a place · SCBig T Bar-B-Q

A Black-owned wood-burning pit on Congaree Road at Gadsden, in lower Richland County below Columbia, run by Larry Brown, known as Teddy and as Big T, who has sold barbecue to the Columbia area for more than thirty years. Logs burn down in a warped burn box behind the smokehouse and the coals are shovelled into low metal pits under pork shoulders. Hash goes over rice, made with pork and offal in the Midlands way. A second house on Garners Ferry Road in Columbia serves the same barbecue from a buffet.

Neither the founding year nor a founding date is on this disk; what the listings agree on is that Larry Brown has been at it in this part of Richland County for over thirty years. He is not a Sweatman, and Big T has no connection to Sweatman's Bar-B-Que at Holly Hill, though the two names travel together in loose accounts of South Carolina barbecue. The evidence that the business is Black-owned is the directory kind rather than the profile kind: EatOkra, which indexes Black-owned restaurants, carries it, and the chef Todd Richards put it in his guide to Black-owned barbecue. A 2019 newspaper profile that would have said it in a reporter's words could not be fetched for this record. The South Carolina Barbeque Association's own page files Big T under Worth the Trip and describes the method — slow over coals and wood at the Gadsden operation — while saying the hash there is a little mild for the writer's taste, which is the sort of judgement a project like this one records rather than adopts. Brown's son Travis works the pits. The Gadsden house closes Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; the Columbia house runs a buffet.

Logs burn down to coals in a large warped burn box behind the smokehouse, and the coals are shovelled into low metal pits under pork shoulders — not whole hogs. The hash is the Midlands kind, pork and offal cooked down and ladled over white rice. Cards and cash are both taken. The Garners Ferry Road house in Columbia serves from a buffet; Gadsden does not.

Open at 2520 Congaree Road, Gadsden, closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, with a second house at 7535 Garners Ferry Road, Columbia. The map point is the Congaree Road centreline rather than the building: the geocoder returned the road, not the house number.