Professors Hagstette and Harmon receive grant in support of Gregg-Graniteville Archive project
USCA Associate Professors Deborah Harmon (left) and Todd Hagstette (right) were recently approved for nearly $14,000 in funding to support the development of research opportunities for students in multiple academic disciplines from the Porter Fleming Fund.
Professors from the University of South Carolina Aiken have received a grant from the Porter Fleming Fund to support an initiative to transcribe and digitize the contents of the Gregg-Graniteville Library’s Archive. The award will create research opportunities for students across various disciplines and further the university’s efforts to preserve this important library collection.
The Porter Fleming Fund was established in 1963 by Augusta author and artist Berry Fleming in honor of his father. The fund provides grants for educational, literary, artistic, scientific, historical, musical, and cultural initiatives in Augusta and neighboring counties.
The nearly $14,000 grant was awarded to Associate Professors Todd Hagstette and Deborah Harmon. It will be used to enable electronic access to the Gregg-Graniteville Archive for scholars and the greater community. The award will fund a large-scale digital humanities curation project, which includes digitization of archival resources, composition of metadata, transcription of manuscript materials, optical character recognition (OCR) work for printed materials, and development of other scholarly apparatus for the collection. It will also support hardware and software updates, promotion and marketing, and front-end website development for the project.
“Deborah had the idea about taking these holdings, which are in manuscript form, and digitizing them for use outside of the walls of this library,” Hagstette says. “It’s an act of preservation, but also an opportunity for student experience, further scholarship on the Gregg family, and for our region to have greater access.”
The Gregg-Graniteville Archive houses the documents and memorabilia of the Graniteville Company, a Southern textile manufacturing firm founded in 1845 by William Gregg, known as the “Father of the Southern Textile Industry.” In the 1970s, the company and the Gregg-Graniteville Foundation donated funds for the construction of the library, the largest library donation in South Carolina at that time, as well as the archives collection itself.
“The university was fortunate to receive the donation for the building of the library, and we have been the caretakers of these artifacts ever since,” Harmon says. “Now we have a great opportunity to share them with the community and also give students firsthand knowledge about transcribing documents that have not been transcribed before.”
The archive holds 130 linear feet of records, which include correspondence, personal diaries, hand-entered time books, annual reports, handmade company scrapbooks, and historical photographs.
Work on digitizing the collection is expected to begin during the Fall 2026 semester. Hagstette and Harmon will train three students on safe handling of historical documents, digitization and file management, and best practices in metadata. There will be an application process for the positions, which will be open to students of any discipline who have an interest in humanities and technology and an enthusiasm for historical discovery. Selected students will gain valuable training as content developers in addition to a scholarship in local history.
“The transcription piece is exciting because it breaks down one of the largest barriers to access. Having electronic access to these documents opens up a world of research on this topic,” Hagstette says. “We are thankful to the Porter Fleming Fund for seeing the value in what we want to do and helping make these opportunities possible.”
For more information, contact USCA Marketing & Communication at news@usca.edu.