bureau’s early activities involved the supervision of abandoned and confiscated property, its mission was to provide relief and help freedmen become self-sufficient. Bureau officials issued rations and clothing, operated hospitals and refugee camps, and supervised labor contracts.

Here, for the first time on the Internet anywhere, we present an entire NARA microfilm of Records of the Field Offices, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1872. We've digitized NARA Micropublication 1910, Reel 103, for the Summerville Field Office, which encompassed all of Colleton County in South Carolina.

Below is a Table of Contents for Reel 103. To view the documents in Reel 103, you can click on each of the files below the Table of Contents.

There are 1,431 frames of original historical documents here. There are no doubt many treasures awaiting family historians and scholars researching Colleton County and the history of Reconstruction in South Carolina.

The microfilm is divided into pdf files you may read online or download for offline viewing. You can use the + button in the pdf file toolbar to zoom documents up for closer viewing. If you choose to download them, you should download them to a thumb drive, not your computer, as the files are quite large.

Each file contains 500 pages, so they will take a few minutes to load for viewing. Do not despair, click to download then make some popcorn, walk the dog and settle in for serious document reading.

If you find an ancestor here, we would love to hear from you. You can write to us at info@lowcountryafricana.com. Happy Ancestor Hunting from the Crew at Lowcountry Africana!